My Little Pony Adventure: Neck-and-Neck

by PhycoKrusk

Where They Came From: The Sad Hedgehog

In the heartland of the United Federation was an unassuming, small rural town, a short distance from a collection of farms and often serving as a stop for motorists traveling down the nearby highway. Inside of that town was an unassuming parlor, not at all extravagant on the outside, but warm and comforting and homey on the inside, filled with mostly humans but also a few Mobians that all knew each other and got on well, but that normally did not have occasion to gather together all at once. This, however, was not what why on that day, many years in the past, unusual about the unassuming parlor in that unassuming town.

What was unusual was the hedgehog on the back porch. A little, blue-quilled Mobian hedgehog, just a bit more than nine years-old. He was wearing a white shirt, with a black suit over-top, a black necktie and black shoes. He didn’t want to wear these things, but at that moment, there were a lot of things that he didn’t want. All he felt he really wanted to do was sit on the step leading down from the porch, staring sadly at the framed photograph he was holding in his hands.

In the photo was a blue hedgehog perfectly matching the one looking at it, which was hardly surprising; he’d posed for that very photo not two weeks prior. Instead of a black suit, however, that little hedgehog was wearing a tan fishing vest and red sneakers, rod in one hand and a fish in the other, although he’d needed help holding up that trout that was almost as long as he was tall. He’d fought hard to catch that fish, and he was proud of catching it, something that the wide smile he wore in the photo made all too clear.

But the most critical part of that photo was the man in it kneeling next to the hedgehog, a human also dressed in fishing gear and helping to hold up that trout that was almost as long as the hedgehog was tall. His silvering hair was was just a bit wild, making him seem slightly older than he was, and his bushy mustache in matching color did nothing to hide the smile on his face. He’d been proud of the little hedgehog that day, when he’d fought so hard against that trout and refused to give up even when his arms started to hurt.

The man was there at the parlor too, inside instead of outside, also dressed in a suit and surrounded by dozens of friends that he would never speak to again. It was this fact that led the hedgehog to absorb himself in the photo; so absorbed that when another man dressed in a black suit came out onto the porch, he did not even realize it.

“I thought you might be out here,” said the new man. When hedgehog didn’t react, the man took a seat on the porch right next to him. “It was last week we were all sitting here, I think. You, me, and your Uncle Chuck, just sitting here, you talking about how one day, you were gonna run around the whole world and see everything there was to see, and he was encouraging you by telling about all the places he’d been. Always thought he was on the right track with you. He was a good man, and as much as he didn’t think he’d earned the title, he was a good father.”

When the hedgehog didn’t react for the second time, continuing to stare at the photo in his hands, the man decided that enough was enough.

“Listen, Jules, I won’t say I know what you’re going through. I’ve lost plenty of folks close to me as Chuck was to you, but time, being a generally unkind sonuvagun, has a funny way of making these things hurt less and less, the further in the past they get. But over the course of many funerals, I’ve learned a trick and I’m gonna teach it to you. You listening, Jules?”

The hedgehog gave no indication that he was or was not listening, and so the man continued.

“When it feels like things are too heavy, and it’s hard to see anything but a bunch of sadness, I have found that it helps to think about the good things that the individual in question has done. Not the little day to day things, necessarily, but the really big ones. And your uncle Chuck? He had the biggest one I know. Did he tell you about Westside Island?”

Again, the hedgehog gave no indication that he’d heard. With a contained sigh, the man pressed forward again.

“It was a few years before you came along. Not too many humans on Westside, but there’s a good-sized bunch of Mobians, and that year, that got hit with a hurricane. First one in longer than anyone could remember, and absolutely terrible. News crews got there, and I was watching TV wondering why didn’t they live in houses. They didn’t live in houses cuz the wind and rain washed most everything out. Twenty thousand people that suddenly didn’t have houses or roads or medicine. And while I’m watching all this unfold, Chuck’s getting on the phone, getting a friend of his from the city to watch the clinic, and then he catches the bus, and then the train, and then a boat, and then he’s there on the island. There for three months, didn’t get paid for it, and never got famous either.

“When he finally gets back home, we all ask him why he did it. Half a world away, after all, wasn’t his problem. He gave all of us a pretty hard look when we asked that, and he says to us, ‘I saw them, and I saw they needed help, and I knew I could help. That’s all the reason I needed’. That’s just the kind of guy he was. He just did what he had to do.”

For several seconds, silence dominated the one-sided conversation, until the hedgehog turned and buried his face in his companion’s chest. “I want my dad,” he whimpered feebly.

The man wrapped one massive arm around the little hedgehog’s shoulders and pulled him into a tight hug. “It’ll be OK, pal,” he said softly. “It hurts now, I know, but it’ll be OK.”

Author's Note:

Headcanon time!

Really, this was going to be a part of the next chapter, but I decided to break it into its own segment both because the chapter was running way long, and also I wanted to get something out before Christmas, and with a segment still missing and no editing to speak of yet, that ain't happening unless I draw a line somewhere.

Some of you will notice some canon being unpacked and redesigned in here that is not main continuity, but once you introduce a crossover, nothing is main continuity anymore, so I took the opportunity to expand a bit on the history of the universe. This is partly an aesthetic choice, but it's largely a design choice, too. Given our hero a story helps me write, because now I understand better what his motivations and beliefs are; that's the purpose of this.

Setting this in between Sonic Advance 2 and Sonic Heroes was also a design choice; I like Heroes (well-enough) as a game, but it has a pretty weak story, and I felt that I could use some of those elements more effectively. Same with Shadow the Hedgehog and (especially) Sonic '06, and I have some designs on Sonic Rush/Rush Adventure as well. I have other story ideas, and while I don't know if I'll ever write them, this puts me in a position to write them if I decide to.

But maybe let's try to get through this first.