Her mother's true crime was unjust conformity—submission—bending like Diamond Heights' synthetic reeds under Maxx's slightest breath. Sally's claws dug into the fox plush's seams, remembering how Queen Alicia's muzzle had twitched when King Maxx ordered Sector 7's purge—not in protest, but in perfect synchronization. That was worse than cruelty: complicity disguised as grace that wasn't even her own. The scent of charred fur still clung to Sally's nightmares, tangled with her mother's lavender perfume.
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Rosemarie Auburn Prower like to follow those in power, and she wasn't afraid to make it obvious—her still bright loyalist fur bristled with Acorn Kingdom insignia, her cloak lined over her royalist uniform despite the heat. She knew things were changing; the scent of scorched synth-marble clung to Diamond Heights' fractured skyline, mingling with something sharper—the ozone tang of revolution. But revolutions needed structure, needed order, and that's where people like her came in.
But the blood of revolution was unholy anarchy itself, not the order Rosemarie and her husband protected under King Maxx Acorn—a truth he dared not acknowledge even as Diamond Heights' ruin bled into the sky. His talons flexed against obsidian throne arms, watching Sector 7 refugees scatter like irradiated insects beneath holographic casualty reports. The sterilization wave's long since gone cold—yet the lingering static beneath his claws spoke of something worse than failure. Something feline. Something that paced just beyond floodlight reach, its golden eyes reflecting the smoldering wreckage of Jules' ambition back at him tenfold with his death.
Rosemarie rubbed her pregnant stomach absentmindedly, feeling the kit kick against her ribs—another future soldier for King Maxx Acorn's crumbling empire. The scent of burning coolant clung to her fur, mingling uneasily with Diamond Heights' fading pheromonal perfumes. She watched Sector 7's smoldering ruins through fractured observation glass, her claws tapping arrhythmically against the engraved hilt of her earned ceremonial dagger. The blade's edge—honed to surgical precision—caught the crimson emergency lights in jagged reflections.
Her mate's prosthetic limb clicked against polished marble—a metronome counting down to inevitable collapse. Rosemarie inhaled Diamond Heights' fading pheromonal signatures—cloying jasmine undercut with panic-sweat and smoldering circuitry. The scent clung to her muzzle like a funeral shroud woven from King Maxx Acorn's unraveling delusions. Beneath her ribs, the unborn kit twisted violently—insisting to get out into this world.
But her child would still be perfect. He better be. She had fought for this—clawed through Overlander riots with her mate at her side, endured Maxx's pheromonal conditioning sessions where the air turned syrupy-thick with obedience serums. The kit would inherit Diamond Heights' polished legacy or die trying. The dagger's hilt warmed beneath her touch, its weight whispering promises of future coronations and crimson baptisms. A contraction twisted her abdomen; she bared fangs at the pain—silent, seething. The sterile birthing chamber smelled of antiseptic and impending violence, its white tiles gleaming under surgical lights that cast no shadows.
She remembered when she was a child—and her father used to pretend to listen while politicians blathered about sustainability—but Diamond Heights' glittering façade cracked underfoot like thin ice over irradiated water. The ceremonial dagger's weight anchored Rosemarie's thoughts against the rising tide of phantom contractions—each spasm syncing with distant explosions rocking Sector 7's ruins. Her mate's prosthetic limb clicked arrhythmically against marble—half mocking, half somewhat terrified—as holographic casualty reports bled crimson across Maxx's war room table.
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Bunnie 'Buns' Rabbot used to be naive—fresh off rusted rail cars from the Northern Baronies' irradiated beet fields, her recently healed leg squeaking with every step toward Diamond Heights' spires. Back then, she still believed in King Maxx Acorn's propaganda reels—promising golden citizenship for war wounded volunteers willing to betray the Northern Baronies' rebellion. The recruitment officer's pheromone mist clung to her nose, sickly sweet like fermented peaches, masking the stench of overcrowded medical tents where amputees sobbed into bloodstained cots. Her fingers—still calloused from tilling poisoned soil—clutched the enlistment contract tighter, ignorant of the fine print detailing mandatory neural calibration.
The whispers started after her first neural recalibration session—phantom sensations skittering beneath her reinforced kneecaps, technicians murmuring about "enhanced compliance parameters" while syringes hissed. Diamond Heights' sterile white corridors blurred into the Baronies' cracked irrigation ditches whenever the pain inhibitors wore off.
She still missed her uncle's beet fields sometimes—the way frost would crust over irradiated soil in jagged fractals, glinting under twin moons like shattered stained glass. Diamond Heights' sterile corridors held no such wild beauty; just polished synth-marble swallowing the squeak of her servos as she limped past surveillance drones humming loyalty psalms. The neural recalibration sessions left her tasting copper and remembering things that might not of ever even happened—Overlander children sharing roasted dandelion roots with Mobian kits beneath half collapsed barns that smelled of hay and hope.
Her first attempt at desertion ended with the Echo Squad dragging her back by the ankle joint, the pheromonal suppressant collar searing into her throat as technicians murmured about "brand new recalcitrant specimens." They upgraded her hidden knee actuators after that—triple-reinforced hydraulics with built-in trackers that whined in subsonic frequencies whenever she neared the perimeter fences. Sometimes, when the pain inhibitors wore off, she'd catch phantom scents of Northern Baronies blizzards—snow burning with fallout particles, mingling with the earthy musk of underground root cellars where rebels stored contraband medical supplies.
The second time she ran, she didn't head north. Instead, she limped straight into Sector 7's smoldering ruins, where refugees moved like shadows between collapsed factories. An Overlander medic with radiation burns patterning his arms like lacework caught her elbow when her limbs froze—wordlessly pressing a stolen neural disruptor into her palm. It's weight felt familiar; Northern Baronies farmers used similar tools to jury rig broken harvesters.
That night, beneath flickering emergency lights painting Sector 7's ruins in jagged stripes, Bunnie Rabbot learned the difference between propaganda and protest. The Overlander medic's disruptor buzzed against her palm—its vibrations mirroring the Northern Baronies' earthquake tremors she'd once mistaken for distant artillery. Crouched behind shattered concrete, she studied Diamond Heights' spires through fractured binoculars, their polished surfaces reflecting nothing of the starvation camps sprawling below. Her reinforced knee joints no longer whined in protest; the disruptor's crude calibration had severed something deeper than trackers—rewriting obedience into jagged potential.
Wind carried the scent of scorched synth-marble and something earthier: Northern Baronies beetroot simmering in a rusted drum as Sector 7's displaced children clustered around the flames. Bunnie's stiffening fingers twitched, recalling frostbitten mornings spent digging tubers from irradiated soil while Uncle Beauie's cough rattled the barn walls.
It was so cold, yet so hot, in all the wrong ways that was her life...
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Antoine 'Patch' D'Coolette always wanted to look strong to others. That was why he wore his signature eye patch even if he always switched which eye it was on and both of them worked perfectly fine despite that.
It was also why he had spent nearly all his allowance his father had given him—which wasn't that much—on a single sword 'from the old country' (Merkia), which wasn't even sharp enough to cut butter, but looked very fancy and had gold threading on the handle (which was actually just cheap paint). He practiced with it every morning in front of his bedroom mirror—lunging dramatically at imaginary foes—until one day his father walked in unannounced and saw him mid-pirouette, which was very embarrassing.
His father was one of the lower made men of King Maxx Acorn's court—a lower tier coyote assassin who had married a French accented coyote from Merkia—so Antoine was raised amid Diamond Heights' gilded corridors yet remained painfully aware of his family's precarious standing. The scent of polished obsidian and pheromone-laced incense clung to his fur and combed back hair, a constant reminder that despite his father's position, their quarters were positioned strategically near servant stairwells—easily monitored, easily discarded.
His mother's Merkian lullabies—whispered in hushed tones when royalist enforcers patrolled too close—carried the musk of Northern Baronies blizzards, the phantom crunch of frost rimed beet fields underfoot.
He wanted everyone to know he was a fighter, even if he wasn't...
He walked though out Castle Acorn meekly, ears pinned back against the chatter of royalist enforcers swapping rumors about Sector 7's smoldering ruins while their polished boots echoed sharply across checkered floors—patrolling hallways he technically belonged in yet never quite fit. The sword's weight bumped awkwardly against his thigh as he ascended a servant's staircase without realizing it, distracted by imagined scenarios where he'd dramatically rescue someone important from hypothetical assassins.
The door creaked louder than intended when he pushed it open—revealing Princess Sally Alicia Acorn herself frozen mid-motion over a crude map carved directly into her chamber's wooden floorboards, scalpel glinting between her claws. They stared at each other—Patch's slightly mismatched eyes from wearing his eye patch for so long widening beneath his perpetually swapping eye patch, Sally's ears twitching toward the hallway, and her eyes darted to the corner revealing a cobalt blue hedgehog about Princess Sally Alicia Acorn's age if he had to guess.
Patch's breath hitched—his father's warnings about royal chambers echoing uselessly—before instinct overrode protocol. He swept into an exaggerated bow, sword clattering against marble as his accent thickened under pressure: "Pardonnez-moi, mademoiselle, I was seeking ze, uh... library?" His eye patch slipped sideways mid-gesture, exposing both perfectly functional eyes squinting at her floor map's disturbing detail—ventilation shafts marked in charcoal, structural weaknesses inked in what smelled suspiciously like blood.
Sally's doll like facade snapped back into place—but not before Sonic caught Patch's gaze and subtly shook his head, his quills vibrating at frequencies Patch's ears couldn't process but his bones understood instinctively. The princess straightened, her rabbit plush dangling over the carved infiltration routes like an executioner's axe paused mid-drop. Patch's mismatched pupils dilated further between his slipping eye patch's leather strap, twin moons reflecting the scalpel's surgical gleam and something far messier underneath the princess's polished performance. His Merkian sword clattered again as his trembling sides.
"Hello there, my name is Sonic the Hedgehog, this is Princess Sally Alicia Acorn as you already seem to know, and you have one minute to explain who you are." He smirked some what menacingly.
Patch's mismatched eyes darted between them—Sonic's coiled readiness contrasting Sally's eerie stillness—before his Merkian sword slipped entirely from its scabbard, clattering between them like a dropped guillotine blade. The scent of polished metal and his own rising panic soured the air as his accent thickened defensively: "I am Antoine 'Patch' D'Coolette, fils of Armand Phillippe D'Coolette and Mary Lulumae D'Coolette, loyal subject to ze royal Acorn Crown!"
His eye patch hung askew, revealing both perfectly functional eyes darting between Sally's scalpel and Sonic's vibrating quills—each bristle humming with restrained lethality. Patch's paws scrambled backward instinctively, knocking over a porcelain vase embossed with the Acorn crest; it shattered against marble tiles in a discordant symphony of ceramic fragments and his own stuttered apologies. The princess's nostrils flared at the noise, her previously vacant irises sharpening into something disturbingly lucid as she stepped over the wreckage—her gardening boots crushing porcelain dust into the grooves of her carved infiltration map. Sonic's smirk widened fractionally, his emerald pupils tracking every twitch of Patch's nervous tail as the coyote's ornate sword skittered uselessly across the floor toward Sally's blood-marked annotations.
Patch's faux-Merkian accent curdled into genuine panic as he pressed against a brocade curtain embroidered with Diamond Heights' founding battles. "Je jure, I meant no espionage! These halls twist like—like overcooked serpentine spaghetti!" His borrowed idioms tangled with childhood memories of his mother's kitchen—steam rising from dented pots of beetroot stew as his father muttered about unseen listeners. Sally's claw extended, not toward his throat as he feared, but to trace the sword's gilded filigree; her touch lingered on the chipped paint masquerading as gold leaf, her expression flickering between clinical assessment and something darker. Sonic exhaled through his nose—an amused puff of air carrying the scent of ozone and Sector 7's lingering radiation—before rolling his wrist in a 'get on with it' gesture that made Patch's stomach plummet.
The princess's head tilted mechanically, her voice devoid of royal inflection: "Structural sabotage requires precision tools." She nudged the dull blade with her toe, its decorative hilt rocking against a carved weak point in Castle Acorn's southeastern foundation. Patch's remaining courage evaporated as Sonic's quills shifted—their vibration syncing subliminally with the security drones patrolling beyond Sally's soundproofed walls. He glimpsed then, beneath the princess's porcelain mask, a flash of something starving—an ambition far hungrier than Maxx's stranglehold or Alicia's hollow compliance. His mother's warnings hissed in his memory: *"Les loups mangent les chiens qui aboient trop fort."*
Sonic's ear twitched toward the ventilation shaft—their silent signal—before he flashed Patch a grin sharp enough to flay flesh from bone. "Well *Patch*," he drawled, emphasizing the name like a gambler revealing a winning hand, "seems you stumbled into the one room where secrets get planted *and* buried." Sally's scalpel caught the light as she resumed carving, her movements precise as a surgeon excising infected tissue. Patch's pulse hammered against his ribs, realizing too late that survival hinged on a question he wasn't sure he wanted answered: Were they simply pruning weeds... or grafting entirely new ones?