Honesty is the Best Policy! {w/Rosy}

Chapter 2: The One, True Shadow

It was Saturday, May 12th, 2018, and Honest was focused on a song cover she was mixing when suddenly she heard the first bird sounds of the morning. She sprung up from her chair and dashed to the window, where she then pressed her face and hands against the glass and saw that the sun was peeking up over the horizon. She gasped and pushed the window up. She stuck her arm out into the open air.
Before Honest could even think, the sound of a lawn mower stopped her thoughts from escaping her brain, and the smell of cut grass made her sneeze. She fell backwards into the room, the window falling shut and producing a loud noise.
The door to her room came open so slowly that it appeared to have opened just by the wind, but then a pop was heard and a person was standing there. "Hello? What was that?"
She hadn't seen Honest laying on the ground at first, but when she did, she laughed.
"What are you doing on the floor?" she asked, bemused. Honest glared at her.
"Nothing," Honest said, standing up immediately. "What are you doing standing up?"
That question made the visitor, Honest's friend and pet Akane, think just long enough for Honest to lock the window and walk past her into the hallway.
"I'm going to go wake Shadow up. You can get ShtH set up downstairs."
Akane made an affirmative noise and took off down the stairs.
"Get up, faker. It's 6 am," Honest said, opening the curtains. It wasn't bright enough outside for that to let much light in, though.
Shadow's eyes flew open as if he were possessed. "We're not going to school today, are we?"
"Well, no-" "Then I'm going back to sleep."
He rolled over. A second later, Honest seemingly fell out of the ceiling and onto him. He let out a cringe-y Kirk Thornton hurt sound.
"Come on! I want to play your game with you!" Honest sat back. "'Your game with you,'" she repeated. "That's kind of confusing." She blinked.
He pushed her off and sat up. "Alright, alright. We can eat breakfast at the same time, right?"
"Sure!" Honest exclaimed. "What's the edgiest food you can think of?"
"Well, we don't have much to pick from, but... what is 'edge'? Some sort of fundamental element of the universe? Is it on the Periodic Table?" he asked.
Honest just laughed since she couldn't possibly answer any of those questions. She had never paid attention in school whenever they went over the elements. She stood up and walked away, stopping at the door. "Do you wanna race there?"
He stood up and straightened the fur on his head. "I just woke up. I don't think that would be a good idea."
"But the Ultimate Lifeform doesn't get tired! He doesn't get sick, too," she pointed out.
"That's only in fanfictions. In real life, er, whatever this is, it's a little more complicated than that."
---

An hour later, all three of them were sitting in front of their 23-year-old TV after flying through their 29th route in a 326 route game. Next, they decided to play multiplayer.
"Aha! The pink one is the real you!" Honest said as she won.
"No, I'm the real me!" he said. I mean, his character clearly looked... alive... but Honest's, despite being made of steel and having a light machine gun mounted to their arm, beat him.
"Robots are taking over!"
Honest laughed, spitting pieces of her breakfast onto the screen. "Now you see what this game does to you. If you play it too long, you start to sound like Sticks!"
"Next, I'll get stripes... oh wait, I already have," he said, laughing as well.
Then Sonic walked in.
"Are you enjoying your own game?" he asked.
Shadow increased his grip on his GameCube controller. "No."
Honest looked over at him, confused. But he was just laughing?
"Why not?" he asked next. He grinned. "Is your own game getting the best of you?"
"Of course not! He's really good at it," Honest lied. She had beaten him easily.
"Really? Then how about I play against you?" the cerulean speedster proposed.
Shadow sweat-dropped. "You... play against... me?"
"Yeah," Sonic told him. "If you're so good at it, why don't you compete against me? If you win, I think that might really boost your confidence."
"'Boost my confidence,'" he repeated. He looked at the "continue?" screen. "Yes or no." "Yes."
He pressed A. "Yay!" the blue blur exclaimed, pushing Honest out of her seat and dashing into the now empty chair. "Yellow Shadow is definitely the real one."
"That's Autumn," Honest informed, pointing at him.
"Oh, so now we're naming them?" Shadow asked.
"Yup!" Honest exclaimed. "Even though we don't know which one is real and which one is fake, we should still be able to tell them apart."
"Why can't we just call them the yellow one, the blue one, the pink one-"
"The yellow one is Autumn, the pink one is Sakura, the blue one is Metro, the orange one is Citrus, the green one is Gringo, and the red one is Summer!"
"What's 'Gringo'?" Sonic asked, confused. No one answered him.
"'Summer'? But that's me," he pointed out.
"They're all you," she argued. Well, she wasn't really putting it up for debate. Honest was simply declaring it the truth.
He "pft"ed at that, and ended up picking "Summer". When the round started, they both found themselves in the depths of a shelter filled with lava. Sonic immediately began to attack Shadow with a barrage of homing attacks.
"What are you doing, faker?" he asked while trying to avoid him. "Pick up a gun and use it!"
"A gun? 'I wouldn't be caught dead with one of those'," he said, quoting himself.
"But it's how you play the game!" Shadow argued when he was suddenly hit in the back and shiny, golden rings flew everywhere. Sonic tried to pick them all up, but some of them fell back into Shadow while others were pushed into the walls where he couldn't reach them. Shadow stood back up and ran, er, skated for his life towards a pair of rails.
Sonic laughed. He then noticed that in the middle of the starting platform there was some sort of security switch. It was similar to one of those that were commonly seen on his arch nemesis's creations in the game that came after this one in that it had to be damaged in order to activate. While Shadow fled the platform via the two rails nearby, Sonic kicked the switch.
Eventually an alarm was heard and the lava underneath them began to slowly flow upwards, cutting off several crucial passageways. Shadow soon found himself in a dead end on a platform that only had one entrance, and that was the pair of rails he had taken to get there. He was ready to head back, but a flash of yellow coming towards him made him halt and hide behind an item crate.
The yellow impostor, Autumn, stopped at the end of the rails and observed the other screen. "I see you, Summer. You can't hide there for long, you know."
Suddenly the crate he was crouched behind exploded and a gun dropped from it, resting in a glowing, green circle on the floor. He looked up to realize that an alien riding some type of spinning, hovering, top thing had ran into his cover, shattering it and emptying its contents onto the steel platform.
Summer tried to reach for the guns that dropped out of it, but a bright, golden blur was seen and suddenly he lost what rings he had managed to scoop up before leaving the main platform. Two of them went into lava, while another fell about a foot out of Summer's reach.
He tried to scramble to his feet, but then a "ding" was heard. The red-striped rodent watched in horror as Autumn juggled his only ring. He spun it on the tip of his finger before it disappeared.
"I guess I'm the one, true Shadow."
"No, you're not!" Suddenly Summer picked up the gun and shot at Autumn. He dropped all eight of his rings and fell to the ground.
"Aha!" Summer exclaimed, jumping up. Autumn wasn't dead yet, though. Summer reached down to recover his lost onion rings and as soon as he had stopped looking at the fulvous faker, Autumn jumped up and flung himself at Summer the same way he had started the match. Summer looked up just in time to see the bottom of Autumn's yellow shoe as he was then sent flying into the lava-occupied abyss below.
"I guess this means you're the fake."
"What?" Shadow exclaimed, trying to piece together what had happened. "That was hardly fair! You just spammed your homing attack. This is the only game in the series that has guns in it, and yet you didn't use a single one!"
Purring was heard and Shadow turned around sharply. Honest had a tablet propped against the back of the chair as she typed something. "I have it all typed."
He "hmph"ed and spun around again. "At least we did something for Honest to add to her story."
"Yeah, and I also beat you," Sonic reminded him, walking away and dropping the GameCube controller into the seat. Honest leapt over the back of the other chair and grabbed the controller. "Let's play Medal of Honor: European Assault next!" Shadow rolled his eyes and huffed.
"I really don't feel like it now. That was physically exhausting," he muttered.
"I agree!" Honest exclaimed all of a sudden. She shut the Wii off and walked towards the stairs. "I have a song to work on anyway. You can follow me if you want," the blond cat said. She smiled a kitty smile and disappeared upstairs. Shadow eventually decided that he would follow her to her room since her bed was especially fluffy, and he could really use a nap.
---

Thank you so much for reading! I can't believe I'm approaching 700 followers already (I say "already" like it hasn't been three years). I really appreciate all of your wonderful follows, votes, and the like, and I hope you enjoy everything I publish in the future. I hope I'll see you in the next chapter. ^u^