Chapter Text
“Alright, this’ll be the last one.” A young fox cub basks in the electric blue glow of a large computer monitor before him, reflecting even brighter blue eyes that contrast with the thick coat of amber fur. A heavy satchel bag dangles from his shoulder, almost overflowing with storage drives and circuit boards. The terminal he’s at is plumbed into the powerful communicator on his wrist, which beams the information to his Cloud. The terminal in front of him seems to be the only thing left standing in the darkened room, littered with shredded metal and electronic debris. Piles of robots line the walls, many with panels deliberately cut out.
“Tails, I’m done over here. Ready to come out?” A voice echoes from outside the cavernous space.
“I’m almost done, Sonic! I’ll be out in a jiffy!” Tails hollers back, twitching his two golden tails. He unplugs the computer from his watch, and closes up the bag. He makes his way down the hall toward the door, his red sneakers scattering the odd bits of debris. Jogging past the entrance, he briefly squints in the sunlight. A bright blue hedgehog stands there, waiting for him.
“Heh. Took ya long enough.” Sonic playfully pokes at the fox with a gloved finger.
“I actually think that was pretty fast. The gymnastics I had to code in to get around that firewall would make your back hurt.” Tails shoots a faux smug look in response. He lifts on the handle of his bag, “Speaking of which, I’m gonna put this thing away, because the strap’s digging into my skin,” he fiddles with the band of leather as he walks away, toward the two biplanes sitting side-by-side before the two brothers.
One is clearly of a more antiquated, prewar design: solid red fuselage with white stripes, muted grey upper and lower wings, and intricate support structures to keep those wings rigid. The plane’s name, the Tornado, is neatly engraved in a plaque on the side of the cockpit. Tails runs a gloved hand along the leading edge of the right wing, before walking around the grey engine cowling, careful to avoid hitting his head on the two-bladed propeller. The thought alone makes him rub the back of his head.
The second plane now comes into full view. Despite being another biplane, this one has a more advanced design that hinted towards greater performance. A large black cowling tapers into the bluish purple fuselage, with yellow accents on the front of the fuselage and the leading edge of the wings. An insignia, resembling the fox’s two tails, emblazons the wings and stabilizer. Tornado II beams at him in engraved letters.
He pauses and sets the bag down on the wing, taking a moment to stretch before jogging back to Sonic, who’d begun to climb into the Tornado. The fox spins his tails until they produce enough lift for him to fly like a helicopter, and he lands perfectly in the open cockpit. The array of switches on the panel in front of him hint that this isn’t any ordinary biplane. They look aft of the cockpit, where a panel had been removed for better access to the cargo space, a tube that ran almost all the way to the tapered end of the tail.
They’ve come here to raid an old Robotnik base that’s carved into a plateau. The past several hours had been spent painstakingly clearing the outpost of traps and threats, and using portable saws and acetylene torches to remove sections of material from the devastated robots and structures inside. Above them looms a large concrete bust of the Doctor’s iconic, if infamous face.
Both biplanes are laden with cargo. The mostly original Tornado lacks the sophisticated internals of its newer iteration, and thus its larger cargo space was filled with material samples. Everything from unique metal alloys to synthetic plastics have been tied to hardpoints throughout the hollow space.
The Tornado II, while designed with cargo in mind, had been filled with supplies and the tools necessary to collect such samples, so it carried the lesser load of circuit boards and data drives that Tails couldn’t process with his laptop.
“So, what do you think of your new toys?” Sonic enthusiastically asked his brother, who fixates on the sight before him.
“There’s so much material here for me to study!” The kitsune beams. “Thanks so much, this was a great idea!” They dismount from the plane together.
With Sonic’s hand on the cub’s back, they walk over, past the planes, to the edge of outcropping, to take in the view one last time. Before them sprawls a vast landscape. A thin ribbon of water cascades down the glacial-cut wall on the far side of a valley, snaking into a river that divides the natural masterpiece.
“Y’know, for such a terrible person, he sure does have taste in property,” Tails remarked, his sapphire eyes fixated on the waterfall.
Sonic looks down at him with green eyes. “You…you do have a point there, bud.”
“Yeah, it’s just another one of the million other things that makes this life incredible.” After one last gaze across the beautiful horizon, they return back to the planes, and embrace each other before they split into their aircraft.
“Have a good flight, Tails,”
“You too, Sonic.”
Both pilots do a walkaround inspection of their beloved planes, but Tails does a more thorough inspection, double-checking hatches and ports. Sonic had already vaulted into the cockpit of his red Tornado before Tails had even finished his preflight. The fox grabs the bag of tech off the wing, and flies into the cockpit using his tails. He secures the bag in a special compartment behind the pilot’s seat, before settling himself in.
Once he straps in, Sonic thumbs the wired handset for the radio, specially designed by Tails to reduce the wind noise of the open cockpits. “Lightspeed to Slowpoke, come in Slowpoke,” he teases.
“Hey, you know the drill: slow and steady wins the race, while fast and lazy crashes in the waves.”
Sonic rolls his eyes. “So what’s our flight plan home again?”
“Ugh. I thought you wrote it down already. We’ll climb to 6,000 feet and maintain a heading of 027 degrees.”
“Gotcha, thanks!”
“No problem.”
“So… without further ado, let’s get this party started!”
They begin the startup procedure for their large radial engines.
“Fuel pump,” Tails mouths from habit as he flips the switch. “Mixture to idle, and throttle to 1200.” The large reciprocating engine growls as the large three-bladed prop starts to rotate. On the second revolution he engages the starter, and after a few seconds of the whining magneto, the powerplant roars to life in a perfectly-executed start. Always ecstatic to see his babied engine run so smoothly, Tails looks over at the hedgehog’s plane, which had also completed its startup, but smoke bellows for the first few seconds as the engine starts with too rich of a mixture.
“Well, she’s definitely not missing any meals.”
Sonic suppresses a giggle “Shut up.”
Tails throws a lever inside the cockpit, and flaps deploy from the lower wing.
“I’ll take the lead, Sonic.” Tails calls as he advances the throttle. The throaty engine shouts as the revs increase. The plane starts to move down the cleared outcropping, with the large suspension handling the bumps with ease. Soon, the tail wheel lifts off the ground, followed by the rest of the plane. As soon as the gear leaves the ground, Sonic follows suit with his own takeoff. He’s nowhere as experienced with flight as his brother, but he leaves without a hitch. Tails slows down so Sonic can catch him, and both planes make a gentle curve towards the northeast, and soon the grassy plateaus give way to oceanic swells below them.
They climb to 6,000 feet and maintain their course.
“So, Sonic,” Tails begins over the radio, “Do you notice anything different?”
"Oh yeah!” The hedgehog excitedly responds, “The Tornado feels so much smoother to fly!” He performs a gentle aileron roll, to the amusement of his brother. As he levels back out, he continues, “I saw you tinkering with it earlier while I was cutting away metal. Were you tightening the control cables?”
“Yeah! I’m surprised you knew exactly what I was doing.” The fox chuckles, “ I must be rubbing off on you .”
“Nah, I still don’t understand how half your stuff works; I only know what it does, and how I can use it. I don’t have to learn how it works either, since you always do such an amazing job, buddy.”
The fox puts a hand behind his head, “Well, you knowing how to use it is what’s important.”
“Wrong. It’s spending the day with you that’s important, bro.” He could hear the fox’s appreciative hymn over the radio. “...and what a day it is. This weather’s perfect for flying!” He dips the wings to get a feel. “Coming here, we were fighting a turbulent headwind of what, 10 knots?”
Tails checks his log, “14 knots, and I agree, that wasn’t fun. It turned into a slight crosswind when we came in to land, too. It was like flying in a… ulp …thunderstorm”
“Alright, I don’t need you scaring yourself,” the speedy hero chuckles.
“Good point.”
“But I’ll say it one more time, buddy: you and me, in these amazing machines, with this weather? Today, we own these skies, my friend. We own the skies, you and I.”
“Yes, yes we do, Sonic.” The kitsune tilts his head, “Hey, aren’t those song lyrics? I feel like I’ve heard that before."
“I dunno, they probably are.”
Movement catches Sonic's eye. He glances over to see his wingman wrestling his tails back inside the cockpit so they stop flailing in the propeller wash. With the offending appendages finally stowed behind the pilot's seat, Tails glances over to see Sonic watching him, and braces for the inevitable deadpan over the radio, only to receive the dismissive wave of Sonic's hand. Even from this distance, Tails' eyes tell Sonic that he made the right choice; his history makes even good-natured ribbing about his appearance a risky business.
Besides, there are so many other ways to poke fun at him, and it doesn't quite work when Tails can simply mute the radio, especially when Sonic, who still can't swim, is flying over the ocean.
Sonic decides to leave the young pilot be, and let the next few hours succumb to the harmonious drone of radial engines.