Sparks of Inspiration

After a few weeks of acclimating to Tokyo, Tsubasa was writing in his journal at a small outdoors cafe. It had been very hectic lately, he didn't have much time after the H8K crash before he needed to start looking for work. As fortune would have it, there was a newspaper that needed someone to write for them. Yui had begged him to take the job, but he wasn't sure why she was so deadset on him doing this in particular. He looked to his notes. Through all the mundane occurrences and trivia, he found something that actually caught his eye. There was some kind of contest to decide on a manga artist for the newspaper. Among the names… was Yui Ejima!

Tsubasa's smile was short-lived. The very next note that he saw was about… the destruction of Odo Island. Tsubasa's firsthand experience was a double-edged sword if he was going to write about this. He was there, he lived it. But the last thing he wanted to do was dredge up those still-fresh memories. Tapping his pencil against his journal, he began to write.

On the 23rd of June, Odo Island collided with a landmass that moved along the Pacific Ocean. Researchers have identified this landmass as "South Island", which was first discovered by the American satellite "ARK" in 1960. Moments before impact, a gargantuan sea creature referred to as "Gojira" by Odo Island residents emerged and attempted to hold South Island away from the Odo shore. The immense damage to houses and the surrounding land suggests that Gojira swung its giant tail during the struggle, possibly as a display of power. Even with the creature's might, it should come as no surprise that South Island eventually overpowered it. Footprints show Gojira walking on South Island before entering the sea. Gojira's current location is unknown. 38 people on Odo Island perished that day, with around 20 people managing to escape. This leaves the remaining human population in a dire situation, but many still do not wish to leave their homeland.

Tsubasa walked into his apartment's dimly-lit bathroom, and ran the sink. He splashed cold water in his eyes, before staring at his dripping face in the mirror. Despite everything that had happened, he was still clinging on.

"Big brother?" Yui asked, knocking on the door and catching Tsubasa off-guard. He realized he had been staring into the mirror for longer than he meant to. "You okay in there?" Tsubasa wiped his face with his shirt and walked out.

"Fine, I'm fine," Tsubasa said, nodding. He looked to Yui's drawings spread out all over the floor. Some of her favorite works were tacked onto the wall. "You've been… working a lot, huh?" Yui glared at him, offended.

"What's that tone supposed to mean? This is gonna be my real job, soon!" Yui scolded him, picking up her loose drawings and placing them into a binder. When she turned to face Tsubasa, she was smiling again. "I want you to see some of these, I bet you're going to like them." She dropped the binder into Tsubasa's arms, he could barely lift it. The two sat down on the floor and looked over the homemade manga.

"This one is about a highschool girl whose beloved dog is actually a monster in disguise, it's a little scary," Yui explained, the biggest smile on her face. Tsubasa smiled and nodded, reading the speech bubbles but mostly skimming through the art. "The panel where you see the mailman's arm get bitten off was kind of hard for me to draw. I may have forced it a little!" She laughed, before Tsubasa skipped to a random page. Yui's delighted grin faded a little.

"This is all wonderful," Tsubasa mumbled, flipping through chunk after chunk of the binder. Yui's imagination must have been boundless with how many different concepts and worlds there were. "I'm impressed, you've truly come a long way since the drawings you made when you were a kid!" He looked up at his sister with a bright beaming smile. She nodded.

"Thank you," she said, fumbling her hands and looking back to her binder. Tsubasa turned a page, and saw a sketch that caught his eye more than anything else so far. In fact, he was utterly fixated on it. "Big brother?"

"Who… is that?" Tsubasa asked, seeing a small hedgehog drawn in the corner of the page. It was very simple and scratchy compared to the almost lifelike art he was used to seeing from his sister.

"What?" Yui asked, moving on her knees over to Tsubasa's side. She took the binder in her hands and stared at the hedgehog doodle. Her face lit up with realization. "Oh! That's Sonic!"

"Sonic… Sonic," Tsubasa asked. "Where'd you hear a name like that?" Yui stood up and put a hand to her forehead, staring at the wall. Tsubasa looked all around, confused. Yui imagined the flag of the United States on the wall. She smirked in admiration.

"Once upon a time, there was a US Air Force pilot named Henry Gordon. He held the title 'The Hedgehog'. While he always seemed to draw people towards him with his charisma and freedom-loving American spirit, he was also so reclusive that even his daughter only knew him by his title," Yui yammered with a sense of pride and dignity. The flag slowly faded from her imagination. Explosions rang out inside her head. She clenched her fists. "One day, he flew his jet so fast, that he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier. Tragically, his plane exploded, and his body was never found. The one thing that could be recovered from the rubble was his flight jacket, with a glorious emblem of a blue hedgehog. The noise caused by the breaking of the sound barrier would since become known as a…" Yui struck a pose and wagged her index finger. "'Sonic boom.'" Tsubasa sat there, astounded.

…

In the days following the crash, the elder had traveled back to Odo. Only a handful of the survivors had enough faith to follow him, the majority trying to make their own way in mainland Japan. Tsubasa was seen as their savior, for a good few days, before a bit of normalcy returned to his life. After that, he became just another one of the Odo Island refugees. As he laid down on the hard floor in a sleeping bag, he looked to Yui. She was sound asleep on the couch. Tsubasa was still reeling from what happened when Godzilla faced off against the moving island. He could have lost everything with every passing second of that whole ordeal. Yui was extraordinarily lucky to be alive, and she was still as cheerful as ever. Tsubasa was still grappling with the fact he failed to protect her. He was seen as a hero by everyone on the flight, but even then…

He knew there was a real hero that day.

"Sonic… Sonic the Hedgehog. When I die, please protect Yui for me," he whispered, remembering the blue hedgehog standing proudly atop the wreckage of the H8K. As he closed his eyes and drifted to sleep.