So, I'm Sally?

[Tangent]

CHAPTER ONE​

---

"Wh… where am I…?" I felt incredibly disoriented and my short-term memories were unhelpfully muddled and ambiguous.

I was in some sort of metal-plated laboratory with a busted-in window along one wall, a row of robotization tubes containing captured subjects along another wall, and my lord and his chief lackey were arguing with the intruder who had just deroboticized me.

"She's back to normal," the chief lackey - Snively - called out.

"I'll do it myself!" my lord insisted even as he shoved me aside. "Out of my way!"

Er… Dr. Robotnik is not and never was my lord. I was a princess, dammit! And even if the Kingdom of Acorn had fallen, I had never surrendered to Dr. Robotnik! Been captured? Yes - too many times for my liking, even if some of those were part of a ruse on my part…

Which had backfired in a big way this time.

Ugh… Coming down from a post-derobotization sucks!

Granted, being a Robian with no choice but to obey Dr. Robotnik also sucked.

Letting myself get caught so that I could be a sleeper spy against Robotnik was a wash all around.

"Oh no you won't!" the intruder - no, my friend Dulcey the Dragon - proclaimed just before breathing fire towards the control console, melting it immediately. And incidentally setting Dr. Robotnik's pants on fire.

As Dulcey drove off my masters… the villains, I moved to free the subjects… my friends… from the robotization tubes.

Something's wrong. Not only did the mission fail, it went seriously sideways in ways that literally made no sense!

I should have made sure that the Neuro-Overrider chip Rotor had given me was attached more securely behind my ear, where I'd hidden it. It had fallen off right as my robotization had started, meaning that I had immediately gone from being a spy on an infiltration mission to betraying my friends to our greatest enemy.

Yeah, in retrospect, so many things could have gone wrong with this mission that it's a wonder that only some of them had happened.

Anyway, I am once again Princess Sally Alicia Acorn, leader of the Freedom Fighters and nominal leader of the overall resistance movement.

Except that I am also some guy from another Zone where everything in this Zone is considered to be fiction. I am also something of a fan of said fiction, and a writer of fanfics.

Which is oddly much less horrifying than it sounds, because neither I nor my friends are fictional, so that part of me was obviously from some sort of recursive Zone.

But how did I end up becoming me? I mean, Sally?

"Are you feeling alright, Sally?" Hedgehog: Priority One… er… Sonic asked me.

What the figurative Hell was that!? I'd been deroboticized! I shouldn't have any trace of the control overlay program in my flesh and blood thinky-thinky bits! And, to be fair, I don't think it's actually still there. This just seems to be some weird after effect.

"Not really, no," I replied. "Coming back from being a slave… I mean robot… kind of hit me harder than we predicted."

"Let's get you back," Rotor suggested. "I'll check you over carefully and see if there was anything the portable deroboticizer missed when you became you again."

"Sounds good," I nodded. "I've been having lingering intrusive terminology issues. Some of it's minor, while other bits are kinda jarring. I'll be including a lot of the apparently random nonsense in my after action report so we can go over it later and see if anyone can figure it out."

I wasn't too worried about having apparently merged with some fanfic writer from some nameless Zone. I've had weirder experiences. I'd deal.

What was more of a concern was the terminology that didn't seem to come from the part of me that had been that guy. Being under the control overlay program had sucked. Not that it was particularly bright in and of itself - if it had been, the experience wouldn't have been so humiliating.

No, the issue was that it used my own mind as its operating system, so while the directives it had imposed were actually simplistic, that simple compulsion to serve and obey Dr. Robotnik to the best of my ability did quite a bit all by itself.

I mean, what can you do when the moment you figure out how to apply malicious compliance you automatically shelve the idea to do what you figure your lord actually wanted you to do?

And I was doing it again. Dr. Robotnik is not and never was my lord. If anything, he had - very briefly - been my owner. Being my lord would imply that I had actually made the choice to serve as his vassal, and I never had that choice.

---

During the trip back I took the time to reflect on the part of me that had been a fanfic writer. One who might not have qualified as whatever the Hell a 'super-fan' of our Zone and others like it was, but who had done deep archive dives into various comic books, not all of them by the same publisher, binge-watched several different…

Okay, what is a cartoon and how is it different from a movie?

Never mind - found the explanation, didn't like it, moving on…

The music was catchy, but why did they draw our heads so big compared to our bodies? We looked like animated dolls in some of those depictions! And don't get me started on how the art styles used by some of the comic book publishers were so all over the place you could sometimes see the switch in styles multiple times within the same issue!

Oh yeah, and I'm never telling Sonic that most of these shows and books were named after him. As much as I appreciate all he does for us, his ego is big enough already.

I sighed as I considered the jumbled, disorganized mess that represented Tangent's memories of the medium. There was actually quite a bit, really, but very little of it was actually related to our world and situation. I mean, yes Star Trek seemed to have been a legitimately interesting show, and I guess that show about candy-colored pony people was alright. And I apparently now had opinions on what order to watch something called Star Wars.

Approximately none of which was particularly useful or actionable in any meaningful way.

And the stuff that actually did seem to pertain to Mobius was even worse because it was so difficult to sort which people and supposed events happened in this Zone and which were more likely to be associated with entirely different Zones. Was some super-metal invented by a canary going to be a thing here? Was Sonic going to be forced to go into hiding in a traveling circus with whoever Porker Lewis and Johnny Lightfoot were? Was Eggman going to try to rewrite reality at some point?

Well, okay - it was kind of a given that he would if he could. Dr. Robotnik literally reveled in being evil. But was that actually going to be a thing I'd have to worry about?

I didn't know.

And if knowing was half the battle, I fear that I may actually be at a severe disadvantage here, what with a multitude of negative-value information.

And as much as all that was concerning, there was this whole Tuvix situation I had going on right now. I mean, sure, I mentally identified as being Sally Alicia Acorn, but that's mostly because that's the identity that actually goes with this body. And don't get me wrong - I am Sally Acorn.

It's just that I am also Tangent.

And not in the two minds in one body sense.

I was just… Me.

One single solitary individual.

Who, while opting to self-identify as being Sally for convenience's sake due to actually physically being Sally, was now facing the difficulties associated with the fact that the Tangent part of me had been nearly three times older than the body I currently have.

How am I supposed to filter out what I need to be me when part of me has so many memories that I have trouble remembering things that happened to me as the previous Sally?