Fanfic / The Melinda Chronicles

The Melinda Chronicles is a Highlander/Sonic the Hedgehog crossover fic.

The story takes place alternate universe of the game canon where immortals exist in Sonic's universe. It's mainly centered around fan characters that happen to be immortals and their interactions with the main cast.

The main protagonist is Melinda Prower, an old immortal that happens to be Tails adoptive mother within the AU. It tends to focus on the strange circumstances that arise for such a bizarre family and opens with an unfortunate public death resulting in Melinda waking up in the morgue. This leads to her finally having to let Tails friends in on her secret and explain (with no shortage of hurdles) about immortals.

From then the story begins to focus on her own life and past (sometimes as it comes back to haunt her), as well as her relationships with the main cast as everyone adjusts to this revelation of the existence of immortals and finding out she's one.

It's written as a series multiple stories of varying length much like story arcs of a TV Show. The genre shifts around between drama, action, adventure, and slice of life.

The stories in their most organized form can be found on Archive of Our Own and the author's DeviantArt (which also includes Bonus Material such as concept art and full uploads of story covers in its work folder)

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Tropes:

General Tropes

• Black Comedy: Usually invoked by Melinda since she routinely comes back from the dead and can walk off some pretty gnarly injuries. She claims developing such a dark sense of humor is a sort of coping mechanism.
• Canon Welding: The story takes place in a universe based on the games, but Kai is explicitly originally from a Wolf Pack tribe. Also present in the crossover element since it adds immortals to the Sonic canon
• Decapitation Required: The only way to permanently kill an immortal.
• Flashback: Being a Highlander crossover, Melinda has quite a few over the course of the story to important moments in her extremely long life.
• Healing Factor: Immortals have the ability to quickly recover from non-fatal wounds. Explicitly limited as it can't restore lost extremities such as limbs or Melinda's missing little finger.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: Melinda IS actually around 19-20 (at least physically) because that's when she suffered her first death but it's ultimately averted since Immortals stop aging the minute they become immortal. Kai is explicitly froze in his early 30s and Isa/Frostbite is noted to look about Sonic's age.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: Same as with Highlander canon immortals can't produce children. This has never stopped Melinda from adopting various children as her own like Maxwell and Tails.
• Master Swordsman: Immortals live and die by the sword, so as expected most of them are.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Immortals can sense each other.
• Really 700 Years Old: A common trait of immortals since they stop aging once their first death awakens their immortality.
• Resurrective Immortality: The method by which Highlander immortals function. They can be "killed" but won't stay that way as long they keep their head. Also the means in which they become immortal since it remains doormat until they suffer their first death
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Played with. All the non-evil immortals we've met so far clearly feel the pain of watching mortals they care about grow old and die while they live on. HOWEVER, they also take the bittersweet view that continuing to live and love while experiencing so much is worth the pain.

A Mother's Goodbye/A Mother's Secret

• Blood-Splattered Innocents: In A Mother's Goodbye Tails gets coated in Melinda's blood from being huddled next to her dead body and she resurrects to the unfortunate scene. This is the point she has to tell him about her immortality.
• Distant Finale: Actually opens with one. A Mother's Goodbye consists of Melinda at Tails' grave after he passes of old age and everyone else is also long gone. She spends the short chapter reminiscing about the time she got to spend with everyone and saying her final goodbyes.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Being the first story written in the series, A Mother's Goodbye suffers from this. Melinda's characterization comes off a lot more serious and somber in contrast to her later portrayal as laid back, often snarky and prone to One of the Kids tendencies. The opposite is also true with Revelations retconning a lot of scenes to be more serious and emotional than she describes them while reminiscing.
• It Always Rains at Funerals: It's raining at Tails' grave as Melinda says her final goodbyes in the Distant Finale.
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: More mild example employed by Melinda of cutting her own palm to demonstrate her Healing Factor and prove she wasn't lying to a young Tails.

Revelations/Reveals

• Died in Your Arms Tonight: The journal page Knuckles reads out loud implies this happened to Melinda with a child she arrived to late to protect from an attacker.
• Fainting: Played for Laughs. Vanilla faints when she see Melinda for the first time after her "death". Almost happens a second time but Melinda manages to stop her.
• Naked People Are Funny: Sometime while Melinda was dead the hospital staff removed her clothing. She's forced to sneak out wrapped in a sheet.
• Polly Wants a Microphone: The bird in the baggage car Melinda hides in to steal a ride to the Mystic Ruins has shades of this. It argues with her and mocks her, even telling her she's in trouble when they hear someone coming. We only see the tail end of the ride but it's implied the exchange has been going the entire trip.
• Shower Scene: Melinda has a much needed once finally reaching Tails Workshop after Waking Up at the Morgue. She uses the relaxing moment to consider how to proceed telling everyone she's not dead.
• Waking Up at the Morgue: Where the story starts for Melinda after dying in a car crash.

Cold as Ice

• Big Damn Heroes: Melinda seems to have a habit of this. She's saves Maxwell from Frostbite at swordpoint when she hears his screams from across the street and later barges in to save Tails and Cream. In the latter incident she even announces her entrance by addressing Frostbite as "You Son of A Bitch!"
• Groin Attack: Twice from Melinda, once on Rouge's bouncer and then again to Frostbite.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Played with and semi-averted. Frostbite is missing an eye courtesy of Melinda, but Espio's ancestor also suffered a similar injury at his hands as a child.
• Like a Son to Me: Melinda explicitly has this sort of exchange with Kai in the climax and he assures her he has so much faith in her because he returns those feelings and sees her as a mother figure.
  Melinda: I loved you like a son, and I still do.
  Kai: and you're like a mother to me

Getting Back to Normal

• Attending Your Own Funeral: Melinda decides being a semi-public figure as Tails mother means she needs to fake a funeral to seal the deal. She attends as her own suspiciously identical younger sister and predictably makes quite a spectacle of it
• Mythology Gag: One of the songs at Melinda's funeral is Dust In the Wind, a song often used in the Highlander TV Show for a Really Dead Montage.

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