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Rouge knocked on the door of the quaint little bungalow and pulled her cape a little tighter around herself against the autumn chill. She glanced around as she waited, hoping that she had found the right place. It was the only house around, so she liked her chances that this was Amy’s.
The door opened and the bat smiled to greet her host. She startled slightly as she was greeted instead by a white sheet that looked like it had been at the scene of a murder, streaked with red and tan down the front.
“Hi, Rouge!” came its enthusiastic greeting. Two purple eyes shone at her from holes cut in the sheet with the brightness and innocence of the springtime sun.
“Hey, Red,” she returned, giving the blanketed echidna a smile.
The eyes looked confused. “How’d you know it was me?”
Rouge looked him up and down. If his height and spiked hands peeking out from the sides of the sheet weren’t a dead giveaway, the fact that his costume didn’t cover his lower half was the clincher.
“Lucky guess.”
“And how’d you know I wasn’t a real ghost?” he asked, just as in earnest as the previous question.
“You didn’t say ‘boo’ when you opened the door,” she replied, taking the question in stride.
Knuckles snapped his fingers, or attempted to, but only resulted in rubbing them together with no sound. “Aw nuts, I forgot.”
“I’m sure you’ll get me next time.”
He brightened up again and nodded, then seemed to notice her costume. “Are you a v-vampire?” he asked nervously.
Rouge spread her wings slightly, creating a flutter in her cape and revealing her black dress and knee-high boots. She had foregone the fangs that came with the cape, but a bit of creative makeup work placed a small dribble of fake blood at the corner of her red-lipped mouth. Paired with dark eye shadow and some good contouring, she thought she made quite the undead creature of the night.
“Yes, darling,” she answered in a genuine fake vampire accent. “I vant to suck your blood. Bleh.”
The echidna jumped back with a (very manly) shriek.
“Knuckles!” Amy shouted from the kitchen. “Quit letting the cold in.”
“But Amy, Rouge is a vampire! If we invite her in, she’ll suck our blood!”
“The electric company is already doing that,” Amy responded, unbothered. “Let her in and shut the dumb door!”
Rouge waltzed in, closing the door behind her. She patted Knuckles on the shoulder and he flinched.
“I’m not thirsty anyway.”
Rouge had never been to Amy’s house, but the girl had good taste. Her feng shui was immaculate and the place was tastefully decorated with Halloween decor. The pink hedgehog smiled at Rouge as she entered the kitchen. Underneath a frilly apron, it looked like she had some kind of costume dress and Rouge noted the red hood and cloak hanging off one of the kitchen chairs.
The countertop was a scene of organized chaos. A rolled out batch of sugar cookie dough bedecked with holes from cut shapes and various cookie cutters, all with a dusting of flour, and a few seasonally-themed colors of frosting were scattered across the surface. Amy scraped a few final cookies off a pan onto a cooling rack, then switched back to a frosting tin, spreading pale green across a cooled confection shaped like a gingerbread man.
“I’m a bit behind for the party,” she apologized.
Knuckles’ nervousness of vampires dropped, his eyes sparkling proudly. “I’m helping.”
Amy’s eyes twitched in a way that commuted her previous apology to an accusation. “Yeah…helping.”
The echidna grabbed a cooled cookie and slathered icing over it, getting it all over his fingers, then pinched some Halloween sprinkles from a container to sprinkle over. When he was done, he held out the labor of his effort for Rouge to see.
“They’re zombie cookies,” he explained as excess icing dripped off the cookie onto the countertop.
Rouge glanced at the completed cookies, at Knuckles’ haphazard but more prolific decorating method. The lion’s share of the completed confections bore his particular decoration style as opposed to Amy’s, whose cookies were more neat and detailed. The pink hedgehog’s eye was starting to twitch enough to register on the Richter scale.
“Looks good,” she replied. “Are you done with your scraps?”
Amy had switched to a different frosting to put details on her zombie. “Yep, I’ll clean them in a minute.”
“You mind if Red and I use them? We could make thumbprints that look like eye balls,” she gave Amy a wink. “It’ll leave the rest of the zombie icing to you by yourself, if that’s OK.”
The other woman luckily picked up on what she was saying and her shoulders sagged in relief. “Oh, great idea! I’ll get you some strawberry jam.”
With jam procured, Rouge and Knuckles started rolling the leftover cookie dough into balls.
“These do look like eyeballs,” Knuckles commented, rolling one on his palm.
“Just wait, you’ll love this. Hand, please.”
The echidna held out his hand and she took it, holding his fingers over hers so that his spikes pointed at her. Taking a dough ball, she pressed it gently against the end of the spike until a deep enough divot formed. The echidna’s face, or what Rouge could see of it, brightened with wonder.
“Cool.”
Rouge placed the cookie on an empty tray and spooned a little of the jam into it. She gestured with the spoon toward the cookie balls. “You make the holes and I’ll do the jam?”
He nodded enthusiastically, taking a ball and poking it on the hand she was still holding.
In a short while, they had filled a tray and set it in the oven. By the time they were baked and cooled, Sonic and Tails had arrived at the party, dressed as red and green mustachioed plumbers. Knuckles greeted them excitedly with two fresh cookies for eyeballs.