A/N: Well, this took a lot longer than I'd expected. Sorry.
This is just something short, funny, and useless to put my mind on the right track for the Parody Engines and/or Labyrinth. Shadow on Earth as a newspaper deliverer. Yeah.
-Episode I Intro-
In our pilot, we find Shadow on an EPIC QUEST to find out just who the badass purple cat that keeps getting shipped with him is. In doing so, will he learn a valuable lesson about judging people by their appearance? ...wait, why am I asking you? I'm the one who decides that...
-Exordiamur!-
Shadow wasn't entirely sure what was going on, but he knew one thing. This one thing was derived from his memories, not his perceptions, but it would drive him for the entirety of his next adventures. Thinking of this one thing now, he trembled in mingled shock and horror, simultaneously revolved and amazed at the one thing that now burned itself into its mind like a hot coal.
That one thing was...
...that Shadow's memories were intact for once.
Still, having just been awakened from stasis, one wouldn't blame him for not realizing why his red, robotic friend E-123 Omega (whom he recognized!) was blasting a wall of flames from one of its myriad Modular Arm Weaponry systems and stopping him from realizing where the hell he was, or why the absurdly sexy and surprisingly responsible bat Rouge (whom he recognized!) was trying to carve a hole in the black metal ceiling of wherever-they-were with a blowtorch. After recovering from the shock of having a working memory, however, Shadow assumed that it was a bad thing.
He needed to know what was going on in order to decide what to do, though, and he didn't think it would be very helpful to stand around doing nothing while he tried to figure out what was going on. He found the less distractible of his comrades and tapped him on his metal shoulder.
"OH, YOU'RE AWAKE," Omega intoned. His voice was... not the most pleasant sound in the world, but at least it was familiar!
"Eh?" Rouge glanced down from her work on the ceiling to see for herself. Her voice was actually pretty close to the most pleasant sound in the world, and it, too, was familiar. "Cool! Hi, Shadow!"
"Hello, there," Shadow responded out of obligation before turning back to Omega. "So... what's going on here?"
"DOCTOR EGGMAN -" Omega said this as a certain hunchbacked teacher might say "FAIRY GODPARENTS!" - "HAD RECAPTURED YOUR STASIS CAPSULE. WE DECIDED TO RETRIEVE IT."
"Thanks," the hedgehog replied, reveling in his memories once again as he thought back to his last stay in Dr. Eggman's care. Surprisingly, more memories followed this one - the massive, Chaos Controlled team attack, Super Sonic taking his absurd power to new extremes by giving his own team about half a Super of power each, Rouge's battle armor that somehow managed to be sexier than her usual catsuit... The power of memories to evoke new memories was new to Shadow.
If you think about it for a while, that's really sad.
Suddenly, a large, circular chunk of ceiling fell to the ground just behind Shadow. He used his usual reflexes to dodge it, leaving a golden trail as he jumped onto Omega's head.
"Oh," Rouge murmured, sheepishly surveying her handiwork. "Sorry. Anyway, we can get out through here."
"Cool," Shadow smirked, jumping from Omega's head to the hole in the ceiling in a single bound.
Surprisingly, there was nothing but air outside the flaming room; he was apparently on the roof of whatever base Eggman had been keeping him in.
"He kept you at the top of the tower," Rouge explained as she landed beside him. "Relying on his anti-air defenses... Kind of smart, but kind of stupid at the same time."
"IT WOULD BE SAFEST TO TELEPORT TO THE GROUND," Omega advised, bursting up on altogether too-loud rockets. He extended the green Chaos Emerald to Shadow in his shiny steel claw - another of his altogether too-diverse MAW systems. "RESULTS OF SELF-DIAGNOSTIC?"
Shadow wandered to the edge. It was a good way down, but it was straight down; the group would easily be able to free-fall and simply slow themselves as their time-stop faded.
"This'll be easy," he smirked. He caught the Emerald Omega tossed to him and tossed it from hand to hand as the team assembled.
"Ready?" he asked. On the affirmative, he barked:
"CHAOS CONTROL!"
-alibi...-
The cat never failed to surprise him.
She'd managed to shanghai her silver hanger-on, appropriately and unimaginatively named Silver, into diverting Eggman Nega, which pretty much ruined his plan. Nevertheless, he'd come too far to give up now.
Indeed, he'd improved Nega's Scalespider device into a new Egg Scalespider, which was far superior to the original for today's goal. Notably, its exploitation of duralumin and chaotic support systems allowed it to use the Eggmobile's own propulsion systems to fly, allowing its own reactor to supply energy to the defense and movement systems.
Granted, it had basically no weapons, but that was acceptable for this mission.
The mission in question was a very, very simple one: steal the Sol Emeralds, or at least one of them. There were three reasons why they might be more desirable than the considerably more powerful Chaos Emeralds, and even worth the desire to go to another dimension to get them: their stability made them much easier to research and conceal than the Chaos Emeralds; they'd give Eggman a personal anti-Chaos Control forcefield (the reason he didn't just teleport into the holding chamber to begin with); they'd give the dark doctors a dimensional tunnel to use at their will (which he could lord over his oddly xenophilic nemesis Sonic, and probably take over the worlds with on the side).
The complications were also very simple, he knew. Burrowing into the Paganar Cliffs was hard; debris would fly everywhere, even with an energy drill, and it would only be too easy to let the tunnel collapse behind him and force him to abort the mission. The ephemeral blue walls around him occasionally made him forget he was burrowing through a cliff, and the noise they reflected rent his ears. And most importantly, it was physically taxing to accept the Scalespider's shaking, though it was obviously better to tax him than his device's structural integrity.
But as he broke through to the chamber at last, free of the echoes and shaking and debris and danger, guiding the Scalespider to rest atop its prize, he realized he'd underestimated the greatest complication of all. This complication decided to manifest itself as a large fireball headed in his direction, from directly beneath him.
She started the battle at his weak point. That there was enough reason to give up. "Chaos Control!" Ivo Robotnik roared in a fit of self-preservation.
Of course, Blaze was too close. She'd come with him. So he decided to take her to one place where he could unnerve her: the specially prepared roof of his recently constructed tower...
-alibi...-
Adjusting to normal life had been... difficult for Christopher Thorndyke. One doesn't easily recover from no less than two supersonic alpha-male hedgehogs, a mad scientist and his incompetent subordinates, an alien invasion by a race of plants culminating in a tragic romance, and a near aversion of the apocalypse. But he'd done it! And he'd become semi-independent, too!
He was wrapped in reminiscence for the moment, but this was mostly because of his company: his wheelchair-bound belle Helen and the GUN veteran who'd stood next to the GUN veteran who'd shot Maria Robotnik for no good reason. They were all discussing (ridiculous) old times over tea in the family room and watching the news. In fact, the veteran had come for a reason, but he'd forgotten it, until...
"Oh, yes!" the old soldier said suddenly. "That was why I'd come here. Some Japanese school's labs - 'Momotsuki' or something-or-other - figured out what caused those last two dimensional jumps!"
He had both of their attentions now. Only the voice of the newscaster punctuated the silence.
"Well? Chris said at last, expectant.
"Remember Chaos Control?" He didn't need to ask. "See, if two of those overlap, it confuses the warp direction, so they just go to the default place."
"Here," Helen continued.
"Pretty much."
There was another long silence, which was good, because this time, the news was showing something rather important and topical - something about a giant robot, flaming cat, and the return of Shadow the Hedgehog.
-alibi...-
Lieutenant Yassin knew every military cliché in the book. This included the one about how the military was generally useless against alien invaders. Fortunately, GUN had developed a few tricks since the last incident two years ago. Therefore, Lt. Yassin decided to switch up the usual alien-stopping procedure a bit.
"EVERYBODY SURRENDER!" the lieutenant roared into his mic from the helicopter. He was surrounded by three missile-firing copters and trailed by a convoy of shell-and-laser tanks from below; infantry was sparse and generally packing bazookas.
Glancing at the color scheme of the large robot, he added: "ESPECIALLY YOU, EGGMAN!"
He'd guessed correctly as to the pilot's identity. His answer was short and sweet: "NO!" Instead...
...everyone on the ground fled in different directions. He pondered following the sinister scientist, but the spider vanished in a burst of red light in a short while, so he decided not to bother.
-alibi...-
"Hello, there," Shadow greeted Chris and company from the windowsill. A great deal of confusion and spilled tea ensued, and Helen was eventually knocked over.
"When did you get here?" Chris, first to recover, demanded, stunned at Shadow's pace. The hedgehog cleared his throat and tossed the green Chaos Emerald into the air.
"...I knew that."
"So, anyway," the golden blur said bluntly, "we got here somehow. Dunno how. We'll need to crash somewhere until we figure out how to get back..."
"Use two Chaos Controls at once," Helen suggested from the floor. Chris hurriedly picked her up, startled at his own klutziness.
"Doesn't that just send them here, though?" the redhead wondered aloud as he moved. "I think to send them back..."
Meanwhile, the soldier was supplicating an increasingly uncaring Shadow.
"I... I'm so sorry...! We can't have...! We shouldn't have...!"
"Uhm. Thanks. Obviously, I'm not happy about it, but what's done is done, you know? Anyway," he cut off the apologetic veteran, "we - Team Dark and I - need a place to crash 'till we can get back, and I figure this is as good a place as any."
There was a long silence as the humans brainstormed objections and failed to find any.
-septimana postera...-
"Papers."
"EIGHTY-SEVEN; FULL STOCK."
"Containment."
"Secure."
"Release."
"NOT PREPARED. MANUAL TODAY."
"Dammit. Whatever, just gimme the basket."
"Here you are~ "
"I'll be back in five."
"We'll get something ready. See you."
So began Shadow the Hedgehog's paper route.
c wut i did thar?
-OP: Knight of the Wind-
It would be a simple operation. Thankfully, no one thought that her treasure was worth a special entourage. This was unsurprising, as to the normal person, this would be no treasure.
The main difficulty would be in concealing herself. Unlike back home, where humans were a rarity, she was, insofar as she knew, the only anthropomorph in this world. The sight of her would be quite a scare, flames or not.
At the moment, she was hiding in a condemned building. It would be easy to burn her way out if things got hairy, and few people were present besides. She overlooked a fairly marché en plein air, though these tended to be rare opportunities in this world. Her query was in one of the stands; even from here, she could see its sheen, nearly taste its edge.
There - opportunity. A woman was smoking a cigarette by a trash can; the spark of the lighter would be an excellent excuse. She snapped her fingers and the bin was alight. Naturally, the store owners panicked, rushing over to help put out the fire. Now she moved, light as a feather and quick as Japanese subway, her target in hand.
She escaped back into the shadows long before the hapless group mustered the supplies to extinguish her flame. Pitying them a bit, she sucked a few of the embers back in as she retreated to the building from which she'd come. As she leaned back against the wall, she munched on her prize, satisfied - a pepper.
She'd gone to all that trouble for a bit of food. It sounded mad at first, but on consideration, she didn't actually have any money, and the mere sight of her was likely to cause panic and perhaps armed rebukes.
Now that she wasn't about to starve to death, it was time to turn her attention to water and the Emeralds. Eggman positive had taken them; this was reassuring, as he wasn't nearly so omnicidal or unflappable as his negative twin. At the same time, though, the positive Eggman was a scientist where Nega was a killer; he'd figure out how to wield the emeralds much faster than Nega. That could have dire results.
Of course, the main problem was that she'd be taking them on alone. She didn't want to engage armed forces; Eggman's robots tended to be far more effective against armies than single, lightning-fast opponents. On the other hand, the military demonstration earlier showed that the armies of Earth were going to get involved anyway, so she might as well guide them into a path in which she'd recover the Emeralds, ne?
As she settled this, something black, gold, and very, very fast whizzed by the building, managing somehow to hit her in the head with a rolled-up newspaper. Naturally, the paper burst into flames as it hit her.
And then the whole damn building caught on fire.
-alibi...-
Shadow didn't even hear the screams. He only saw the ominous cloud of smoke looming over the city, in fact, after eight more blocks, which, at his moderated speed, took about a minute and a half. This was unfortunate; if he'd been there, he might have settled the matter in about five seconds.
But by the time he'd returned, one side of the street was basically alight, moderated only by a large fireball that seemed to be sucking in flames. Shadow went through his memories, if only for the sake of remembering, and decided that this was a bad thing. Besides the pyre's magnitude, the sort of power absorption he saw before him was generally a hallmark of villains alone.
He decided to cut off the "evil-demon-powering-up" problem first and then deal with the "city-on-fire" problem; after all, he recalled, the city had a fire department, but not an evil demon department. He aimed a homing attack into one of the fire streams, then sent another one around, and continued doing so until he'd built up a localized gold tornado that stole the flames from its malevolent absorber.
When he was satisfied with his attack, he hurtled onto the side of the street that wasn't on fire and sprang back into a homing attack, determined to strike while the demon was distracted. He curled himself into a black cannonball and fired away.
Unfortunately, he was deflected; the demon was spinning at ridiculous speeds to direct his attack, and, more importantly, it was somehow on fire... again. He was sent plowing into the road, leaving a pothole that wouldn't be fixed for about a month.
This was when Shadow decided to start fighting seriously. He rolled out of the hole, spending as little time in the air as possible, and knelt in a sort of runner's pose, ready to take off whenever necessary. He'd need to size up his enemy if he planned to get anywhere.
Now that he was getting a good look at his foe, he was starting to wish he'd never started the fight.
Where a demon of fire had had once whirled, an extremely beautiful lilac Burmese now stood. She was wearing a deep violet cloak that exposed no skin whatsoever, utterly aristocratic gloves and tights, shoes that were far too similar to his and Sonic's for comfort, and a great deal of white makeup on her face and eyes. Her golden eyes were cold, calculating, and probably hiding a quick brain that was thinking along the same lines as Shadow's, albeit with a bit less lust.
This first impression told Shadow two things: that he wasn't going to be on a date any time soon, and that he was in for a long, hard, possibly-unwinnable fight.
-nostra negotii exordiunt-
A/N: At this point, I got bored and decided to start writing Enigma of Scarlet Plague, of all things. Mine attention span seems to have died. Well, here's this, with a very nice cliffhanger at the end.
A/N/S: I HATE FORMATTING. -.- Really, it got rid of all my nice separations and s (you can't even see them now, I bet) and everything...