Written for the Kelviniana forum Summer's Up challenge.

Once again, the night was split with Shadow's anguished cries.

"She's gone... she's gone... She was so perfect... so beautiful... and now, s-she's..." Unable to face the merciless brutality of the world, Shadow curled up into a ball of quivering angst.

"Shh, honey. I know, I know." Rouge patted Shadow's spikes comfortingly and shot an impatient glance at her watch.

As if on cue, the door blew open and a blue streak careened across the room and smashed into the wall, leaving flaming scorch marks on the carpet. Rouge made a disgusted noise. "Ugh! You're paying for that, you know."

Sonic yanked his plaster-dusted head out of the wall and grinned. "Well, you did say to come as fast as I could..."

Hearing this, Shadow's head emerged from the curled-up ball of quivering angst. Upon seeing his visitor, he groaned angrily. "Oh, not you... haven't I suffered enough?"

Sonic took in Shadow's puffy, redder-than-usual eyes and the snively paths carved over his fuzzy cheeks by rivers of tears and snot. Clearly, he had been crying, something Sonic did not realize Shadow was capable of. It was disconcerting.

Now, Sonic was not especially fond of Shadow, considering him a bit irritating with his myriad neuroses and stuck-up attitude. But still, a friend is a friend, and Sonic was eager to help – although he wasn't sure if he could offer the kind of help Shadow needed. This was already pushing against the border of psychiatrist territory.

So Sonic raised an eyebrow. "...What kind of emergency is this, anyway?"

"Nothing you need to c-concern yourself with, fool!" Shadow shouted, voice creaking and shuddering with misery. If he had meant to sound menacing, the effect was utterly lost.

Seeing he'd pry no answers from him, Sonic turned to Rouge for an explanation. She opened her mouth – but then Shadow started up again.

"How could someone l-like you understand? M-My pain? My sorrow? Sh-She was everything... everything to me... there will never be another like her... never... sh-she's irreplaceable... and I... I've l-lost... lost..." Suddenly he burst into tears again, burying his face into his chest-fluff and rocking back and forth on the couch. His sharp quills plucked at the upholstery rather noisily.

Sonic felt oddly threatened. "Should I leave...?"

"No," said Rouge. She patted Shadow again, cooing softly: "Why don't you go back to bed, sweetie? We'll take care of it from here."

Shadow didn't even protest. He weakly rolled off the couch and trundled down the hall, making muffled sniffling noises all the while.

Rouge rolled her eyes. "Now, where were we?"

"Let me guess," Sonic asked, now that Shadow was out of sight. "This has something to do with that 'Maria' person?"

Rouge shook her head. "Nah, he's been over that for a while. This is something far more serious."

She stood up and motioned for Sonic to follow her. Furrowing his brow in confusion, he obliged, and the bat-girl led him downstairs to a plain-looking door near the back of her nightclub.

Sonic watched as Rouge rummaged through her pocket. "He's very strict about security," she explained as she produced a ring of keys and stuck one in the lock, turning it with a click. Using the key in the doorknob triggered a panel to slide open in the nearby wall, revealing a keypad. Pecking in the correct code caused another keypad to show itself, and entering the correct code on that caused the door jamb to slide open, exposing a series of padlocks keeping the door anchored in place. After using the rest of the key ring to unlock these, answering a series of riddles, and letting sensors scan her eyes, facial structure, and fingerprints, Rouge gave up and kicked the door down.

An avalanche of stuff came pouring out. Upon closer inspection, Sonic identified wrenches, nuts, bolts, springs, bits of engines, a variety of metal doohickeys, and what was unmistakably a flux capacitor. All would have felt at home in Tails' workshop. "What's all this stuff for?"

"His garage," Rouge said with no small amount of disdain. She gestured broadly to the room beyond.

Sonic squinted. "Looks more like a wall of tires to me."

In fact, that's exactly what it looked like – a wall of tires, with tchotchkes and scrap metal wedged in between to seal the gaps. Sonic doubted anything but air could get through it.

"Exactly, he's constructed a labyrinth to keep people out," Rouge grumbled. "A four-car garage packed to the ceiling with a bunch of rusty junk... ugh. There's a small space in the middle where he does all his monkey wrenching."

"How does he get in there?"

Rouge gave him a look. "Ever heard of Chaos Control?"

"Oh. Right." Suddenly, alarms went off in Sonic's head. If Shadow had lost something in there... "Y-You're not gonna make me help clean this out, are you?"

Rouge looked startled. "What? No! But anyway, like I said, there's an empty spot somewhere inside all that. Shadow keeps his motorcycle there."

"So?"

"So it's missing, you dope," Rouge said. "Poof. Gone. Lost."

"But... how in the world..." Sonic struggled to wrap his brain around this. "You just said the only way in and out is with the Chaos Control!"

"Mm-hmm." Rouge nodded slowly. "And as you know, Shadow is kind of paranoid." She jabbed her thumb at the remains of the door to illustrate. "And he is rather emotionally invested in his motorcycle. So. Do you want to put the pieces together, or should I do it for you?"

"You think he stole it himself?" Before Sonic could point out the obvious contradiction, Rouge battered him with exposition.

"Precisely." Rouge planted her hand on her hip. "He tends to go without sleep for weeks at a time, since his dreams are not exactly visions of sugar-plums. So, when he finally passes out, he tends to sleepwalk. He's spent the last few nights obsessively tweaking Dark Rider, so I'm thinking he must have fallen asleep, subconsciously warped away with the bike, and hidden it where no-one could find it. And-"

"...Because he has a sieve for a brain, he can't remember where he put it," Sonic finished, sighing.

"Well, actually, somnambulists rarely recall their midnight adventures. Which is really too bad... hee-hee-hee."

Sonic ignored her double entendre lest they pass the event horizon of flirting and forget the matter at hand. "And because of the Chaos Control-"

"...It could be literally anywhere across all of space and time. Yup." Rouge closed her eyes heavily. "It won't be long before Shadow comes to the same conclusion, and when he does-"

"So it's a race against the clock." Sonic kneaded his temples and gave a low whistle. "Yeah... we're gonna have to call in the reinforcements."

So, a short while later, Sonic rendezvoused with Tails in the fox's workshop.

Tails stroked his fluffy chin thoughtfully. "Okay... so, we have to find Shadow's bike before he goes off on a rampage across the time-space continuum and beyond, tearing apart universe after universe and possibly disrupting millions of alternate time-lines in a futile attempt to find it himself?"

"Yes, he isn't exactly known for his tact," Sonic said. "Or for his foresight. Or for his... neat, precise work."

"So we have to, essentially, mop up his mess before he makes it. All right." Tails sighed. "But, y'know, I guess I can't preëmptively blame him for possibly freaking out in the near future. I mean, I'd feel the same way if the Tornado just up and vanished."

"We have a whole fleet of them, you know," Sonic said, motioning to the hangar behind him. It was practically flooded with piles of biplanes.

"And every one of them is special," Tails murmured, a proud tear in his eye.

"Uh-huh." Sonic vaguely wondered where his Tornado was - probably buried under thousands of Tails' babies. But then again, Sonic did not form ridiculous emotional bonds to material objects, so this didn't bother him. "Speaking of Tornadoes, do you still have that butterfly dimension sailboat thingy-ma-jig?"

"You mean the SS Tornado EX?" Tails sounded a bit miffed, as though Sonic's inability to remember in perfect detail the thousands of iterations of Tornadoes was deliberate. "Sure, it's in the novelty quadrant. Why?"

"Well, we're going to need backup. We have to dig through all of space and time, remember?" Sonic smirked. "Let's ring up some specialists."

Specialist number one was easy enough to reach, although Blaze was rather alarmed when a giant lavender sailboat shot out of the Sol Emeralds and smashed into the palace bathroom's wall, decimating a few million rings' worth of priceless art and jeweled toilets. (Before you ask, she had been about to give the Emeralds their nightly bath.)

"'Eyyy, Blaze," said Sonic, leaning on a broken spigot. He seemed awfully casual for the situation. "Can I borrow you for a sec?"

Contacting specialist number two proved more complicated, but Tails had it covered. He flew up to the moon in his handy-dandy Rocket Power Tornado Mint Breeze mk. XVII and deployed a holographic projector set to activate in roughly two hundred years.

Roughly two hundred years later, Silver the Hedgehog was floating around aimlessly when the moon suddenly turned blue. He felt his stomach swell with dread. "Oh, no... not again..."

Tails' yellow face appeared amid the blue, and waved at him cheerfully. "Hey, Silver!" a synthesized voice boomed out, loud enough that the entire planet could hear. "Overkill" didn't even begin to describe it. "Sonic and I need your time travel powers. Could you please warp to my workshop at..." He checked his watch. "Um... 11:37 AM on Saturday, August 10, roughly two hundred years ago? Thanks."

And just like that, the video vanished. Meanwhile, a bunch of people roused from sleep by the cosmic Skype call were organizing a manhunt for this "Silver" fellow.

"That's the third time this week! I'm sick of this!"

"If this keeps up, I promise you, I will lose it!"

"I'm not missing work again because of some stupid past crisis that won't even happen anyway!"

"There he is!"

"Let's get 'im!"

Silver blanched and took off, at once fleeing for his life and hoping a Chaos Emerald would magically fall into his glowing hands. It wouldn't, obviously.

Chased by an angry mob and scouring the planet for an Emerald, Silver had a wild and crazy adventure that involved shutting down a fashion scandal in Spagonia, single-handedly dismantling the corrupt government of Sealand, defeating Cthulhu with only a ball of yarn and a couple of busted calculators, and, through a series of humorous coincidences, getting a popular nudist beach named after him, but none of that was pertinent to the story at hand.

All you need to know is that eventually he got his hands on the Emerald and warped back in time to Tails' workshop 11:37 AM on Sunday, August 10, roughly two hundred years ago.

Tails was at his computer; apparently he had just finished recording the message. "Hey, Silver!"

"Uh. Hi," Silver said, looking around. "Where's the emergency?"

"Oh, Sonic will fill you in when he gets back. Watch the workshop for me, okay? I'm gonna go put this holographic projector on the moon."

Silver watched Tails leave, feeling a bit irritated, but he didn't have to wait long. Sonic came crashing through the wall on the SS Tornado EX.

"'Sup, Silver!" he yelled. "Just sit tight and I'll give you the skinny in a sec. I need a bite first."

"...Okay," Silver said, only barely able to parse Sonic's antediluvian accent and severely antiquated slang.

The chrononaut was abruptly knocked over by a teeth-rattling sonic boom as Sonic ran off to get a chili dog or something. The blur was back before Silver could even process what just happened.

"So! Remember Shadow?"

"He kicked me in the head," Silver grumbled.

"Yup. Classic Shadow." Sonic chuckled to himself, reminiscing fondly, even though he hadn't been around to see that part. "Anyway. Shadow lost his motorcycle and we need to find it before he goes on a rampage. Capiche?"

"...Okay." Silver blinked a few times. "What's a... motor-cycle?"

"It's like a bicycle for the emotionally insecure."

"Oh." Silver pondered this. "When'd he lose it?"

"Last night. But by now, it could be anywhere throughout all of space and time!" Sonic declared in a theatrical voice. "I'm searching the present, Blaze is searching her dimension, and you are gonna search through the past and future... uh, if you don't mind, that is."

"Well, I didn't come all this way for nothing, so..." Silver appeared lost in thought for a moment, but then smiled triumphantly. The solution was so obvious. "...Sure. I'll help."

"Cool! If you find it, bring it to Club 'Rouge' sometime tonight, because that's where Shadow lives. Apparently"

"Heh. If I find it, he says." The silver hedgehog lifted his Emerald up, smiling mysteriously, and said, "Oh, I'll be there. Chaos Control!"

With a flash of light, he vanished.

And so Sonic, Tails, and Rouge, with the enlisted help of Blaze and Silver, and further bolstered by the rather unhelpful auxiliary efforts of the Chaotix, Cream, and Amy, ran all over the world searching for the Dark Rider. As time wore on, though, the search grew increasingly desperate. Not even the expert dowser Amy Rose could find so much as a trace of it. Everyone redoubled their efforts, not wanting Sonic's hyperbolic accounts of the impending rampage to come to pass. Shadow even managed to bridle his emotions long enough to warp Rouge and Sonic up to the ARK to search the abandoned space colony and the surrounding planetoids.

"I wouldn't have hidden it here," Shadow grumbled, looking out the window at the Earth. "It's too obvious."

"You could at least try to help us look," Sonic muttered.

"And they call me heartless!" Shadow whined. "I brought you up here, to the crucible of my suffering, isn't that enough? How can you even begin to suggest-"

"Yeah, Sonic!" Rouge joined in, popping out of nowhere just to wag her finger at him. "Just because you've lived a perfect life free from hardship doesn't mean you can just-"

"Jeez, relax!" shouted the blue hedgehog, tossing up his hands in defeat. "Obviously I didn't mean the place where all the bad stuff went down. I'll take that one, sure. I mean, can't Shadow go look through all the other parts, 'cause if he does we can get this scavenger hunt over with faster."

"I don't want to," Shadow grumbled. "I'm still grieving."

"Oh, man up, will you," Rouge snapped, fickle as ever.

So Shadow was made to wander around the grassy inner fields of the Bernal sphere while Rouge searched through Mad Space and the meteor herd. Sonic, meanwhile, had to run through and check every last dust-filled corner of Lost Impact, the Doom, Cosmic Fall, Crazy Gadget, Space Gadget, Final Rush, Final Chase, Cosmic Wall, Lost Colony, Eternal Engine, the Cannon's Core, and he gave up at The ARK because he didn't have a Black Hawk handy.

"Besides, there's no way Shadow could hide a motorcycle here... it's just a bottomless pit," Sonic consoled himself.

Somehow propelling herself through the vacuüm of space with her wings, Rouge flew up to check on him. "Any luck?"

"No," Sonic sighed.

Shadow suddenly appeared, startling the others. "Oh, we'll never find it at this rate! I must have hidden it in a parallel world or something..."

Uh-oh.

"N-No, Shadow, there's still places we haven't checked! Like... the rest of the observable universe!"

"Well, that's a relief," Shadow said acidly.

"C'mon, man. Don't give up just yet. It's gotta be around here... somewhere," said Sonic, weakly indicating the planet in general.

Shadow sniffled and stared dismally at his green Chaos Emerald. "No... It doesn't..."

Before Sonic or Rouge could get in a positive word, Shadow had warped them back to Club Rouge. Either the effort of transporting three people such a distance, the emotional strain of losing his motorcycle, or both combined both seemed to have drained him. Rather than launching off as anticipated on a furious rampage across all of time and space and blah blah blah, Shadow instead appeared to have fallen into a listless depression.

"It's just a worthless piece of metal. Easily replaced. Sonic's right: I shouldn't have become emotionally attached to it in the first place. Wherever Dark Rider is, it's as good as gone now." Shadow's voice was hollow and yet somehow more unhappy than when he was crying earlier. "I apologize for wasting your time."

His spines drooped and he started shuffling away. Sonic felt the pain of failure stab him in the chest – he grabbed Shadow's arm desperately. "No, Shadow! Don't give up! We'll get more people to help, we'll keep looking, and-"

"Oh, forget it," Shadow sighed, halfheartedly shrugging his arm free. "It's no use."

As though summoned by the words of power, Silver the Hedgehog appeared. "Hello, comrades!" he chirped.

Rouge, Shadow, and Sonic glared at him as one. "Can't you sense the mood?"

"Nope," Silver declared brightly. "Now, folks, if you would turn to your left and look out the window..."

Confused, the three obliged. And indeed, parked on the sidewalk was-

"DARK RIDER!" Shadow shrieked, face splitting in a starry-eyed smile. His jubilant grin would haunt Sonic's nightmares for weeks to come.

Immediately, Shadow warped them all down to the sidewalk so he could embrace his treasured vehicle. It was like one of those cheesy movies where the boy reunites with his dog after thinking him dead. Sonic felt awfully out of his element.

Shadow turned his beaming face to Silver and cried - "Wherever did you find it?"

"Oh, it was simple, really," Silver purred, smiling in a self-satisfied way. He reclined in midair as if lying back on a comfortable couch. "I just went back in time to before it went missing and brought it back with me to the present moment."

The effect was instantaneous.

It was almost as if somebody had flipped a switch. Rickies evacuated the neighboring trees; flickies took to the skies in swarms; spiders packed up their cobwebs and started clearing out. Rouge and Sonic recognized the brewing storm themselves and quickly dove for cover. Everything with a pulse knew it was time to get out of Dodge.

The air seemed to plummet to subzero temperatures as a growing aura of soul-sucking fury swallowed the sun, boiling out in black waves from a certain Ultimate Life Form. Shadow's face swiftly hardened into a stone-like mask, his lips pressed into a cold, thin line - but his eyes were wide, very wide.

His voice became dangerously quiet, every syllable slicing like a scalpel: "What was that?"

Impervious to social cues, Silver blindly repeated himself, sounding slightly bemused. "I... went back in time to before it went missing and brought it back with me to the present moment...?"

There was a long moment of ominous silence as his words sunk in.

Suddenly Shadow exploded at Silver, snarling like a panther. "So it was you! You're the thief! You're the reason I lost my bike, lost my dignity! Well, you better prepare yourself, Silver the Hedgehog, because I'm going to skin you alive!"

"Ouch! Hey!" Silver tried to escape, but Shadow knocked him out of the air with a spinning crescent kick. The ESP'er skidded across the pavement and started scrambling away, terrified, dodging Shadow's furious punches with a twenty-percent rate of success. "Wait! Stop! W-What did I do?"

"You caused all this to happen in the first place, you blistering idiot! Now stand still so I can rip every spine from your scalp!"

Silver ducked, rolled, and psycho-boosted down the street, babbling pleadingly. "I-I don't understand, I'm sorry, I was just trying to help, t-time travel is very complicated—"

"Time travel? Time travel?! I'll show you time travel!" Shadow roared, skating after him with claws outstretched. "I'll knock you into next week! I'll backhand you back to the future! I'll beat you so hard, your grandfather will explode! I'll write a firmly worded letter to your mother! I'll loiter on your private property! I'll-"

"Aaah! Nononono! I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'm-"

"Don't you try to apologize, insect! You can't even begin to imagine what you just put me through!" The light of pure crazy gleamed in Shadow's eyes as he erupted with maniacal laughter, red worms of palpable anger slithering over his skin. "I'm gonna tear those stupid fronds off your forehead! Let's see how you cope!"

"Help! Help me!"

"That's right, you better run! Chaos blast!"

They vanished over the horizon. After a few moments, neither the blood-red explosions nor the bloodcurdling screams could be heard as more than a faint whisper on the wind, as if some guy down the street was watching a Michael Bay movie with his windows open.

"Well, I suppose that's that," Rouge said, folding her arms. She was a bit unimpressed by the whole fiasco.

So was Sonic, who merely shook his head and sighed. "Ugh... Dumb... So dumb..."

And they all lived happily ever after, except for poor Silver, who ended up in the hospital, and Blaze, who was still frantically searching her dimension and would continue to for several weeks until Sonic remembered to tell her they'd found the motorcycle. But... yeah, everyone else? Happy as clams.