Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.9.34
Location: Wing Fortress, 74/C Deck
Pathway: File overflow 9375v37n4m -- redirect 9375v38n4m
PARSING
"…To call them 'emeralds' is a misnomer if ever there was one. It was only in my initial analysis, with a few cursory notes on the inferred modal specular reflectivity, that I designated them as such. That the name remains is somewhat uncomfortable to my sensibilities as a scientist, but, it has to be said, the confusion thus engendered amongst my foes, savages though they may be, has been profoundly useful to me.
To call them 'chaos', on the other hand, cuts directly to the heart of the matter, for they are, despite my considerable efforts, still profoundly, almost maliciously, capricious in nature. That is not to say that their behavior can never be understood, nor controlled; indeed, I have devoted my present research efforts almost exclusively in striving towards this goal, and analysis asofar has... not so much revealed concrete facts, but at least suggested a theoretical avenue down which one can proceed.
So, I shall use the term 'Chaos Emeralds', dubious though it may be. One thing we can say about them, at least, is that these things are not made of normal matter, nor probably even matter at all. One needs take only a cursory glance at even their most mundane 'physical' properties to see that this is the case; apparently arbitrary spectral shifts, kineluminescence of unpredictable magnitude, phase-space pseudorotational cycling through Platonic and non-Platonic geometries, etc. And this isn't even mentioning how, left to their own devices, they tend somehow migrate to through subspace to pocket dimensions (or 'Special Zones, as they have come to be known). This most... curious property leads me to conclude that they, along with a host of other non-classical phenomena on Mobius, are perhaps all singular facets of the same problem; the Emeralds, the gold rings, the Special Zones: all artifacts of higher-dimensional pseudo-geometric flaws in the phase-space of reality. When I first conjectured this, I was at a loss how to go about even generating a theoretical framework to describe their properties, but my recent work on Non-Euclidian topology in hemi-integer dimensional spaces has indicated a... a..."
RECORDING ENDS
Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.11.50
Robotnik's scientific dictation faltered as his attention was drawn to a blinking blue light on the console behind him. Swinging his spheroid form from one computer bank to another, the gargantuan scientist fumbled his way through pie tins, printouts, and half-drawn weapon designs, searching for the buried keyboard.
"Code Blue! CODE BLUE!? Where?" he yelled at the screen, franticly cycling through the reams of data before him. "Where is that hyperkinetic erinaceine?"
A string of digits informed Robotnik that the answer to his question was: 40.317 West, 60.156 South. And Robotnik was a mad scientist; he knew his geography.
"Ha! Ha ha! Hahaha!" The Doctor's body wobbled grotesquely as he threw back his head in mad laughter. His robot sentries had detected the anarchic menace on the oil rigs offshore of Mystic Caves. Ambushing the hedgehog at the edge of the Oil Ocean would leave him with absolutely nowhere to run.
Robotnik drummed his fingers manically on the desk, his moustache twitching as he ran through Wing Fortress' armory manifest in his head. What to use, what to use?
WING FORTRESS QUARTERMASTER INVENTORY
Transaction I.D.: WF c9001/71.a
Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.23.19
Checked out: 1 (One) "Hammerhead Submersible, combat class; incl. fore antideuteron cannon, grappler claw; modified for use in high viscosity environments"
Authorization: Dr. Ivo Robotnik
Timestamp: MY10.363 - 40.2.91
Location: Wing Fortress, 04/A Deck
Pathway: Cache lost 0078t57h4i – emergency redirect 1123b56n2o
PARSING
"…-tailed mutant kitsune pursued in a bi-plane! The aft point-defense cannons shot it down, but the hedgehog made it onto MY facility! It's broken through the on-board defenses and is progressing fore on the outside of the carrier; the structural damage that blue pincushion's inflicted on the superstructure means I daren't do a barrel roll to shake it off, like the pestilent tic it is! I've charged the control room countermeasures and dedicated the control algorithms to the navigational computer; the master node is in the cockpit, so there's no chance of the anarchist mutant disabling it before it activates. Unfortunately, the processing power I've lost already means th-"
-ERROR /-1123b56n2o-WF:codeML
Static briefly hissed from the screen on Robotnik's right, which then abruptly blanked out as Wing Fortress shuddered under another explosion.
"…means that if another node gets taken out, non-critical systems will start to FAIL!" He roared, slamming a gloved fist down onto his work desk. Reams of printed machine code and half-eaten egg sandwiches scattered onto the floor.
Why was this blue freak so persistent? Robotnik had thought an aerial installation would be safe from its meddlesome depredations, but it seemed he had miscalculated. Badly. And the only thing he hated more than miscalculation was that selfsame mutant hedgehog who kept exploiting the miscalculations.
A screech of tortured metal, followed by the sound of smashing glass, sounded from several rooms aft. Robotnik snarled, hefting his grotesque bulk out of his chair. He had genuinely lost count of the number of times he'd been forced to face the hedgehog himself, but… well, his legions of robot defenders has been either utterly crushed or simply outpaced by the blue blur, so the Doctor really had no choice.
Sonic planted his hands on his hips and tapped his foot, regarding the defensive turret in front of him with a sly grin. The wind tore through his blue spines as Wing Fortress labored on through the Mobian sky, but Sonic's air of nonchalance gave no hint of the fact he was riding a doomed aerial juggernaut and staring a gun turret dead in the–
A chicken-like robot burst out of the portal, guns cycling, but Sonic was on it before it even had time to lock on. Covering the hundred metres in less than a quarter of a second, Sonic's foot connected with the metal exoskeleton. Hard. The automaton popped like an over-ripe fruit, scattering a profusion of wires and bolts that were immediately whipped away by the merciless winds. A comatose bird, covered in viscous pink electrolyte, slid out of the wreckage, tumbling end-over-end across the carrier's beige paintwork. If it was lucky, it would regain consciousness before it hit the ground. Or a propeller. But Sonic didn't want to think about that too much.
Launching himself off the ruined robot's emplacement, Sonic ricocheted off an aerofoil and blasted full force into a hatch cover. Sparks blossomed as his spines scythed through the plating, and with a screech of tortured metal, the bulkhead exploded inwards.
Sonic flew in with it, landing amidst a storm of steel and glass shards whipped up by the decompression. The hedgehog grimaced as they lacerated his face and chest, and tore patches of fabric out of his gloves; but then it was over as quickly as it began, with the last lose fragments whipped out into the atmosphere.
Gritting his teeth, Sonic pulled on a shard of glass that had embedded itself in his cheek. It came out, leaving a sanguine gash behind, and, with a sense that wasn't quite sight, but wasn't quite anything else either, he caught a flicker of a gold spinning away from him at the extreme edge of his vision.
Sonic wasn't the kind of hedgehog to wonder too closely about the nature of these gold rings. Kintobor had tried to explain what he thought they were, once, but Sonic had only caught snatches of "reciprocal t-space" and "toriodal M-branes". He'd been eating pizza at the time, and double mozzarella was far more interesting. What he did know was that the rings were profoundly useful, and that it was extremely foolish to be anywhere near a badnik without at least one.
Snatching at the arcing peculiarity, he felt, more than heard, the distinctive 'ting!' as the golden distortion reabsorbed into the atoms of his arm. Weird forces flashed across his body, and his various grazes faded. Incomprehensible geometries danced in Sonic's mind for an instant, then: his injuries were gone, as if they'd never even existed.
Shaking the glass out of his spines, the revivified hedgehog braced himself against the shattered bulkhead door, and launched himself into a sprint through the interior of Wing Fortress.
Robotnik didn't have to wait long. No sooner had he finished reprogramming the room's defense systems, the far door exploded off its hinges, absolutely no match for Sonic's momentum. "Hi Doc," he remarked with a grin, "Your robots missed me. You really should put at least some targeting hardware in there, y'know!?" Smirking in a manner he knew would infuriate the scientist, Sonic advanced forwards.
Just as planned, Robotnik's face turned purple with rage behind his walrus-like moustache. He was an engineering genius; a genius! Anyone who didn't agree should… well, they should:
"DIE, you contemptible FILTH!" he bellowed. As Sonic launched himself across the room, Robotnik's ham-sized palm came down on his console.
Sonic, curled into a cobalt buzz-saw, stopped dead in mid-air, before crashing to the floor with a thump. Robotnik sneered at his nemesis through the force-field, bringing his face so close that static crackled across his moustache. "Not quite fast enough, were we, vermin?" he observed, as Sonic tested the barrier with his fingers.
"Oh, real clever, Eggman. You caught me." The hedgehog retorted, pushing against the force lines. "What are you going to do now, talk me to death? You know I'm gonna find a way out of here before you can get to the end of one of your rambling speeches."
"My name is Ivo Robotnik, hedgehog. That's DOCTOR Ivo Robotnik to you." he spat, prodding the console with flabby fingers. "And I stopped trying to educate you and your fellow savages some time ago. Indeed, I have a far more interesting fate in store. Voila!" The Doctor tapped the final button in his sequence, and above Sonic, machinery whirred to life. From the ceiling, two cruelly barbed, spinning disks emerged, immediately homing in on Sonic's position.
The hedgehog became a blur of motion, darting backwards and forwards inside the force cage as he danced away from the diving platforms. Cackling hystericly, Robotnik entered another sequence, and, with a hum of electromagnetism, the forcefields began to collapse. Slowly, but inexorably, they were restricting the space Sonic had to move in. The blue blur inside sped up, and Robotnik rubbed his hands together with malicious glee.
"And now, for the coup de gras, you obnoxious pest!" he announced. Tapping a final sequence, Robotnik set in motion more machinery embedded in the ceiling. Metal shields unfurled to reveal a glowing white hemisphere, flickering to blue and back with a frequency that hurt the eyes. Robotnik couldn't see it, but Sonic's expression grew significantly grimmer as watched the device charge – at the same time as he narrowly avoided losing an arm to the razored disks.
The blue/white hemisphere emitted an ominous 'whoop' as its capacitors reached full capacity. Then, with a sound of indignant atoms being rent asunder, a burning blue-white beam scythed through the room, leaving blackened char across any surface it touched. The blue blur inside the forcefields sped up even faster, dodging the platforms, the beams, and the walls of its own prison.
Robotnik's mad laughter echoed even above the sound of sizzling metal and swishing blades. He might actually do it, this time; he might actually reduce that blue hedgehog to the crimson bloodsmear it deserved to become! The platforms spun faster, and faster, as he opened the laser cannon up for another blast. The crystal diode exposed, and charged, Robotnik's hand descended towards the 'fire' key-
And the pad in front of him erupted in a shower of sparks. Roaring with surprise, Robotnik waved his gloved hand through the air to quash the flames on his fingers. Looking up through the distortion of the forcefield, the Doctor saw Sonic riding one of the spinning disks. He was singed and bleeding, but despite that, the hedgehog looked very pleased with himself as the ruined laser sparked and sputtered over his head. Whilst Robotnik watched, the forcefield began to shimmer; the laser's destruction must have fried the flux modulator, damaging the muon generator too.
Robotnik growled at being denied his quarry once again. This always happened? What was it about his machines, that there was always one weak point that accursed hedgehog could find, and exploit?
Well, that was a question for another day. Robotnik was nothing if not a fiendishly intelligent villain, and he knew very, very well that it would be unwise to still be standing in front of Sonic when the forcefield failed. Fixing the hedgehog with a final, hate-filled glare, he turned and waddled towards the cockpit as fast as his legs could carry him.
Sonic regarded the retreating mad scientist through the failing force barrier. And with no small sense of satisfaction. He did indeed feel rather pleased with himself; Robotnik had set him quite a challenge this time, compared to their last encounter in the polluted slick of the Oil Ocean. The Doctor's efforts to constrain him had almost worked; if he hadn't gone and put a large, eminently breakable laser in there as well, the crushing forcefields might have caused Sonic considerably more trouble given a few more seconds. Jumping off the failing metal platform, Sonic pushed through the attenuated shield with scant resistance. His spines glowed faintly as trapped magnetic ions collided with his wake; then he was through, and dashing into Wing Fortress' cockpit.
What confronted him was an immense bank of controls; computers, dials, altimeters, switches, control and security systems, and wires, wires, everywhere. The hum of electricity pervaded the entire room; multicolored lights flashed epileptically, and no small number of screens showed 'Red Alert', complaining to non-existent overseers about the damage Sonic himself had already wrought throughout the structure.
Planting his feet slightly apart, Sonic surveyed the machinery in front of him with a kind of savage expectation. With one gloved hand, he ran his fingers through his spikes, dislodging several crystal chips and pieces of wreckage; half out of diligence, half out of vanity. Then, lowering himself to the ground, he slowly curled up into a ball of razor spines. And kept curling. The outer edges of his spikes ran across the floor, frictionless, so he was rolling on the spot. As his momentum brought him back to where he started, he pushed against the floor with his sneakers, speeding up his rotation. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again…
Turboing on the spot, Sonic's revolutions caused a mini-cyclone in the enclosed room. Papers flew wildly, loose wires flailed like angry cobras, and even more sirens started blaring. Then, instead of just kicking up centrifugal speed, Sonic launched himself outwards, channeling his rotational energy into a blue ball of destruction aimed at the console banks. In the blink of an eye, Sonic went from a whirring sphere on the floor of the flight deck, scythed through the navigational equipment, and out via a concealed hatch in the floor. Behind him, the cockpit burst into flames as every piece of machinery left crumpled under the impact of his sonic boom. The blue hedgehog landed on a gantry attached to the nose of Robotnik's flying fortress. As a gout of fire lanced out of the room above him, Sonic glimpsed the good Doctor: he was strapped into the cockpit of what appeared to be a streamlined jet, franticly twisting the dials on a control panel.
Sonic wiped the sweat from his eyes with a singed glove, and grabbed a nearby girder to support himself. This was not good. He had no rings. Getting hit by Vulcan cannons or energy beams took its toll even with their weird golden energies coursing through his veins. Without them… well, the laser had been close. If Robotnik was going to come at him with another of his personal mecha, Sonic wasn't certain he could handle it.
But Robotnik didn't seem interested in Sonic in the slightest, right now. Indeed, through narrowed eyes, it looked as though the Doctor was planning to run, not fight.
A nerve-jarring shudder ran through the gangway Sonic stood on, and he heard the very definite, very ominous sound of the Wing Fortress' engines cutting out. The giant vessel began to sink in the sky, as its horizontal motion changed into a somewhat disturbing vertical motion. Sonic idly considered that he should probably have thought about how he was going to get off the airship alive before he smashed up the bridge. "Tails, where are you when I need you?" Sonic muttered.
But Tails was… the last Sonic had seen of him, he'd been franticly hammering at the controls of his biplane as it fell out of the sky. The aft cannons on Robotnik's Wing Fortress has landed a glancing blow on their flighter, burning one wing to cinders and dousing them both with a torrent of exotic radiation. Sonic was faster than sound, but not faster than light; he couldn't dodge lasers after they'd been fired. Indeed, his tactic was destroying them, or at least getting out of their way, before they shot at him. So he'd made a blind jump through the air and managed, more by luck than judgement, to land on one of the support girders at the back of the Wing Fortress. Tails, fur smouldering from the blast, had simply fallen away from him, still strapped in to the biplane's pilot seat.
If the worst came to it, Sonic rationalised, Tails could always abandon the plane and fly himself to safety. However, that didn't help the hedgehog in his present predicament.
He had only one option, then.
As metal twisted and rivulets popped out of their holdings, Sonic put on a surge of speed, drawing level with Robotnik's escape vessel as it pulled away from its moorings on the doomed mothership. Bouncing off a tenuous umbilical fuel line, Sonic reached out and grabbed onto a handhold on the side of the craft. The acceleration nearly jerked his arm out of its socket as the Doctor fired booster rockets. Heaving with all his strength, Sonic pulled himself up the side of the hurtling flyer. The heat from the engine fires was blistering, and the air was getting tenuous as Robotnik's streamlined vehicle rose higher into the stratosphere. Sonic glanced back at the dwindling spectacle of Wing Fortress; completely ablaze, it nose-dived out of the sky to be swallowed up by the cloud layer.
Mobius quickly fell away below them, and the vault of atmosphere above attenuated from blue to black. The Doctor was heading for low orbit.
Drawing increasingly frantic breaths as the oxygen petered out, Sonic squinted into the distance as some particularly bright star hove into view. But with the craft's merciless acceleration, the shining object soon ballooned in size; an asteroid, then, or a moon?
That's no moon.
The approaching object was an immense spherical structure, many kilometers across: a steel and glass ball-bearing hanging in the void. Red auorae fluxed across its surface as the last vestiges of the Mobian atmosphere burned themselves against its surface with friction fire. Two massive, sunken pits in the sphere glowed with a baleful crimson light, giving the whole satellite the appearance of a face. A fat, mustachioed face.
The Death Egg. Robotnik's orbital fortress and final stronghold. Much as he loathed the Doctor, twisted parody of his old friend Kintobor, Sonic had to admit, grudgingly, that he could build stuff. Lots of big, complex, ridiculously egotistical stuff. With death rays for eyes. And he could build it fast, too. Not just fast, but-
Sonic shook his head. That was the anoxia talking. Robotnik was a genocidal psychopath, and no amount of industriousness could mitigate that. Besides, Sonic had more pressing things to consider. Like the fact he'd had no oxygen for over a minute, and what little remained in his body was being sucked out of his pores by a trillion cubic light years of hard vacuum. Forcing his eyes to stay open even as the moisture boiled off his corneas, the hedgehog scanned the approaching superstructure for some way of entry. He highly doubted Robotnik was going to be so obliging as to leave the airlock open for him.
There. An observation deck. A metre-thick pane of vacuum-resistant, reinforced glass was, at least, better than a metre-thick bulkhead of vacuum-resistant steel. Summoning the last of his strength, Sonic curled himself up into a ball and launched himself at his chosen target. Only a second later, Robotnik's shuttle fired its retro-boosters; had Sonic still been holding on, the abrupt deceleration would probably have pancaked him.
Travelling, for once, under borrowed momentum rather than his own, the hedgehog felt his thoughts growing increasingly sluggish. He was only able to summon the most rudimentary awareness at the insanity of his plan. If this didn't work… if he didn't have enough speed, if the glass was too thick, if he hit at the wrong angle… he was done for. It'd be Game Over, man.
Sonic spun on through the void.