"You'll never stop him!" she yells, tears streaming down her face. Her hair is a mess, the rosy quills hanging into her eyes even as she screams at the nightmare.
"He'll come for me! He'll come for me and he'll smash you up! He'll make you wish that fat man had never built you!" Crimson lightning tears apart the sky, but her voice is loud and clear.
"You don't stand a chance against someone with a real heart! He'll come for me because he loves me!"

Its hands are ice, and its eyes are dead, as it lifts her higher. It is everything he is not. Hard, and cold, and utterly without pity. Everything she hates, in the shape of everything she loves. It just stares at her, with those unwavering red pupils. The metal fingers tighten around her neck; despite herself, she can't help but gasp with fear. It's toying with her.

"You're just a copy! A bad copy! You know that? You're nothing like him! His eyes are green, and his fur is darker than your stupid paint-job!"
There is no change in its metal face, no matter how much she thrashes and kicks. Sickly red light glows through the churning clouds above them, painting the entire Stardust Speedway the colour of blood. It hoists her further into the air, as though offering the hedgehog up to the roiling tempest.

"Sonic! SONIC!" Only the thunder replies to her. Fear creeps into her chest, now; nibbling away at the diamond-hard certainty of rescue. He is coming for her; she knows that, in the very core of her being. But what if he's hurt, what if he's not quite fast enough, what if he's…

It can't smile. It can never smile, just one more thing that makes it so different from her precious one. But there is something in Metallix; something that has seen her fear, and enjoys it.

The robot Sonic draws back its other fist, and
-and it glances sideways-
but too late, far too late. A flash of blue, just a little darker than Metal's own plating, and the imitation is gone. She screams as she spins through the air, flying over the edge of the ruined highway; but he's here, he's here! Silhouetted against poison clouds, in the Bad Future of a world that is not their own. He's here!

He catches her, and they land gently on the rusted steel of the causeway. Even here, even now, in this terrible place; he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. Every time she looks at him, she sees something new that takes her breath away. The way his fur stands on end just a tiny bit, charged with static from the speed of his movement. How did she not notice it before?

"Amy…" he breathes, and her heart melts just to hear him speak her name. With utmost tenderness, he brushes the quills away from her eyes.
His touch really is electric, she thinks.
"Amy, did it hurt you? Are you okay?" The concern in his voice, the worry in his eyes; those perfect, jade eyes…

"Amy, we have to get out of here!"

"Oh, Sonic, I love you too!" she replies. But… wait… that's not right.

"Amy, get up! Get up!"

"I… what?" This isn't how it should go. The next line is: "Please, Amy, will… will you marry me?" – spoken with a kind of shy hesitancy, that he never shows to anyone else; that makes her insides turn to molten gold.

"Damnit, hedgehog! GET UP!"

Why is Sonic green?
…and why is Stardust Speedway exploding?

The old ones said it hadn't always been like this.

But there weren't so many of them left, not after the purges; and their voices fell on deaf ears. The autoschools taught things a little differently. Besides, the newer inhabitants had enough trouble surviving, without listening to the revisionist murmurs of those bitter fools. Civic history was a dangerous topic.

Even the name of the place was contentious. The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father– that was how you named it in the public spaces, where they watched you closely. Robotropolis, or Metropolis – these names were tolerated. Usually. But you glanced behind, before you spoke the word. Some of the robots, some of older models; they were more… puritanical than others. The Eggrobos were the worst; those clanking, rotund facsimiles, paint faded and scuffed, shuffling through the filthy streets on failing servos. The few that were left; they were the most devout, the most unforgiving. Any name but The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father, and you could find yourself facing a correctional beating, or Redemption Through Labour.

Other names were more dangerous, names whispered behind cupped hands, spoken only when you knew there were no spyports nearby, and when you truly trusted those you addressed. The Machine Hell; The Land Of Darkness. Some names were taken from the humans' language, with connotations few Mobians understood. The Ninth Circle; The Steel Purgatory. Names that could see you taken in the middle of the night, and your friends would never see you again.
Or worse: they would see you again.

And some names… very few knew them. Because if the machines even suspected you had heard another speak it; if you had ever lingered in a blind spot with someone who had screamed the name in the Punishment Spheres; then they wouldn't just take you. They would take the entire population of your complex, take them to the Cathedral Of Transformation. They would go to your domicile, and they would cleanse it - burn every object, every surface, every secret place where you might have inscribed the words.

Even amongst the machines, few understood the significance of those names, of why the Father commanded they be rooted out with such uncompromising ruthlessness. They simply obeyed, and listened.

From the highest spires to the dank bowels of the under-city, they listened. The burnished copper domes of a thousand habitation complexes bristled with surveillance equipment. Below, and inside; the streets, the workspaces, the recreation commons: through hidden microphones and cameras, they listened. Many of the devices were broken, by casual vandalism or simply neglect. You just didn't know which ones.

The old ones said it hadn't always been like this.
The city wasn't always turned in on itself; paranoid.

Perhaps if they'd aimed a few of those sensors outwards, the croc thought wryly, then The Glorious Metropolis Of The Ineffable Father wouldn't be in such a mess right now.

"Another dropship! Behind the towers!" The floor shook as a further salvo pummelled their position.

"He's… he's right, there's more of them…" To the east, something exploded. It sounded like something large.

"We're out of time, Vector! We have to leave, now!" Crackling weapons-fire ricocheted off the steel floor, throwing shards of metal over their heads.

"Is… is she okay, Mister Vector? Can we… is it safe to move her?"

"What am I, a doctor?" the crocodile growled. "But Espio's right. We can't leave her behind and we can't stay here-" a ripple of pink energy smashed into the wall at their backs, as if to emphasise that particular fact; "-so I guess that means we're moving her. You've got Cheese, right?"

The demure rabbit nodded, clutching the chao tightly to her dust-covered dress. She looked like a ghost, blanketed a dull grey by fallen plaster and pulverised duracrete. Espio was… well, you couldn't tell where the rubble stopped and the chameleon began. Which, Vector supposed, was the entire point.

The sounds of battle crashed on all sides; alarms and explosions and the strange warbling noises of the alien's weaponry. Tentatively, the croc raised his eyes over their rapidly-crumbling bulwark – drawing a renewed hail of enemy ammunition for his trouble. What a day.

The invaders were crawling towards them, threading a path through the debris with all the grace of an impatient locomotive. They really did have to move.
As carefully as he could, with all hell breaking loose around them, Vector scooped the semi-conscious hedge-girl of the scorched crater where she lay, and unceremoniously clamped his massive jaws down on the pink creature. Lucky for him, female hedgehogs didn't have back-spines.

"Rea-ry?" he managed, barely audible over the renewed bombardment of the creatures' dropships. With no response from the rabbit, Vector glanced back over his shoulder.
Cream was looking at him with an expression of such absolute horror that Vector couldn't help feeling criminally guilty. But, for all the hedgehog looked like a fresh kill, dangling limply in his reptilian jaws, she was safer there than slung over his shoulder.
They didn't have time for this, though. Their position was entirely indefensible.
Cream – somewhat mollified as Amy's eyes fluttered, proving that the towering sauropod had not just bitten her in half – didn't resist as Vector grabbed her hand. Behind the rabbit, something shifted in the rubble that was presumably Espio's signal of readiness.
"Rokay, ren. Hree… rwo… ron…"
The ragtag trio of Mobians leapt from their latest hiding place, and into the crossfire of Metropolis Precinct Echo-Lambda.
They had not picked a very good time to do it.

Vector crouched low as he ran, attempting to make himself (and Amy) as small a target as possible. It wasn't an easy task. The croc was taller than some full-grown humans. And dust-covered or not, lime green scales weren't ideal urban camouflage by any standards. Airborne fragments pinged against the chitinous ridges on his back, as bolts of power corkscrewed into the roadway around him. Vector's attention was focused so much on avoiding the smoking potholes that he scarcely realised his route was carrying him directly towards an advance squad of the invaders.

They were lumbering, ungainly creatures; leathery bodies ranging from jet black to pallid grey, the monochrome broken only by splashes of scarlet on their crests and hands. Mouthless faces turned towards the dashing reptile – together with large, glowing handguns.

There were three of them. And carrying Amy, he didn't stand a chance of avoiding the barrage...

But they never got the chance. On the right, a fountain of green ichor burst from the creature's knee as a kunai knife found its target; on the left, with the cry of "Chao!", an azure blur struck the trooper right between its compound, insectile eyes. Shoulders lowered, Vector charged full-pelt into the final alien – and they were through, darting into the (comparative) safety of a ruined manufactory.

"No, no, keep going!" Espio yelled, a ghostly ripple of grey and brown temporarily visible against the subtly altered backdrop. "They're right behind-"

A thunderous roar drowned out the rest of his sentence; drowned out everything else, even to Vector's Crush-40-hardened eardrums. The fleeing Mobians were thrown to the floor as gouts of flame exploded through the factory's ruined windows. Luckily for them, most of the glass had already been shot out.

It was precious seconds before anyone dared move again. Vector winced as he levered himself off the corrugated floor. Dimly-perceived, golden geometries danced at the edge of his vision, before the scattered rings faded back into whatever half-reality they came from. It had been all the crocodile could do to avoid crushing Amy when he fell, and there had been little opportunity to cushion the landing for himself. He had bounced quite a long way.

Behind them, the street was transformed into a scorching inferno. His detective's perceptions couldn't help hazarding a guess at what had happened: it looked like the Black Arms' dropships had been blown out of the sky. Shadows flitted amidst the fires; angular silhouettes, darting back and forth over the alien wreckage. Vector shook his head. You really knew you were having a bad day when you were relieved to see badniks arrive on the scene.

He found Cream a few feet away. Mostly by the sound of her coughing, as the rabbit was still camouflaged well enough to rival Espio. The diminutive mammal's ears were folded down on top of her head. As the crocodile slid towards her, a pair of chocolate-brown eyes raised up to look at him. "Where-"

Vector raised a finger to his mouth, motioning for absolute silence.

It was obvious what would happen next. The shadows in the smoke were combing over the downed craft, ruby-red sensor beams hunting methodically. Not so much searching for survivors as ensuring there were none. And while the city's defenders weren't actively trying to kill him, Vector was quite right in presuming that Metropolis' besieged garrison wouldn't hesitate to level this building, just to eliminate the possibility that Black Arms had escaped inside. All it might take was a single noise.

And Cream's muffled coughing sounded awfully loud, even as the fires raged outside...

The scanning lasers flashed through the factory's shattered windows; crimson pinpricks, creeping over the broken stone and metal.
Past Espio.
Past Vector and Cream, desperately trying to remain silent.
A flash of silver, and…
The badniks zipped away into the smoke, their battle still far from over. Vector didn't realise he'd been holding his breath until he released it. He gave Cream a belated thumbs-up while he was at it, permitting the rabbit to resume hocking the dust out of her lungs at whatever volume she liked.

Glancing over at Amy, the crocodile saw that she was still out of it. Her headband had fallen off, somewhere between the street and the factory, but besides that, the hedgehog could have just been sleeping. In a ditch full of plaster dust and shrapnel, but still-

"AWW, man! That was so-o-o-o cool!!" exclaimed a voice from the rafters. "They were all, like 'pew, pew', and then it was all 'ker-blamo!'"
Buzzing, half-covered in soot, and grinning like a manic; the third member of Chaotix dropped into view, alighting on a pile of discarded machine parts. "Hi Espio. You miss me?" he asked, antennae writhing like fat, stripy worms.

The 'pile of machine parts' opened a large, golden eye, regarding the bee with long-suffering irritation. "Charmy, you're shtood on my fathce."

"Well maybe you shouldn't hide so well, then?" the juvenile insect retorted. His undiminished smirk made it clear that he'd known exactly what he was landing on; that, and the fact that he made no effort to move at all. Turning instead to Vector, the bug snapped off his flight-goggles and made a childish approximation of a salute. "Special Agent Charmy Bee reporting mission accomplished, Boss! Do I get a medal now, seeing as it's wartime and all? Huh? Do I? I think I should."

Charmy was the smallest, youngest, and self-proclaimed 'most annoying' member of the Chaotix Detective Agency. He was also incredibly late.
The croc's relief at seeing Charmy alive and well was largely cancelled out by the fact that 'I'll just go up there and see what's goin' on, Boss; five minutes, max!' had just taken the insect over three hours. Conflicting sentiments that were not entirely captured by Vector's exasperated yell of: "And where, exactly, have you been?"

"Umm…" Charmy began, his face falling as it became obvious that the reptile wasn't going to welcome him back with sweets and a raise. The bee shifted his feet sheepishly, smearing charcoal all over Espio's back - thereby proving even more of an inconvenience to the chameleon by accident than by design. Which was often how it went.

"…chimney." He eventually responded. And, pre-empting a pair of raised crocodile eyebrows, "They was shooting at me, boss! The robots and the gross aliens. They're re-e-e-ealy going at it out there. There were lasers and giant worms and about a million Egg Pawns and – hiya Cream – and they were all blastin' everything and you should've seen when they blew the big statue up, it was all "woosh!" and so I had to fly down this chimney to get out of the way and it was really dark and… and… and why is Cream here?"

"We havn't got that far yet," Espio remarked levelly, having at last succeeded in rolling out from under the bee's feet. The chameleon had resumed his neutral, magenta colouration - apart from the sooten footprints stamped over his torso, which he was vainly attempting to dust off. "The Black Arms advanced along Rho-Delta about half an hour after you left, and we spotted her with the refugees." Unlike his camouflage, however, the alertness about Espio did not fade away. The ninja's saffron gaze ran across the factory's blasted walls, checking for escape routes, or Metropolis' ubiquitous security cameras.

"And then we found Amy," Vector finished, gesturing in the hedgehog's direction, where Cream and Cheese were attempting to pull their unconscious friend upright.

Hovering above the debris-strewn floor, the bee persisted; "But why is she-"

"You can play twenty questions when we're not stood in a warzone, Charmy!" the crocodile told him. "Speaking of which, did you spot a way out of the fighting while you were up there?"

"There's a-"

"One that doesn't involve running through gunfire."

"Err… that's… umm." The bee's brow furrowed.
"We-e-e-e-ell… there's badniks over there, and the aliens were moving in from there and there before they knocked the statue down, so-o-o-o… that way!" Triumphantly, Charmy levelled a soot-blackened glove towards the iron girders in the factory's ceiling. "If we get onto the roof we can go over all the worms and mechs and there's a walkway that'll get us inside this big building that the chimneys were on top of! That… should be okay?"

Vector blinked. They were that close to the edge of the combat zone? If Charmy had only one skill… well, that would have to be 'annoying people'. But pathfinding came a close second, and the bee had not disappointed him this time. Besides, standing around discussing the route didn't seem a particularly attractive prospect. From the smell of things, the fire in the street had begun to creep inside the factory. There was an ominous vibration in the floor, too; he didn't know what that was, but it probably wasn't anything good.

Alright then. The roof it was.

"You got that, Cream?" the crocodile asked, turning towards her and Amy. "Onto the roof, across the walkway, into the building with the chimneys. I'll…" the words 'carry Amy again' never made it out of his mouth, as Cream grabbed hold of her friend defensively the moment he started the sentence.

"M-Mister Vector... um... I can carry Amy, so there's no need for... for you to..."

"...I'll take the stairs. You and Charmy carry Amy."

"Hey!" complained the indignant insect behind him. But the crocodile was already bounding up the corkscrew staircase, towards the building's shattered skylights. Espio jogged up the wall beside him, as much a ease on a vertical surface as a horizontal equivalent. The chameleon wore a knowing grin, that Vector pretended not to see.

They had been fortunate, really, that they happened to run into this factory. It was old; older than the other plants in Precinct Echo-Lambda. More recent additions to the city's urban landscape did not include such extravagancies as windows or fire escapes.
The ceiling hatch swung open with a protesting squeal of hinges long un-oiled. As Vector hoisted himself out into the smoke-wreathed roof, the roar of battle rushed back into his ears with a vengeance. A squadron of Egg Drones screamed overhead; Cream and Charmy had to duck out of their way, Amy swinging dangerously between them. Down in the street, spherical Roller badniks ploughed through the burning slag of the Black Arm's dropships, inch-thick titanium armour shielding them from the furious heat of the plasmatic fires. Meanwhile, that vibration was getting stronger.

"Charmy! Which way!?" Vector yelled. The bee had next to zero chance of hearing him, but he was dragging Amy and Cream through the ashen air with a clear direction in mind.
The metal roofing beneath their feet was growing warm as the detectives sprinted after their airborne guide.
And Espio looked worried, which was perhaps the most damning indictment of the situation.

Above them, red clouds swirled. The Black Arms had brought the fearsome tempest with them, for reasons as much theological as military. And something was moving inside; something in no way holy. The source of the vibration became suddenly apparent to Vector, as a metal hull broke through the sanguine mists.

The vessel plunged out of the sky, blasting through the blanket of alien weather with such speed that it seemed predestined to slam straight into the city. It's matte black underside bristled with weapons and sensors, clearly visible to Vector and Espio as they threw themselves down onto the hot metal of the walkway; a lot of good it would have done, with a thousand tonnes of warship hurtling down upon them. But then antigravity drives kicked in at the final instant, etching radioactive flux lines into the clouds. The ship stopped dead, turned with indecent haste for a vessel that large, and with a screech of tortured engines, leapt forwards across the city skyline. Others followed, black and orange hulls soaring over the metropolis, illuminated by the blasts of their own cannon-fire.

"Get inside, get inside!" Espio shouted, scrabbling up from the floor of the gantry. Charmy and Cream lunged forwards, desperately hauling Amy towards the door of the chimneyed building.

It was not a good time to be outdoors. The Eggman Fleet had arrived.

Author Note

Uurgh. It's over. That chapter was ridiculously hard to write. The first half was OK; the second half took me two weeks and by my mind was even worse than my usual prosaic fare. I don't even know why I had such trouble with it. My muse just curled up and died, and so as a result an ostensibly Sonic fanfic turned into some sort of contemptible Call Of Duty crossover. Yrech.

So as to avoid the confusion that addled Mr. Duran's mind; this chapter is obviously set at the time of Shadow's game, which is a number of Sonicverse years after the events of An Island Without A Name.
And if you don't know what Crush-40 is… well, I didn't either, until I had to go search Shadow cutscenes via Youtube in an effort to determine whether the Black Arms actually do have mouths or not (and they don't). Suffice it to say that Vector listening to Crush-40 may create an ff/IRL paradox that will consume us all.

Anyway, it's a mystery fic, and mysteries abound! Why are Chaotix and 2/3rds of Team Rose even in Metropolis? What are the forbidden names of the city? Why is Espio smiling wryly? Precisely how does this chapter have any relation at all to the prologue? What the hell is the author doing? Has he been getting high off shampoo fumes and that's why none of it makes any sense?

STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT IN THE NEXT EXCITING INSTALLMENT !one!!1!eleven!11!