Author's Blabbering: Sorry for the short chapter... It's even shorter than the first one. Again, please send some constructive criticism and I hope you enjoy!
I hope it's not too obvious what this fic is inspired by... lol.
Replies
YumiShoko: I hope you like where it's headed so far... ;u; Thanks for the comment!
Chapter 2 – Monitor
The young boy crouched in the dark closet, knees to his chest, eyes set on the crack under the door, slowly breathing in and out as to not make the slightest of sounds. He scrutinized the feet that tiptoed by with wide eyes, terrified of the being who owned them. They just went back and forth.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
Up until the feet suddenly stopped in front of him.
The boy held his body tighter to his chest, as to hold himself farther away from the light that seeped from the adjacent room.
The feet refused to move.
The child quietly whimpered, scared that his predator might have found its prey. His eyes finally crept up to find another pair of eyes through a small opening.
Staring directly into his.
He found him.
·◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊·
Sonic's subconscious violently emerged from the frigid pool of slumber, jerking the blue hedgehog up with a cold sweat. His heart threw itself at his ribs and his hands refused to stay still. He could not breathe for a split second, as it felt like someone was choking him—vehemently.
That nightmare was… bad.
Sonic took a while to calm himself down, as he was eventually able to take in deep wavering breaths and think of past, pleasurable moments with his friends. He remembered meeting his friend Tails, fighting off bullies and flying his father's plane for the first time in months, after the kid genius easily patched it up in minutes. He remembered meeting Eggman for the first time on one of his runs through Green Hill, during the early years of when Eggman was in commission. He remembered having an enjoyable thirteenth birthday party with Tails right before their families moved to Mobotropolis together. He exhaled in his last deep breath and laid back on his bed, lifting the warm and cozy covers over his quills.
Only then he realized that it was not his covers.
And that it was definitely not 6:00 AM.
Sonic, again, flung himself off of the bed that, he now knew, was not his own. He scoured the room from his position and saw walls of black and red all around, a state-issued laptop on a dark wooden desk across from him, and pitch blackness showing through a hexagonal-shaped window over his bed. The room looked exactly like… one of those dorm rooms…
Why was he back at the academy!?
The hedgehog threw himself off of the bed and noticed that not only was he was still in uniform, but he had a metal bracelet tightly clasped around his left wrist and snug under his glove cuff. The teen ignored it—just for now at least—and walked out of the room, cautiously aiming not to let his presence be known, but not before he had to unlock a door that was strangely secured. Passing by multiple open and closed doors to his left, he began to faintly hear chatter in the cafeteria once he was halfway through. Sonic peeked from behind the corner and found the class situated there—sans Tails, Rouge, Scourge, and Silver—whispering among themselves and seeming obviously agitated.
"Guys!" Sonic shot out from behind the wall and sprinted down to the lunch table. A new large monitor—almost half the length of the cafeteria—now hung over the vending machines to his right, but he did not pay much attention to it.
"Sonic!" Amy hopped up from her chair, ran up to the hedgehog, and hugged him tight again. "Do something!"
"Ames, I don't even know what's goin' on," Sonic said as he lightly pushed Amy from his torso, who went on to sit back down, whimpering.
"No one does, unfortunately," Shadow, who was at the end of the dark wood table, commented after a few seconds of Amy's noises. "We've been hoping someone would wake up and know at least something."
"I'm tellin' you it's one of MAG's tests or whatever," Mighty, who leaned back in his chair next to an eye-averting Ray, repeated.
"And I'm telling you that that's illegal and absurd," Shadow quickly snapped.
"It's completely possible," Knuckles said.
"It's possible but entirely nonsensical," Shadow reiterated in annoyance.
"How do you even make sense of a school floating in space?" Blaze spoke up. "This entire situation is nonsensical."
"Wait. Floating in space?" Sonic questioned.
The diverse room of mobians was quiet for a short moment before Blaze voiced again.
"Come here, Sonic."
The cat rose from her chair and motioned for Sonic to follow her. The two walked down the hallway that continued to the crowd's left, which dead-ended in the study hall—a large, barely furnished room, save for a few plants and sofa-chairs and desks for quiet studying and working, with the tallest window in the school. The clear lancet window reached from the baseboard on the ground to the baseboard on the ceiling and usually allowed some of the gorgeous greens that crowded around MAG during these last few days of summer to show through, as well as the clean white, red, and black buildings that made up the academy's campus.
Instead, what was beyond was a faraway planet in complete, silent, cold blackness.
That planet was Mobius.
·◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊×◊·
Sonic, now in utter disbelief, and Blaze, still in slight disbelief, returned to their friends, who were recently joined by newcomer Scourge.
He slammed onto the table and exclaimed, "The fuck you mean we're in space!?"
"It could still be a projection…" Amy hoped, looking down at the clean wooden table.
"I doubt it," Espio suddenly asserted in a thick Japanese accent. "I don't think there are projections for every single one of these windows. They're just glass."
"This school has some advanced tech," Mighty wondered. "Maybe they can pull it off?"
"I… guess that it's just a possibility then," Blaze mentioned.
Tails and Silver then joined the rest of the class, just as confused as Sonic was. Blaze filled them in with the details she knew just as Rouge sneaked in.
"Are you… serious?" Silver asked at the other end of the table with a look of bewilderment while Tails suddenly disappeared into the hallways. "Doesn't that mean we have a little bit of air left?"
"I have absolutely no idea," Blaze said.
"So, what? We're just going to sit here and wait until we all die?" Scourge spat. "Have any of you really tried to find a way out? Or find out what the hell happened?"
"We wouldn't be sitting here pondering otherwise," Shadow said with a hint of offense.
"Oh fuck off," Scourge cursed while pushing his hands off of the table. "I knew joining this stupid school was gonna fuck me over. Why the hell did I listen to my bro?"
Soon after, Scourge began to heatedly pace from one end of the long table to the other, as Mighty straightened in his chair and Shadow hunched over, thinking intensively.
Sonic started to wonder from the earlier mention of Scourge's brother. "… You know something? I swear I was running home after school."
"I… do too," Wave recalled, along with Amy, Knuckles, and Rouge.
"D-Did they… really kidnap you guys for some sort of test…?" Mighty hesitated, since he stayed in a dorm, still holding onto his theory.
"Would they…?" Amy started to mumble.
Suddenly, an odd, masculine voice was heard from above the dubious group. "Yes, yes I would."
Each classmate was paralyzed with confusion. They suspiciously looked at each other, then promptly around the room, then slowly up at the widescreen monitor that hung above the vending machines. It displayed MAG's logo in a crimson red, instead of its light shade of green, over a layer of monochrome static. The monitor was slightly tilted downwards and gave the feeling that whoever was beyond that static was watching their every movie and listening to their every word.
"Did… you guys hear something out of that thing?" Silver stuttered, still watching the monitor.
"I sure do hope so," the voice, which was completely different now, returned. "I don't want to play games with deaf people."
"Who the hell are you?" Shadow hissed after a silent second.
"A new friend, you can say," the voice, now feminine, answered. "Or maybe your new teacher, since that would fit more…"
"Cut the crap and tell us who you are!" Scourge demanded.
The voice was silent for a moment, perhaps offended, or just in thought. "Hmm, fine. Call me—" The voice trailed 'me' for a few seconds, then continued. "Mobotropolis… MAG… Ah. Yeah, got it. Please call me… Maggie. That's a cute name, right? Maggie?"
The two standing hedgehogs glanced at each other in annoyed disbelief.
"What-What did you mean by play games with…?" Amy suddenly uttered. "You said it earlier."
"Ohh, right," Maggie, now with a masculine voice, eagerly began. "Well… then, welcome to MAG's Annual… Uh, Reckoning… Thing."
"What…?" Blaze breathed amidst resurfacing silence.
"Yeah…" the voice continued. "Where all of the academy's best students go to die."
The class simultaneously gasped and stepped back, or stood on their feet, giving startled stares at the monitor above them.
"But not die any old way, though… no," Maggie pondered, then went on. "Nothing like fetching you all into space or filling the entire place with hydrogen cyanide. That's unimaginative. Boring. I'd say something more like… games and instructions or something like that… Something fun—"
Mighty suddenly stood up. "Yeah, sure, you sicko. Somebody know where the remote is?"
"I don't think that's a good idea," Maggie teased. "Besides, do you guys even know how to get back to Mobius? Your little patient friend has been waiting to show you guys something here for a while, now."
That was when the mobians looked to the golden fox to their right, with some gadget in hand and uncertainty on his face. He reluctantly stepped closer to the crowd, slowly breathing in and out, quickly shooting looks at his device, the monitor, and the other students.
Tails hesitated, but was finally able to mutter against twelve confused gazes, "We're… Uhm…
"We're not on Mobius anymore…"
Dead silence followed.
"G-Give me that," Wave suddenly shot up from her chair, stomped over to the young mobian, and snatched the mobile device from his hands. She played around with it for a minute and then grew a look of defeat.
"M-Maybe it's been messed with…"
"It's a password-locked locator that was safely secured in a password-locked barrier that was inside of a password-locked briefcase. There's… no way anyone tampered with it," Tails said with saddened unease. "And besides, the logs show that only I've used it…"
Wave's eyes darted slightly as she could not believe what was on the monitor: coordinates that were outside of Mobius' atmosphere. She shoved the machine onto Tails' chest and stormed back to the table, slightly trusting that the short fox knew what he was doing. He was number one in the class, after all.
While Wave returned, Maggie spoke. "There, your proof from the smartest guy in the room. Or, well, second smartest. We're in my territory now, kids."
"As if we'd do a thing you say," Silver shouted out.
The voice snickered. "Well then. I want you all to look at your wrists. Closely. When you try to pull it off, it would hurt like hell. Why? Because it's nicely connected to all of your poor hearts."
The room responded with groans and whispers of skepticism. Knuckles suddenly called out, "Yeah, right. As if you did that in our sleep."
The voice beamed, and said, "I was hoping one of you said that."
The comment immediately resulted in every single student feeling a dreadful shock straight to their chests. The shock preceded several screams and cries, especially a harrowing one by Scourge himself. Some fell hard on their knees, while others fell backward onto the cold marble floor. Most of the class was folded, violently shaking, on the tiled floor, clinging to their chests for dear life and choking on cold gasps for air. Ray and Tails then fainted—the latter to Sonic's horror, the former to Mighty's.
"There," Maggie voiced over heaving breathing and loud weeping. "Now you all know I'm not screwing around. Tomorrow at noon we're going to play a fun game, and I oh so do hope all of you could care to join me!"
Maggie laughed as the monitor turned to black.
