Day 214: MY 10.179
Timestamp: MY10.179 - 64.3.21 'FI chronology'
Location: Chrome Gadget, Tower 5, C/3
Pathway: File overflow 2965v212i4s -- redirect 2965v213i4s
PARSING
"…telomere analysis proves the creature is indeed of tachyglossus bathychromus maximus, although the ramifications of the genetic profiling are less than self-evident. The last record of Echidnean society on the surface of Mobius dates to approximately four thousand years ago; consult archaeological reports for the MY 5 Marble Zone excavations, sections 124.9.c to 137.2.b inclusive. The motifs uncovered detail the conquests of warlord Pachacamac, and there is no indication of social progression beyond rudimentary stoneworking and tribal mysticism.
How the Floating Island segues with this picture is at present unclear. While the absence of reliable archaeological finds on the surface demonstrating Echidnean social progression beyond the reign of Pachacamac implies an abrupt civil collapse, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. We can reasonably hypothesize that at least some of their number must have gone on, to construct this isle. The chaos control machinery in the Hidden Palace is crystallographic technology, still mechanically simple, though the interface seems to have been designed as user-unfriendly as possible; a security measure, perhaps? And who against?
Unfortunately, it has been impossible to determine when the echidnas began taping the quantum vacuum distortion of the Master Emerald to produce the Floating Island's antigravity field. Chaos irradiation from the gem causes beta-radiative decay in normal matter to fluctuate unpredictably, rendering carbon-dating methods useless. As for the how; it is certainly possible that the antigravity effect was procured by accident. Consulting d97/08.1 Postulate 13/a, a simple geometric arrangement of ferromagnetic materials, the kind that one might expect of shamanistic ignorance, should be sufficient to induce at least a short-range levitative effect which not even the primitive echidnas could have missed.
While the aforementioned 'Guardian' has proven unexpectedly useful as a translator, guide, and lieutenant in efforts to fortify this island, he evidently knows nothing of how he actually came to be here. This raises the question-"
-EMERGENCY OVERRIDE/-2965v213i4s-CG:codeBLACK
Code Black?!
Alarms exploded to life throughout Chrome Gadget Zone, ringing across acres of industrial superstructure and toiling badnik manufactories. They blared through forests of needle-sharp generator spires, as emergency shutdown protocols went into force; the harsh red glow of their heat-sinks dulling to charred black, negentropic processes switching off lest their weird energies draw the ire of the temporal distortion.
Robotnik, garbed in his customary crimson-and-yellow lab coat, allowed his dictation to falter abruptly. He knew what was coming next, and simply gripped the arms of his massive chair while the air filled with klaxons.
The gravity wave pulsed across the Floating Island in microseconds, but rather than flooring the Doctor as it had his Mobian lieutenant, Eggman weathered the distortion with only a disheveled moustache to show for it.
The scientist remained frozen even after the danger had passed. He could see the statistics scrolling across the read-outs in front of his desk, and was well aware of the need for immediate action… but a large part of his mind was held, briefly, in the grip of fear.
It wasn't an emotion the Doctor often felt. He himself was the stuff of nightmares, for the innumerable thousands of Mobians who had seen their homes razed and their families enslaved during the South Island experiments. Robotnik didn't even fear Sonic, in truth. At least, he told himself that there wasn't much room for fear, in the midst of the burning hatred and contempt.
But this… this was a special kind of fear, the kind accessible only to a man like the Doctor, a man with his unshakable faith in mathematical certainty and the immutable laws of physics. It was a fear of incomprehension. The chaos rift had opened, yes, but it was here a week earlier than his calculations had predicted – and he didn't understand how. That was far more terrifying than the million-ton artificial satellite now hurtling towards him: errors of such magnitude demonstrated that his best equations only scratched the surface - he really didn't know the true power or nature of the Chaos Emeralds at all.
Yet.
Galvanized by the hopeful thought, Robotnik hauled himself out of his hemispherical chair with all the haste he could muster. Searching for a command stylus, the Doctor's pudgy hand swept pages of notes off his worktable – the same table, in fact, that he'd fashioned from scrap metal after his pod crash half a year ago. Robotnik had brought it with him, to this, the first tower assembled in the crash-site meadow, serving as a constant reminder of his own genius in the subjugation of nature.
The Doctor finally located his computerized tablet, and stormed over to the transport chute in the corner of his lab. He didn't like to work while on the move, but he needed to be at the catchment site to personally oversee the operation, and speed was of the essence here. The mustachioed scientist had to cram a week's worth of delicate calibration into – he glanced at the chronometer – twenty-five minutes and sixteen seconds.
Scanning the tablet's data rapaciously as the glass-walled lift descended, a corner of Robotnik's brain once again lamented the absence of the Egg-o-matic. His favorite mode of transport would have conveyed him to his destination in (armed) comfort and style, and far faster than the improvised network of inter-zonal monorails which his lift fed directly into.
The tablet in Robotnik's hand chimed noisily as the scientist was scanning force distribution of badnik legions within range of the Cradle. It seemed the echidna was attempting to contact him. In former days, the Doctor would have made the creature wait for a response, simply out of spite, but now he allowed the communiqué through directly.
"Talk to me, Doc!" came Knuckles' worried yelling, courtesy of his tablet's micro-speakers.
"As you might be able to tell, the subspace rift opened earlier than expected." Robotnik replied, his voice undisguisedly patronizing. 214 days on the Floating Island had softened his attitude to its undeniably accomplished (and hilariously naïve) Guardian, but that didn't mean Eggman liked the onerous creature. Simply... tolerated. That was all. But he was certainly in no mood to tolerate idiocy; not today.
"You s… we had more tim… week at least!" the tablet continued, static garbling the echidna's response.
The Doctor raised his eyes from the screen, glaring towards the Icecap Zone in irritation. A flock of Flybot767 badniks cruised alongside his pod, the sleek red-and-silver birds forming a personal escort; beyond them, Robotnik could see the white peaks of the frigid zone gleaming on the horizon. Nestled in the foothills below, neon lights of Carnival Night's probability calculators blinked epileptically even in broad daylight, before the garish Zone's limits blended into a plain of green and red over which Eggman's capsule now travelled. He was passing through Mushroom Hill Zone, a sprawling pseudo-woodland of fungal stalks and dubious plant-life. The great, mutant stipes of amantia trampolinus towered even above the monorail track, their parabolic caps briefly blocking the Doctor's view as his route plunged through the vegetative skein. Glancing above him, Robotnik wondered precisely where the meteors causing all this static were, when-
The badniks were what did the damage. Flybot767s were essentially aerial survey drones, built for speed and sensor coverage rather than combat. Their offensive capability was limited to kamikaze dive-bombing; and, true to their programming, that was what they had done. Sensing a high-velocity object hurtling within the exclusion zone of their creator and master, the robotic birds swerved in mid-air to intercept.
Unfortunately, the flimsy machines were no match for half a ton of mechanized comet.
The glass of Robotnik's capsule switched from clear to white in an instant, as the surface transformed into an opaque maze of cracks and fractures under the barrage of pulverized badnik parts.
But it held.
At least… for a second or two.
The Doctor just had enough time to drop his stylus in surprise. Then the weakened glass collapsed, taking a half wall of Robotnik's pod with it.
The Doctor cursed furiously as he was buffeted by wayward shards of plexiglass, but his invective was lost within the cacophony of meteoric barrage all about him. The shriek of the wind whipping past his pod was deafening, but even that was drowned out by the concussive procession of sonic booms as falling wreckage pummeled into the atmosphere. Through squinted eyes the Doctor watched geysers of flaming mulch explode beneath the track, throwing the giant ochre mushrooms up in the air like they weighed nothing, as the precious fragments of his Death Egg slammed into the earth. Golden fungal spores filled the air, carried up on the thermal winds of impact flashfires.
In spite of the danger to himself, the shards of glass caught in his moustache, Robotnik found himself feeling giddy – and not just because of the mildly psychotropic pollen. It was impossible not to appreciate the gamut of natural destruction exploding around him. Watching a green Zone burn was always invigorating, with the prospect of cleansed, lifeless wastelands in the smoking aftermath. Glorious!
The monorail sped on, whisking Robotnik through of the fungal vortex.
The Cradle wasn't a building in the traditional sense. From a distance, it resembled a vast wall of scaffolding; briefly, it reminded the Doctor of the Metropolis Zone during its construction, when his badniks had reached a rate of completing one hab-complex every hour.
But the Cradle was no city. Approaching closer, one could discern that the purple-and-yellow scaffolding didn't support anything. It just circled round in a vast bowl-shape, useless metal frameworks pointing up at the sky like accusing fingers. Vast pipes snaked their way across the plain of the preemptively-named Launch Base Zone, winding up skeletal girders like a parody of natural ivy.
Robotnik had ordered a general evacuation of construction robots the moment he arrived at the Cradle's monorail terminus. Now, safely (he hoped) ensconced in an observation bunker, the Doctor watched through a pair of electronic binoculars as the last emergency teams welded gravity impellers to critical towers. The delicate machines resembled massive, segmented oranges. Robotnik, despite having designed them himself, disliked the impellers; they were inefficient, ring-intensive, and invariably imploded after the first firing. Nonetheless, the Causal Censor precluded him from using anything his former self would detect thousands of miles away, so the Doctor had to rely on these obsolescent (but quiet) technologies.
Well; it was almost time. The air was crackling with static, both metaphoric and literal, as the giant orb descended through its final kilometers. Scorching winds rushed out from under the falling space station, as the air was squeezed out of the narrowing gap between the island and the descending fireball. It blotted out the sun, now, plunging Robotnik's vantage point not into shadow, but into a hellish crimson twilight as the Death Egg's own molten surface bathed the island in fiery radiance. An ominous tremor rumbled in the ground at the scientist's feet, travelling up the bones of his legs and making his vast stomach wobble uncomfortably. It was less than a kilometer away, now; the katabatic wind roared past Robotnik's bunker, a furious torrent of burnt air. Despite the damage to the satellite, the melting facsimile of his own face still stared back at Eggman, giant eyes staring right at its creator's tiny shelter.
And… now.
Around the circumference of the Cradle, sixty-four gravity impellers fired. Spheres of electric-blue light expanded out from the rim of the scaffolding caldera, outpacing the winds, passing through earth and steel as if they weren't even there. Robotnik felt a lightness in his bones as the blue aura flickered through his bunker, and then… the tremors stopped. The gales stopped. The Death Egg stopped.
And the water started.
Miles away, hidden from the Doctor's vantage point, the pumping stations at Azure Lake Zone had been stirring to life. Baffles swung open, turbines whirred, and, in seconds, a thousand gallons of pristine glacial meltwater (not to mention hundreds of very scared, then very dead, frogs and fish) were sucked into the vast pipes of the Cradle's trunkline. Thundering at hundreds of miles an hour under immense pressure, the water surged along the metallic arteries of Launch Base Zone, up the tributary pipes winding round the scaffolding, and: out.
Steam exploded across the lower surface of the Death Egg. As the anti-gravity fields dissipated, the furious jets of freezing water provided a final breaking counter-force, guiding the giant sphere downwards and onto the Cradle's expectant scaffolding. It could almost be described as gentle, the Doctor thought, if not for the fact that the water jets carried enough force to power-wash a man's flesh from his skeleton. The space station bled its glowing heat into the torrential water flow, as it descended the final meters into the Doctor's trap. Red status bars flicked to yellow, and yellow to green, as Robotnik checked his structural readouts.
He had done it.
He had done it.
Mad laughter burst from the Doctor's lips: an insane, cackling noise, not of mirth, but of triumph. Even a week early, even starting on this island with nothing, he had done it! Over the furious hiss of steam, and the metallic creaking of the frameworks, Robotnik's exhultation echoed off the grim walls of his concrete bunker. He had done it!
His laughter abrubtly cut out.
Eggman's eyes were drawn not to the screens, nor the data printouts before him, but to the detritus on his small desk. A pencil was rolling across the surface. The Doctor watched, a sense of alarm building rapidly in his mind, as the stationary threw itself off the desk. It kept rolling along the floor.
The Floating Island was tipping over.
Knuckles scrambled down the cavern wall, showers of dislodged rock tumbling away from his handhold. Detritus fell away from the sheer surface at a dizzying angle.
The Guardian did not look his best. Clods of earth hung in his dreadlocks, and his sanguine fur was matted with dirt and scrapes. It had been a difficult journey, burrowing through the freezing permafrost of the Icecap, but that was far preferable to being buried beneath the meteoric avalanche that had chased him underground. The white crescent on Knuckles' chest was almost invisible under a film of black mud.
But that was irrelevant. The cramps in his hands, the grit in his eyes; nothing. Because the Island itself was hurting. The echidna didn't need to see the Master Emerald to know that; not that he could avoid it. The wall of the Hidden Palace was bathed in emerald light, even at this distance. Knuckles had never seen it like this before; the gem's radiance was painful to look at, and it drove away the shadows throughout farthest reaches of the palatial cavern, illuminating ancient murals which even he had never seen before.
The wall beneath his fists shook as the Island tilted another couple of degrees. If the Guardian didn't do something soon, he wasn't going to have anything left to guard.
"Damnit Doc, you said you knew what you were doing!" Knuckles muttered, his arms a blur as he punched his way down sheer surface.
But… no. He couldn't blame the Doctor. Robotnik had demonstrated time and time again his boundless commitment to the defense of the echidna's sacred home, with his badniks, his tireless industry, his obsessive augmentation of the old traps and fail-safes. This... this was Sonic's fault. The Launch Base Zone project wouldn't be necessary if not for the barbarous hedgehog! Knuckles ground his sharp teeth as he climbed; he almost hoped Sonic would survive, and come to the island, just so he could beat the genocidal blue blur to death with his own two fists.
The Guardian's glove suddenly slipped out of a crevice, and he was left dangling by single hand, the mosaic floor of the Hidden Palace still hundreds of metres below him. Normally, losing his grip would be unthinkable; Knuckles' spikes could punch through solid basalt, and lock him into the rock so tightly that it would be easier to sever his arm than sever his hold. But his muscles were exhausted, and the cavern wall was slick with moisture as the Island's tilt played havoc with its water tables.
The echidna growled, a guttural, feral noise. This wasn't fast enough. There was a quicker way down.
He let go.
Plunging through the yawning cavern like a falling blood drop, Knuckles narrowed his eyes against the Emerald's glare, reflected back at him from the uncountable tiles of the palace frescoes. He dropped towards one of the glittering floor-patterns, a single design amongst the thousands that packed the floor of the chamber.
The Guardian barely understood any of his ancestor's artworks; whether they were history, prophecy, or simply decoration. This one depicted a red echidna on the left, and, on the right, some sort of purple creature with three strands poking out of the top of its head. The figures were stylized mirror images, separated by a zig-zag barrier in brilliant lapis-lazuli blue. Their arms were extended across the cobalt divide; Knuckles had never decided whether they were shaking hands or trying to kill each other.
However, there was no time to marvel at the artistry of his predecessors. The Guardian timed his descent until he was only a second from impact, and then he threw out his arms and fanned out his spines, tensing his shoulder muscles in a precise fashion, feeling the turbulence flow around him in just the right way…
Echidnas weren't really designed for aerial maneuverability. They were more at home underground than high above it. But during his long years of solitude, his innumerable lonely treks across the mountain peaks and bluffs of the Floating Island, Knuckles had discovered that gliding was mostly just a matter of falling with discipline. And tremendous upper body strength.
The Guardian swooped down onto the chamber's mosaics, landing on the perilously sloped surface at a cross between a sprint and a nose-dive. He careened between a pair of broken, marble-clad pillars, before being brought unceremoniously to a halt by one of the few undamaged columns. Knuckles wheezed as the air was knocked out of him, but he sprung back with barely a moment's hesitation, sprinting up the palace's wide steps three at a time. Viridian light blazed off every surface, but Knuckles' tunnel vision was fixed only on the Emerald plinth. The floor shifted again beneath his feet; the Guardian heard a horrible crash behind him, what he could only guess was a set of pillars collapsing, failing to withstand the Island's unsuccessful renegotiations with gravity.
Knuckles knew what he had to do – and, ironically, he knew it only because of the experiments he'd wanted stopped. The crystal controls around the Master Emerald's altar had fascinated Eggman; almost as much as the Emerald itself. The Guardian hadn't understood Robotnik's strange expression when he first laid eyes on the great gem, but in the Doctor's presence, the jewel itself had seemed… different. Expectant? Perhaps it was because of what they had learned: little things like raising, moving, rotating the Island. And rebalancing it.
The Guardian didn't have the luxury of time to slow down, not with the noises of imminent structural collapse echoing through the Hidden Palace. Bracing his muscles at the final instant, he crashed into the altar at full pelt. Knuckles heard one of his legs snap, and the momentum slammed his upper body onto the control crystals. His outstretched fists connected with two of the quartz rods he needed; the final one was pushed down with concussive force as the echidna's skull struck the array.
The Master Emerald flashed in his mind, and everything went from green to black.
Author's Note:
DISCLAIMER: Do not operate your own Master Emerald controls with head. Such actions may result in premature death and Frozen Nitrogen Corp. will accept no responsibility for loss of brain function or life thus incurred.
And Chrome Gadget is TOO a real Zone on the Floating Island. It was one of the obscure two-player Zones
on Sonic 3. Likewise Azure Lake Zone. Though the real mystery is why I have the ability to remember this.
Lastly; my beloved readers, what do y'all think about chapter length? Too long?
Too short? Need-to-be-restricted-to-a-single-plot-point-every-time? Thoughts?
