It was dark for the first moment of two, with Eggman not expecting company… nor wanting any. The darkness was foreboding and eerie, but it didn't last. To the left and right of them, paneled strips of lights flashed on the floor. The ceiling was illuminated by similar panels, except these were wider and directly overhead of the duo.
They continued walking. The walls were metallic and dull, circuit wires running along the sides. Eggman's ugly face was imprinted every two panels or so, leering at them as if he had just taken over the world. Tails could have sworn the eyes were following them, like in the old Scooby Doo cartoons, but that would be ridiculous. After all, Eggman was an idiot! Step after step, the hole in the door behind them grew smaller and smaller as they moved farther and farther away until they passed through an arch and lost sight of it completely.
They entered an anteroom, a sort of lounge for the base. Tails had no clue why Eggman would bother including furniture, but there were two sofas, arranged in a V-like formation facing a widescreen TV. On either side, there were stands that held remotes to the TV, a miniature freezer for beer (how do you think Eggman got so fat?), several retro popcorn poppers, and soda fountains. A state-of-the-art stereo system was hooked up all around the room, putting rock concerts to shame. The bass was right below the TV, and was large enough to be mistaken for a mini-car. Other speakers slightly smaller than the bass were hooked up in each of the four corners of the room, at eye level. A disco ball hung from the ceiling, an homage to an age long past. They passed through the room reluctantly, knowing that looting this place would probably have satisfied them for a good year or two alone.
Another long hallway greeted them, this one spiraling around in the inner circle of the dome. If the dome was an onion, Tails and Sonic would be walking along one of the inner layers. Their footsteps echoed in the nearly silent hallways. Tails' hover board floated nearly silently alongside of them, scanning every couple of seconds for signs of infrared energy. Other than the lights and the wires and themselves, there wasn't much. An odd signal was emanating from further into the dome, to their left. It wasn't infrared, it was something else. This confirmed GUN's suspicions: Eggman was up to something.
"Hey, Tails…" Sonic began, turning his head to look at the kitsune while still keeping up the pace. Tails kept walking as well, but nodded to show that he was listening. Sonic continued.
"Don't you think this is a little weird? I mean, come on… We both know Eggman's stupid, but to actually put a self-destruct button on the outside of the base? And think about it. We haven't hit one security patrol yet." Sonic pointed out, and Tails rolled his eyes. This was all old news to him, Sonic was just repeating arguments that Tails had already thought of, brought counterexamples up for, and examined thoroughly from each side.
"Duh, Sonic." Tails stated bluntly. Sonic raised an eyebrow quizzically. "If it's obvious to you, with your intellect, of course it was obvious to me! So tell me, what do you plan on doing about it?" Tails pushed back, bringing up the chief argument against action. Sonic scratched his head, thinking. They kept walking and Tails waited patiently. Finally, he seemed to come up with something halfway decent.
"Well, we can't go back. I mean, what are we gunna tell Rouge? 'Hey, we think something's up, so we're not going in there.'? No way! Then again, we can't just go in there blindly… Any ideas?" Sonic summed it up quite nicely. There were, frankly, no options but to keep moving. Tails shook his head no, and they continued along their spiral path. Tails ran a fortieth check on the board's subsystems. Thruster capacity was at 80% from the hit it had sustained earlier. The frame was slightly cracked, but still mostly intact. Weapons were at 100%, they hadn't been harmed one bit. The sensors were a little bit damaged, and a few of them had lost power from the breakdown of the piece of the frame. They were showing a readout of 61% on his communicator. It was bad, but it had to last 'till he got back to his lab.
Suddenly, the lights flashed red below and above them. Pseudo-darkness filled the room as their eyes adjusted to the darker colors. An electric-sounding woman's voice played on the loudspeaker, reminiscent of techno-movies where an intruder had been detected. And indeed, that was exactly what she was saying. So at least Eggman had prepared a welcoming party, right? Tails and Sonic slid back to back against each other, rotating around to prevent ambushes. Out of the semi-darkness came a small army of robots. They were nearly silent, floating on anti-magnetic thrusters. Their twin-barreled Vulcan cannons gleamed dully in the red glare. Their bodies were protected by two-inch thick metal, most likely reinforced. The robots were in no way, shape, or form, small. They were pretty big, only three and maybe half of a fourth could fit in a phalanx formation along the hallways.
Tails pressed a button on the keyboard, which was still up and running. It then turned off. Flipping the watch head back to the top of his wrist, he brought it to his mouth. Microphones within the device began to record, and the supercomputers prepared to interpret his commands.
"Bios: program Turret Delta execute. Vulcan cannons engage. Program Small Packages execute." Three separate commands ran through the device, and immediately afterword the board kicked into life. It had been floating beside them, flashing off a dull warning of the plainly visible robots before the commands. Now, it was thrusting off, anchoring itself in place directly above their heads. The Vulcan cannons reappeared on the front of the board, which would turn on its axis and begin to shoot down the robots on Tails' command. The sensors would ensure that neither Sonic nor the golden kitsune would be targeted by the cannon fire. Out of small compartments on the underside of the board, a multitude of small bombs dropped. Big gifts come in small packages, they say… These things could take out a tank if placed properly. As it was, Tails would have to be careful not to put himself in the blast radius. Each grenade was the size of a pea at first, before its outer shell expanded to the size of grapes. Somehow, Tails had programmed these babies to detonate only when he wanted them to. Marvelous work.
"Hey, Tails… You got a plan?" Sonic called behind him, pulling his socks up with his right arm while still remaining mostly upright. A tough trick to learn, but a useful one at that. The robots were coming closer by now, from both sides. Their cannons were warming up; bright orange spots glowed within the cannon barrels. Tails brought the communicator back up to his mouth, calling over his shoulder at the same time.
"Hell yes, Sonic. Bios: Engage Targets!" Above them, all hell broke loose. The turret-ized board spun around, loosing a hail of cannon fire into the first wave of enemies. Tails scooped up a handful of the bombs and let fly with them. As he tossed them over the heads of the robots, one after the other exploded in the most opportune places. The shockwaves from each individual blast penetrated the thick outer shells of the robots, rattling Tails' teeth in his own mouth. But it didn't matter much, as each robot fell one by one.
Sonic had already begun to give 'em hell behind the kitsune. Leaping into the air, he used a homing attack on the second wave of robots as the first wave fell back. The cannon fire magically missed Sonic's body by mere fractions of an inch, as the turret continued to dish out cans of whoop-ass. Landing on all fours onto the ground, he pushed off with his hands into a backflip. His feet arced up in an elliptical pattern, slamming his heels down onto the top of another robot. A crater appeared on the metallic ground, where the smoldering ruins of the destroyed mech remained. Landing back onto two feet, he now was in the middle of a throng of bots. There wasn't much he could do without an emerald, but that wasn't going to stop him now was it?
"Sonic, WIND!" Spinning around, his arms remaining stationary as his body formed a shape not unlike propeller blades, Sonic conjured a maelstrom of supersonic energy. The robots closest to him were almost immediately crushed, bolts of pure wind slamming into them with godly force. These bots rammed into the robots behind them, setting off small chain reactions. A good four or five waves of mechs fell to the onslaught that was Sonic Wind.
Tails, meanwhile, was in the process of ramming a grape down the throats of any robot that came within ten feet of him, which turned out to be a lot of robots… His tails whirled around, raising him far above the floor, and slightly above the heads of the bots. Tails' voice rang out in the confined space, singing a twisted version of a childlike tune: "One blown-up, two blown-up, three blown-up robots, four blown-up, five blown-up, six blown-up robots, seven blown-up, eight blown-up, nine blown-up robots, and there's still so many to go!" His almost maniacal laughter added to the cacophony of battle.
Even with Sonic's speed, Tails had demolished the robots on his side faster than Sonic could. In fact, Tails had time to invent the cure to AIDS while Sonic finished playing with his friends. Finally, after each and every piece of junk robot was reduced to smoking rubble, they were able to continue. Welcoming committees were always fun to deal with.
The rest of their journey was a walk in the park, pretty much. The lights stayed red, reminding them that they had been spotted. The destroyed scrap heaps were still back there, though, reminding Eggman that his mechs sucked and that he should probably ask Bill Gates for a few of his armed security bots. A man who made that much money on a glitchy OS like Windows just had to be a genius. And of course, what do genii do? Build robots, duh.
So it was that the duo arrived at the core of the facility. Tails had long since disengaged his turret program and returned the grapes to their containers. They had magically returned to their pea-like sizes as well. As the five-inch-thick blast doors opened, they were greeted with a circular room, the walls completely smooth. It reminded them heavily of déjà vu, but neither could place where they had seen it before. Obviously, this room contained the machine, but where was it? A slightly raised platform stood in the center of the room, standing out like a sore thumb. Obviously, they knew all too well to stand clear of it. Whatever it was there for, it was NOT a good place to have a picnic. Walking inside, they stayed on their guard, eyes searching for other robots or a giant laser or something.
Tails whirled around, hearing a tiny scraping noise behind them. Of course, as luck would have it, the blast doors had been almost silently closing the second they entered the room. The blast door would not yield an escape route either… The Vulcan cannon didn't even make a dent as Tails ordered fire from the board. Eggman's cackling laughter resonated across the room, signaling their demise. When Eggman laughed that maniacally, you knew some bad shit was goin' down…
In an instant, Tails recognized the room, and the machine. Pushing Sonic towards the center, he re-initiated the three programs he had begun earlier. The Vulcan cannon reappeared. Bombs dropped. The board fixed itself above their heads atop the platform. Sonic whirled around, looking at Tails as if the kitsune had lost his mind. Tails silenced him with a hand.
"Sonic, this is not here to kill us. Recognize this blasted thing? This is the fucking Solaris Prototype, Mark II! If we can't get out of here, he's going to send us somewhere we don't want to go. Now help me throw these damn bombs! HIT ANYTHING THAT LOOKS WEAK!" Tails frantically shouted, ignoring Eggman's jeers from the loudspeaker. They grew louder and louder as the bombs they threw failed to do anything.
"It's no use, dunces! These walls are ten inches thick in some places! You two are going to say hello to a few good friends of mine… The dinosaurs! Gah ha ha ha ha!" Eggman's laughs rang out to them. They were still ignoring it, but Tails was able to catch the word dinosaur… He threw the bombs harder, struggling to find a weak point. Within minutes, the bombs ran out. They hadn't even made a dent.
The machine hummed, and they felt a pang of dread. It was all over. Eggman was going to send them to the past, possibly back to the point where there would be no way to get the emeralds and return. They were goners. Suddenly, a bomb fell beside him, a straggler that had stayed back, held fast by the door. Looking up, Tails saw the head of the machine staring back at him: a mechanical spire sticking straight out of the ceiling. In one fluid motion, Tails snatched the grenade off the floor, and chucked it at the spire. Tails could see it now: Eggman watching in horror as the grenade made its fatal arc, Tails grinning wildly as the bomb came closer and closer to its target, the resulting explosion, and their freedom rubbing into Eggman's face!
In a perfect world, that would have happened. Eggman would have lost, and things would be back to normal for a week or two, until the good doctor came up with another ill-fated plot to rule the world.
In reality, the bomb did explode… and nothing happened. Eggman's laughter reached a new height in merriment as their supposed salvation failed them. Tails fell to his knees in defeat. It was all over. The machine was almost done charging, and they were out of bombs. Sonic had his fists clenched behind the kitsune, his knuckles underneath his gloves as white as the gloves were themselves, yet he was powerless to do anything. The previous Sonic Wind had drained his strength; there was nothing that he could do. There was nothing anyone could do now. It was over.
Lights flashed red overhead. A green flash burst into existence as the machine flared into life. Tails closed his eyes, and prepared for the inevitable. A wormhole through time, sucking them through dimensions like water through a tube… They were finished. It was all up to Rouge now. She had been hearing every minute of the action, and she, too, knew that it was over.
Suddenly, the fox's ears pricked up. Eggman's voice wasn't the only thing he heard now. The glare of the red lights dimmed, as if they were being blocked by something. An ominous voice filled the room, loud enough to be heard over Eggman's boisterous laughter, which almost immediately ceased to exist.
"Missing something, doctor? I took the liberty of taking a souvenir from your little machine here… Don't worry! I gave you something in return!" Shadow grinned wickedly, holding an object in each of his hands. Tails could see a glass capsule resembling a sort of fuse in one hand, an odd collection of tubes and cylinders within the glass. The glass was capped on each end by metal, and a relatively small width of metal pipe ran down the middle of the device. Stemming off of the pipe like spokes of a wheel , wires jutted out to support smaller cylinders running vertically up the device. The small cylinders were no longer than a pill, and they were scattered all over the inside of the fuse-like device. In the other hand, Shadow held the red Chaos Emerald. It gleamed even more fiercely in the heat of the glare overhead, which, now that Tails thought about it, probably didn't signal something good. It was like some sort of code in the mechanics industry: Green means good, red means bad, yellow means that Tails is right in front of you ready to kick your ass. Oh, sorry, yellow usually means watch out. But Tails had been using his own definition for quite some time.
Back to the plotline! Eggman had finally gotten some visual feed to his monitors, which (coincidentally) were running Windows 98 and so they kept crashing every few seconds… Once he finally found a monitor that would show him what was going on, he flipped on the volume to the microphone to full volume.
"YOU BASTARD! YOU GO BACK AND YOU PUT THINGS RIGHT! GAH! Another plan ruined! Why do I act like such a lame Bond villain?!?!?! I'm even going to escape imminent doom like one!" Eggman ranted, whilst the red lights pulsed quicker and quicker. Evidently, whatever Shadow had done, it had not been for the benefit of the device. Turning around, Shadow extended an arm to the duo, who had just been standing there slack jawed the entire time like morons.
"What, you two gunna just stand there? I mean, Tails at least deserves to get out of here alive for making that wonderful fake emerald of his… Faker can stay if he wants. No objections here." Shadow kept his hand out, and in a jolt Tails realized that they were supposed to Chaos Control their way out of there. Smacking his forehead, the kitsune realized that Sonic probably could have taken the emerald from the board and done that ages ago. A few button presses later, and the board was now following Tails dutifully as he ran to his salvation.
Time slowed down. Every step seemed to be twice that. Then ten times. One footfall stretched on for a mile as the space-time-continuum was ripped to shreds in an instant. A world of fire and flames materialized around them, molten metal and machinery falling from the sky above them. He could feel the heat of the flames, and the cold of ice at the same time. Wind pushed him back as he continued to race through the Chaos. The earth beneath his feet rocked, skewing his balance horribly. The light grew brighter, he could no longer distinguish the red glare from the fire. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the room collapsed altogether. Shadow was still there, holding his hand out towards Tails as Sonic kept his own gloved hand right above it, waiting for him to hurry up. A futile prospect.
