"Espio?!" The chameleon looked up. He was wearing a tattered grey scarf around his neck and wore what appeared to be a modified Kevlar vest with his many knives hanging off it. His bandaged wrists and wrist guards remained, along with some tarnished shin guards. His back spines and tail poked the vest. His face showed surprise at the sight of the three hedgehogs, but he quickly overcame it.
"Get over here, quickly!" he beckoned. More of the creatures were appearing by the second. "We don't have much time!" They complied, running back towards where they'd met Cid, while the lion gave cover fire. The creatures gave chase, but they stopped as soon as their targets crossed the barrier to the Bell Tower. They just seemed to loiter there, unable to see that there was a way across. Sonic and co kept running until they got to Cid's shop, where they ran inside and bolted the door before Cid could object.
"Thought you boys'd be back," the raccoon laughed. "Have a little trouble, did we?" Sonic scowled at him, but Shadow stayed on topic. He turned to Espio.
"Can you please explain what's going on? Like what they were!"
"And what these are!" Silver held up his hand where the giant silver key had been. Now however, there was only his chaos emerald. The same went for Shadow and Sonic's.
"And why we're three weeks in the future," Sonic added. The black and white hedgehogs turned to him in surprise.
"We're in the future?!" Silver exclaimed. Shadow nodded.
"That explains how Espio got here so quickly," he returned his focus to Espio. "Can you answer any of that?" The chameleon nodded.
"Yes, but not right now. Now we need to move before they send more. Squall will explain what you need to know." Espio motioned to Cid to move into the back room. The brown lion stepped forward.
"I'm Squall Lionheart, or Leon," he introduced. His voice was level and quiet. Those things that attacked you before were heartless. They're created from the darkness of people's hearts, usually triggered by times of great anger or stress. Lately though, a group of mag…" he was cut off by the black mouse.
"So you don't even bother to introduce me?!" she exclaimed. "What type of a host are you Leon?" Leon sighed.
"This is Yuffie, Espio's apprentice. Professional spy and ninja" Yuffie waved over-energetically. Silver waved back. "Can we get back to the point now?" Yuffie shrugged, her whiskers quivering.
"Whatever," as Leon turned she mouthed something behind his back. Silver snorted.
"As I was saying, recently a group of mages have been going around turning people into heartless. They spread like a plague, and in three weeks nearly all of the world's population has been turned into heartless. Traverse Town is one of the only safe areas, and even here can't last much longer." Sonic raised his eyebrow disbelievingly.
"You're telling me that the entire population, over 6 billion souls, has been taken over by some plague?! That's impossible!" Leon shook his head.
"It's not like that. People don't become heartless from people spreading it between each other. It comes from exposure to darkness, and usually there isn't enough darkness to affect anyone. But three weeks ago something happened, something that released an unnatural amount of darkness into our world and this mucked up the ecology." Sonic suddenly broke out laughing.
"OK, OK, you got me! Real good joke guys, but come on! Darkness? Heartless?! Do you honestly expect me to believe this?!" He moved to the door and swung it wide open, expecting Knuckles or Vector to be eavesdropping. But there was nothing there. Yuffie jumped up and slammed the door shut.
"Don't do that! They could be waiting outside!" she hissed. Her face was deadly serious.
"Silver, Shadow, you don't believe this, do you?" he asked his friends. Silver studied his hand intently, not meeting Sonic's gaze.
"Too many things don't add up for this not to be real," he reasoned. "Those creatures, the chaos emeralds strange reaction. How do you explain them blocking our powers?" Sonic shrugged.
"I've seen Eggman do worse, who's to say Tails hasn't come up with something better?" Silver still wasn't convinced. "What about you Shadow? Surely you can see this isn't real?"
"Actually, I read something in Gerald's old reports."
"Oh God, not Gerald Robotnic again!" Sonic exclaimed. "How much damage has that guy done already?" Shadow scowled at him, but continued regardless.
"He told me once about a set of experiments he did in his youth to find a perfect power source. He experimented on the chaos stream, and when he did he accidentally created something that sounds nearly exactly like what we fought before. It was so dangerous that the program was cancelled immediately. He wouldn't tell me much, but he definitely wrote a series of reports on it, somewhere in GUN's database. If we can find them they might tell us more." Sonic put his head in his hands.
"This isn't possible," he muttered. "Darkness of the heart, heartless, Keyblades, mages. They don't exist!" Sonic continued to mumble to himself, while Silver looked concerned. Shadow shook his head.
"Sonic gets like this when he encounters something he can't either ignore or get someone else to reason away," he told Silver. "You get used to it." He turned back to Leon. "So we know what attacked us, now what were those swords that appeared when we tried to use chaos control?"
"Those things were keyblades, the weapons of the heart against the darkness."
"Weapons of the heart?" Shadow repeated. He'd never heard of such a thing.
"Yes," Leon answered. "When the heart is threatened by darkness, a person can summon forth a keyblade to lock their souls against the darkness. Depending on their past and mindset these keys take different forms, which is why you three have different weapons. The heartless fear it because it threatens their hold on a person's heart. The only problem is that the keyblades require a lot of chaos energy, so most people need a booster to create one. The chaos emeralds are probably the easiest one to identify, but something like a chaos hotspot or a soul can also allow a person to summon the weapon. If you hadn't turned up here, you might have been lost."
"Yeah, it's lucky that you three turned up," Yuffie interrupted. "We thought you were taken like…" Leon made a movement to cut her off, but too late. Shadow had grasped at the meaning.
"Weren't taken like...?" Shadow asked. Leon glared daggers at the dark furred mouse, who cringed visible. "Weren't taken like…?!" Shadow was getting impatient.
Before Leon could answer, Espio and Cid came back in. "OK boys and girls," Cid announced. "We're leaving."