Yellow eyes blinked in anticipation, watching the door very carefully. The cat swished his fluffy tail from side to side, wondering when he was going to see Dark again.
Getting up, he paced in front of the door, mewing in frustration before jumping up onto the window sill, his tail waving between the blinds.
Tape was getting anxious. Dark would never leave him alone this long. Something must have happened. He remembered seeing those odd looking people earlier that Shadow and Rouge spoke with, but Tape could only understand a limited amount of words that they spoke.
The Chao were equally worried. They knew Mephiles would not have spent this long out of the house without Shadow and Rouge.
Where's Dad? It's not like him to be out this long... Sharpe's emotion dot twisted into a question mark.
I overheard something happened to him and Dark... Kai said in a low tone, as if worried if saying it would cause more bad to happen.
Krystal looked upset, so Sharpe put a paw around her shoulder to calm his sister down.
At the sound of Dark's name in Chao Speak, Tape's ears perked up and he poked his head out of the blinds.
Dark? The cat said in very broken Chao, not at all fluent, and therefore hard to understand between him and the Chao. Dark? The tone indicated that he was asking about information. Also, if we heard it, it would have simply been a "Eh-rr?" sound of some sort.
Kai shrugged and Tape's head lowered in disappointment.
Mephiles eventually learned the origin of the mysterious earthquakes, not at all pleased initially, as Sonic had inadvertently caused parts of a building to hit Dark in the head and give him amnesia.
"What the crud!" Mephiles shouted once Sonic confirmed it. "Dark lost his memory because a building collapsed on him! Not to mention all those other people at the hospital having to be relocated! And don't forget all those other buildings affected! Be careful next time!"
"You should have seen when he left after the city was flooded by Chaos..." Tails said casually, lounging sideways in the cockpit of the Tornado while reading a book and sipping a soda through a straw. "Off into the sunset, like a true hero... And leaving the rest of us to clean up afterwards..."
"Hey, I came back to help the refugees stuck in the debris!" Sonic defended. "I needed to take a quick break, after all... I had just gone Super and cooled down a really ticked off water beast... You can't have expected me to jump in that quickly after that!"
"Water beast? Flood?" Mephiles cringed visibly, bringing his arms up. "Geeze... Good thing I wasn't there, then... I would have been scared quill-less! Literally! My quills would have just fallen off from fright, and made me bald!"
"You're scared of water, too?" Sonic lifted his ears up.
"Yeah. Bad near drowning experiences, and I can't swim..." Mephiles nodded. "I died once from drowning... Shadiw was there, so that's why I'm alive now. CPR."
"Wow. Me too!" Sonic said. "Except for the actually drowning part. And the dying. And the 'kiss of life'. With Shadow..." He rubbed the back if his neck. "But, I can't swim either, so I know how you feel."
"Huh... So... How many more Emeralds are left..?" Mephiles asked.
"Let's see... One quake for the splitting of the earth... Two for the Emeralds so far... Five."
Mephiles threw his head back in frustration.
"Dark's so going to be mad or go mad by the time I get there..." He groaned. "He doesn't even know I'm going to find him... I wish there was a way..."
"Well, you could come along with a few of the areas and hope a robot relays the images of us and hope Dark gets a chance to see it..?" Sonic offered.
"That's a really long shot..." Mephiles opened his eyes. "And I don't fancy the idea of potentially bursting into flames on contact with whatever's out there... Even if I am fireproof..."
Mephiles was referring to the night previous where a hidden thing in a wall shot out flames and set fire to Sonic's shaggy were-fur, in which Sonic the Werehog flailed about helplessly before jumping into a strangely convenient pond, sitting there with a sizzle and steam sound and later smelling like a wet dog because of his fur.
"You're fireproof? Then what's the problem?"
"My skin won't blister or melt... But my fur will singe off, and I still feel the heat..." Mephiles narrowed his eyes. "I just won't have lasting damage... And look like a naked pink rat..."
"Your skin is pink under that fur? Mine's peach..." Sonic added, needlessly distracted.
"Not pink pink... But light pink... Like my tongue..."
"Huh... Never noticed, that tongue is a girly pink!"
"I've been told... I can't help it..." Mephiles mumbled and clamped his mouth shut to avoid needless attention to the mouth muscle.
"Does food taste different with a pinker tongue?" Chip hovered in front of him, genuinely curious.
Mephiles gawked at him for a moment before saying loudly: "Yours is the same color as mine!"
"Wow! Really?" Chip hovered to the reflective side of the plane and stuck his tongue out to see. "It is! Wow! We're like tongue brothers! You can have half my chocolate!"
"Uh, thanks?" Mephiles was very confused at what Chip meant by anything, and figured to just go with it.
Dark was just looking worse and worse as time progressed. His quills looked thin, with a few littering the floor, his short fur was sticking together at the ends, his eyes were rimmed with those shadowy dark circles, and his refusal to finish eating his food left him looking just a bit more underweight.
Pillows propped up against the wall on the bed, he reclined and hummed tunelessly with his eyes closed, moving his head from side to side slowly in non existent beat with it.
Shu watched him, regarding him with some concern.
"You really shouldn't let that go to waste..." He pointed to the plate of food Dark had picked at, then set aside.
Dark snapped one eye open and stared at him intently.
"Nor should you be concerned..." He said edgily. "Back off..."
"Cranky much..?"
"If I wasn't so low in mood right now... I'd jump you..." Dark growled. "Consider yourself lucky..."
"You know, you look worse than when you got here..." Shu added in a bit of concern.
"And you look the same for someone who was supposedly here before me..." Dark said slowly, sitting up more.
Shu looked a bit nervous again.
"Aw, c'mon. It's probably because I've been taking better care of myself..." He backed away, folding his ears back.
"And yet... In the week or so I've been here, no one has brought you food..." Dark frowned, getting up off the bed and stepping towards him in a manner similar to how he did when he broke free from the Scepter, except his head was tilted to look up at him intently. "There is only one bed in this cell, but you have not made any attempt to use it, nor rest. You look too well kept to have been here as a prisoner longer than me. No one has tended to you whatsoever. And above all, you keep hitting information about me dead on before I confirm it..."
"You're getting paranoid again, Dark..." Shu brought his hands up to create a barrier.
"Again? You have never seen me paranoid!" Dark snapped angrily, slamming a hand against the cell wall near the green and black hedgehog. "Who are you really! Answer me!"
"I'm Shu!" Shu shouted back, pressing his back against the wall. "You're just overreacting!"
He bit down on his lower lip, and Dark could see that he was missing a tooth. A canine tooth, be exact.
Suddenly, Dark pulled back, clutching a hand to the left side of his head tightly, a sharp pain piercing through his brain mercilessly. He eased himself to the ground, knowing it would be a matter of time before his body would have made him do so anyway.
He was having a migraine.
Shu appeared horrified.
"Oh, no! I didn't mean to!" He shouted, stepping away from him. "I was doing so good so far!"
If his head wasn't in so much pain right now, he would have widened his eyes in horror. Instead, he grabbed the plate and threw it at Shu, trying to get him away further.
"GET AWAY FROM ME!" He shrieked just as Shu dodged it and it shattered against the wall.
When Dark was able to open an eye more clearly, a look of absolute terror spread across his face as he felt something wet run from one side of his nose, him uttering various choking and gasping sounds horror as he did. Then he tasted something metallic.
He brought his hand up to his nose and dabbed the back of it to the nostril, and looked down, face getting paler at what he saw.
Blood. He was having a nosebleed. Spontaneously. Which wasn't normal. Given that it was accompanied with the pain in his head and sinus pressure, and possibly the heat... He probably should help it let up fast...
Looking back up at Shu, he realized something else that made even the blood flowing out his now pinched nose run cold.
There was nothing there. And by the looks of it... There probably never was.
Dark shrank against the wall behind him, gasping like a fish out of water as he looked around frantically, trying to prove to himself that he had not been speaking with a hallucination this whole week, but nothing was looking like it would help.
Then he heard something that he last heard over a week ago. Something that made his body freeze up and his pupils contract to pinpricks.
"I really am sorry for deceiving you, Dark... But it was the only I could get you to speak with me..."
Dark's face visibly drained of color and he choked on words audibly until he managed to clear his throat to shriek.
Orbot popped open, out of his ball form, and looked around in confusion.
"Am I the only one who hears that..?"
"The sound of me not caring?" Metal didn't looking at him in annoyance.
"Oh, very humorous... I mean that screaming sound."
"Odd... Now that you mention it..." Metal Sonic suddenly took interest. "It sounds like that bizarre hedgehog... Dark, isn't it?"
"You probably should check on him, being that you've kinda been assigned that job..."
If Metal was capable of making a groan of exasperation, he did his best convincing imitation. He'd been checking on Dark constantly because not only did Eggman force him to, but just about every other speaking bot was reminding him, and it was getting boring and undesirable. Dark had stopped sending back edgy remarks that Metal partly enjoyed their cleverness and underlying irony. He was just boring now.
Coming across Dark's cell, he was a little taken aback to find the odd hedgehog repeatedly SpinDashing against the walls, some of which were spotted with blood, likely from whacking himself again and again at the walls at such full speed.
He wasn't supposed to do that.
Metal would have inhaled deeply and slowly if he could. Then he stepped into the cell and caught Dark when he passed by midair, still in a ball. He unfurled and started clawing frantically at whatever was in front of him, which was the top of Metal's head, decorating his shiny blue paint job with scrapes and gouges, even effectively bending one of his metal ears. Something the hedge-bot was not too pleased about.
Turning Dark around, so that he wasn't causing anymore damage, he pulled him out of the cell and back to the main room where everyone gathered, and towards Eggman.
"Yeah, look... He's freaking out again..." Metal said with very little concern. "And it looks like he threw himself so much at the wall, his nose is bleeding. You ne-"
Metal didn't get to finish. Dark pulled free and spun around and lunged at him, knocking him to the ground. Metal's sensors hadn't registered Dark's swift movement and this actually startled him enough that he made a sound resembling shock.
Then what happened next made the egg shaped Human scream in both fright and for his prized robot.
Dark slammed Metal's head against the floor, tore the circuitry in his neck, causing sparks to fly as Metal's LED display flatlined. Then Dark proceeded to dismantle the robot manually and roughly, throwing the pieces aside with no care for the condition of the pieces.
"OH MY GOD! METAL!" Eggman screamed, quickly running for the collar controller that was discarded on a console keyboard and cranked the dial darn near up to eleven, the berserk hedgehog creature freezing as electricity crackled through him and his quills before he fell sideways off Metal, laughing weakly as Eggman slowly turned it down to not hurt him more than needed.
Eggman stared at the pieces of the robot on the floor before him. Never once did Sonic dismantle Metal with such brutality, nor that quickly. Dark had achieved all that in less than ten seconds.
Picking up the mangled robot, he assessed what kind of repairs would be needed. The left arm would need to be reattached, for one thing. And the gouges would need to be worked out. And repainted. A new LED display, since this one was cracked... He had a spare, so that would be easy. Most of everything would be easily repaired or replaced with his resources.
Except.
The vocal processor. Dark had broken it in half.
That meant that Metal would not be able to speak until a replacement compatible with his hardware was obtained.
Given the damage and how quickly it was stopped, Eggman was just pleased it hadn't been worse.
He couldn't wait to finish that extraction machine... Then Dark would be out of his hair (heh... He's bald!).