Chapter Nineteen: An Offer You Can't Refuse

If it was possible to reach through the screen and try to strangle Sonic, Knuckles would have done so at least six times throughout this conversation.

It wasn't because of his smug, obnoxious grin. Or the insult that he still didn't quite get. Or even that he was leaning in so close to the screen that you could practically see his pores.

It was because of what he'd done to the village.

Every villager he could easily remember, as well as a number that he couldn't, had gathered together in the barren remnants of the plaza like they'd been called there by some announcement only they could hear. None of them spoke. None of them moved, either. And when whatever was showing this footage changed to show them the scene from a different angle, each villager's eyes were revealed to be glazed over and lifeless. The lights were on, but nobody was home.

The team's communicator's let out a sudden, shrill beep, as Amy's voice penetrated the silence. "Guys! I don't know what's happening, but I think everyone's been- AAHH! SONIC, SAVE-"

Her voice abruptly cut off, leaving behind nothing but static for a few seconds. Then, the communicator stopped transmitting, and everything was silent once more.

Knuckles glared at the monitor, eyes blazing and teeth clenched. "What did you do to them?"

The monitor's feed changed to reveal Sonic once more, this time at a reasonable distance away. "Not much. I merely possessed them-" He trailed off to move whatever was filming this exchange to a new location- "using these helpful tools you so generously let me take." Once he showed them what he was talking about, the worst-case scenario began playing out in everyone's heads.

Each laptop that he'd taken was present, lined up in an orderly row. All of them were turned on. And all of them displayed what appeared to be a functioning replica of the disastrous program that had started this whole thing. Each monitor was mostly white, but a miniature Sonic bounced around each one, seemingly normal except for their red eyes and maniacal smiles.

"Now that I have all this power, I no longer need to wait until a person is asleep to work my magic," the creature hissed. "Unfortunately for me, while I can influence the minds of anyone within a certain area, the only way to assume direct control over someone would be to come into direct contact with them. But that's getting rectified soon."

Tails was almost tempted to ask how that would work, but Sonic was obliged to answer without any prompting. "Oh, and before you ask, just because I can't directly control someone's actions doesn't mean I can't kill them. Since I have access to their brains, nothing's stopping me to shut off their brain waves, which would lead to… I think you can figure it out."

"You wouldn't," Shadow said. "You're too weak for that. If you were going to do it, you would have done it already."

"Don't tempt him," Rouge hissed.

"Oh, please. I'm more than willing to pull the trigger," Sonic said. "Just for you, I'll prove it right now."

Everyone except Shadow and Metal Sonic felt their pulses skyrocket. Tails and Rouge clutched their chests like they were about to have a heart attack on the spot. Sonic moved his computer around again to reveal a cluster of mud-and-straw huts, with several destroyed ones leaving holes in an otherwise tight formation. It looked like there had once been living things there, but most of them were crumpled on the ground, eyes unblinking and bodies still. Just one of them was still upright.

For a moment, anyway.

Then, Sonic fixed his glare on him for a second, and he collapsed to join the rest of them in death.

"Holy… crap," Tails managed to stammer out. "He just slaughtered the entire Gogoba village!"

Shadow seemed concerned, but for reasons other than Tails. "I know this is still a massive threat, but didn't you hate those things?"

"Sure, I didn't particularly care for the Gogobas," Tails said, "but no one deserves what just happened to them!"

Sonic interrupted them once more, killing that debate before it became a distraction. "Now that you have an idea of how much power I have, thanks in part to you-" Knuckles clenched his fists here- "I have a proposition for you."

"We do not bargain with villains, such as yourself," Metal Sonic said. "As Doctor Eggman can attest, doing so never ends well for the normal person."

"Can it, you second-rate knockoff," Sonic snarled, breaking composure or a second. "Unless you want all these villagers- and yourselves- to be dead, I suggest you listen."

He began laying out the details, slow and steady. "First off, I want access to every computer on this island, as well as anything on Doctor Eggman's base. Second, I want fast, working transportation to the mainland. I'm keeping the villagers under my control until I reach the dock there. If anything tries to kill, injure, or hamper me in any way before I get to the mainland, everyone on the island dies or becomes my puppets, including all of you. And, finally…"

Knuckles looked like he was about to blow a gasket. "Can you get to the freaking point already? I hate it when villains stretch out their monologues for as long as possible."

Sonic rolled his eyes. "I'll ignore that. Back to the point, though. Tails, I want you."

"Wait, what?" Sticks started shaking her head at top speed as if she had a marble in her ear she was desperately trying to dislodge. "What are you going to do with him? Eat him? Kill him? Stuff him and then keep him with you like some kind of creepy doll?"

"I don't know how you put up with this every day, Tails," Sonic said. "I want your brainpower to be put to good use. It'd do wonders for my plans."

As the others tried to figure out how exactly they could outwit this creature, Sonic finished off what he wanted to. "If you want to comply with my terms, send Tails, as well as all the computers he can carry, to the Gogoba village exactly twenty-four hours from now. And when I say Tails, I mean Tails only- no one else. From there, Tails should lead me to whatever my method of transportation is, and then I'll take control of him for my own purposes."

Eggman stared blankly at the monitor, not quite comprehending the insanity of this all. "And what makes you think we'll do all those terrible things?"

"Because if you don't," Sonic said, smiling in a gruesome fashion as he did, "not only will every single person on this island die or be possessed by me, I'll get to the mainland regardless. I'll make you watch as the world falls to me, you know. It'll be the worst kind of feeling- knowing you screwed up yet unable to do anything to fix it. Stronger people than you have broken upon realizing that."

"Wait…" Tails, unsurprisingly, was confused. "If you're going to take over the world anyway, what's the point of us following your terms?"

"If you do exactly what I say, you, your friends, and all the remaining villagers will be safe from me, as will this island," Sonic said. "Wouldn't do to destroy my home any more than I already have, anyway. Bygone Island will still be free when I'm done taking over, and I'll keep my word on that. And you should know as much as anybody that I'm not one to break promises, Tails."

"Screw that," Shadow snarled. "Let's just kill this stupid thing! We have Tails' computer, why can't we just delete that stupid program?"

"You could try," Sonic simpered, "but since I've spread to more computers, not only would it not kill me, but I would also feel it if you did, and let's just say I would take that as you not complying."

Before anyone could say anything else, Sonic finished off with, "Better hurry to get everything ready for me, unless you want to die, that is. The clock's ticking!" This was followed up with a special type of laugh reserved only for someone who'd gone completely and utterly mad.

Then, whatever Sonic was broadcasting from turned off, turning the monitor back to a plain black screen.

A vein pulsed in Shadow's forehead as he ground his teeth together and clenched his fists. "Now what? The only thing that we had on our side was time, and now we don't even have that anymore! How are we supposed to end this nightmare and not die at the same time?"

"The statistical likelihood of that happening has decreased to approximately eight percent, Shadow the Hedgehog," Metal Sonic drawled. "It is a little lower for you, since you are the biggest threat to his continued existence besides Tails."

"Well? Then what's the eight percent for? What do we have to do to hit that eight percent?" When Metal Sonic didn't immediately reply, Shadow yelled, "Spit it out, you useless bucket of bolts!"

Metal Sonic responded to that by ramming into Shadow hard enough to send him flying backward about five feet before he crumpled in a heap. "Offense taken at that degrading statement. Do not ever insult me or my bolts again, Shadow the Hedgehog."

"Guys!" Tails didn't sound intimidating even on his best days, but he hardly ever raised his voice, so just doing that was enough to catch everyone's attention. "The real threat is still out there, and unless I misheard him, we have less than twenty-four hours before he begins his plan for world conquest. We'll have time to insult each other later! Right now, we need to focus on our common enemy!"

"Tails is right, Shadow," Rouge said. "We need a plan, and we need it fast. How are we supposed to outsmart something that's essentially a computer?"

Knuckles scratched his head, veins popping out as he struggled to think. The cogs in his brain weren't ready to shed their rust yet, leaving him saying, "I don't know."

"No one expected you to, Knuckles," Sticks said. "That's what I'm here for. In my book, all you need to short out a computer is a little water. We should just get all the computers he's on wet, which should stop him from working!"

Rouge shook her head. "Okay, that's not the worst idea I've ever heard, but it still has a lot of problems. One, it doesn't do anything to ensure he can't hurt the villagers, two, he'll see through it in a second, and three, do you seriously think computers are so badly designed that all it takes is a bucket of water to make them shut down instantaneously?"

"Well, I'd like to see you do better, then," Sticks said. "It's still the best plan on the table so far."

"Not for long," Rouge replied. "I have a better plan. I believe that Sonic's powers can only work when he's conscious, because otherwise, he could have killed himself with his own lasers in his sleep."

"If he sleeps at all," countered Tails. "Who knows what all those programs I wrote for my laptop did to him? I mean, I have a lot of theories, but no way to prove any of them."

"I think we can safely assume he needs to sleep at least a little, otherwise he'd have attacked us constantly," Rouge replied. "Our main goal should be to knock him unconscious, and then we can destroy the computers without him being able to interrupt or retaliate."

"There is one problem with your plan, Rouge the Bat," Metal Sonic stated. "I should have revealed this to you and Shadow the Hedgehog earlier, but killing the entity without forcing it out of Sonic the Hedgehog first will almost certainly result in the death of Sonic the Hedgehog. While his life may be worth less than that of the entire world, that method should be used as an absolute last resort."

"Well, that's going to be a problem," Rouge said. "How are we going to force something out of Sonic's brain?"

Everyone else came up with absolutely nothing. However, after about fifteen seconds of furious thinking, Tails' eyes lit up and he came very close to jumping for joy.

"That's it," he said. "Knuckles, Sticks, remember the mind-analyzing gun I built about a year ago?"

Sticks nodded yes. "You mean the one you tested on Sonic, getting you sucked inside his brain, and the only reason you're not still in there is that Amy saw the note you left and used the 'undo' function?"

"Yeah, that one," Tails said. "With that invention handy, we get inside his head! Once we're in there, we can defeat the virus without ever needing to touch a computer, and he'll never see it coming."

"It's a good idea on paper," Shadow said, "but how are we going to get close enough for that thing to work without him realizing what we're doing? Also, how is fighting this thing on its home turf going to help anyone but him?"

"Because," Tails countered, "if we combine it with Rouge's plan, not only will he pose no threat to anyone except us, he won't even have to know we have the thing!"

Knuckles was smiling and nodding with the rest of them, but he wasn't fully convinced. "But… what happens if we lose?"

The half-smile Tails had on fell off his face. "Knuckles, if we lose, it doesn't matter where we do it. If- and hopefully it's just an if- we lose, it won't matter where it happened. He'll start conquering the world, for real this time, and we won't be able to do anything to stop it."

"Well," Shadow said, "I guess we better not lose."

"If this plan I'm cooking up works," said Tails, "we shouldn't have to worry about losing."

"Wait," Eggman said incredulously. "You came up with a whole plan and didn't bother to tell the rest of us? How many kinds of wrong is that, especially at a time like this?"

"Don't worry, I'll spill," said Tails. Then, he turned to face all the others.

"So, this is how it's going to work…"

Review Zone, Act XVIII:

-Linz2: Thanks, once again, for your review! And nice to see you caught my not-very-subtle reference to the source material. Based on that, this is probably about what you expected. Time to see if anything comes of it.