The workshop was dark and empty aside from Tails and his assistant, and the changed mechanic liked it that way.
He wasn't a kid any more, he was fourteen years old, but war had changed him. Thanks to the war, he felt a hundred times his real age.
When a hollow and silent red shell in the shape of Infinite returned and defeated Sonic under Eggman's orders, freezing the blue blur in a chunk of Ruby and floating off to space as Eggman laughed, Tails knew the world would need a new hero.
His friends thought he had lost all hope, maybe even lost it completely, but they were wrong.
He refused to go outside and talk to his friends, and he spent all of his time in his laboratory, working to create something that could fix everything.
He was Tails The Fox, the new Chief Engineer for The Resistance, and with the aid of his trusty assistant Cream The Rabbit, he was the reason why all those brave fighters out there had Wispons.
Well, except for Shadow The Hedgehog, who insisted his "Old Reliable" glock and stolen Black Arms weaponry was superior to whatever Tails could build.
If only anyone besides Shadow and the Black Arms could use those things.
He tried not to think about Shadow. Not when there were so many fake Shadows and fake Chaoses and fake Metal Sonics and fake Zavoks tearing Resistance groups apart all over the world.
His plan took months of work, but soon, his creation was complete.
The machine Tails had been working on resembled a sculpture in the vague shape of a Fox, a sculpture made of metal spikes and weapons. Parts of his new device had been built from leftover weapons he'd been making for The Resistance, and many guns stuck out of the bizarre machine at random angles. Some of its parts had been salvaged from defeated Eggman mechs and destroyed Eggman robots. Some of its parts came from the genetic scanners and telekinetic weapon triggers found in some reverse-engineered Black Arms weapons.
One of its parts came from GUN's Artificial Chaos experiments, and a perfectly white fake Chaos Emerald lied within its head where a brain should be. He made one before back when Eggman shot the moon, but he couldn't make many of them these days when supplies were so limited.
But the metal core in its chest came from a defeated Metal Sonic robot that didn't vanish once defeated, and it was powered by a mysterious red rock Rouge stole while doing recon in one of Eggman's bases.
"Tails... Are you sure this is right?" Cream asked. "We aren't just creating a new Wispon here. We're creating something... More."
"You can't get cold feet now." Tails reassured her. "And neither can I. Sonic's up there, in space, stuck in one of Eggman's prisons. The Resistance can barely keep the remaining beacons of freedom safe. We can't mount a rescue mission on our own... We need something stronger. But this... This can change everything."
He ran to a large metal console and pulled a lever, flipping ten switches up and five switches down. He typed rapidly upon two keyboards and biometric data incomprehensible to anyone with an IQ under 200 filled every screen on his workshop's wall of monitors.
"Cream, hit the button!" Tails shouted.
Cream ran over to a big red button on the wall and got ready to press it. "Last chance to back out now!" Cream called.
"I've read enough sci-fi novels to know how wrong this can go too, Cream!" Tails yelled. "But we don't have a choice any more! It can't get any worse for us than this! And if it goes wrong and makes things worse for Eggman, we win! Now push the button!
She pushed the button and the smell of lightning filled the air as his machine powered on, a grey mess of parts that melted together to become a solid blue chunk of artificial chaos goo frozen solid. It just needed a DNA sample before the genetic resynthesizer could function properly.
"This one's for you, Sonic."
Tails licked the robot's metal face, on its left side.
"It needs a bigger pool of DNA samples to synthesize its own genetic code, so I need you to lick the right side of its face," Tails ordered.
Cream nodded and hesitantly licked the right side of the robot's face.
And then he placed one of Sonic's old and worn-out gloves, turned inside out, on the blue machine's face. Followed by one of Shadow's old gloves. After that, he added a sweaty washcloth he'd long ago swiped from his old rival in the skies, Wave The Swallow. He hadn't heard from her or the other Babylon Rogues since all this Infinite stuff started, but he hoped she was okay.
The three cloth items were absorbed into the softening goo and absorbed completely, the goo melting it all away all and learning from it.
"Are we doing science or offering up sacrifices to summoned spirits?" Cream joked.
"You can call this not science when I break out the weegee boards." Tails replied.
Before their very eyes, the machine transformed into a gooey blue copy of Tails, before turning into a gooey blue copy of Cream, a gooey blue copy of Wave, and finally, a gooey blue copy of Sonic. But the machine couldn't hold its form for long, not before melting back into liquid.
Tails opened a drawer full of magazines and drawings he'd made by hand. Some magazines were full of sports superstar Hedgehog girls, some were full of cute Rabbit girls advertising cars, some were full of Extreme Gear racer birds, and there were more than a few magazines full of beautiful vixens, but he'd taken inspiration from all of them to draw images of the most beautiful girl he could imagine.
For reasons he would only understand a few years from now, of course.
Throwing away concept art and rejected drawings and a few sketches of Cream's beautiful mom, he found the perfect drawing and showed it to the fake Chaos Emerald-enhanced mechaslime creature he had created.
The female machine changed to match what she saw on the page, using it to help her make sense of her body's conflicting biometric data files. Her gooey blue body shifted into the shape of Wave's body, with wings on her back and two foxy tails on her rear. Two massive ears hung off either side of her head, which grew Sonic the Hedgehog-inspired spikes. Those spikes grew longer, like Knuckles's dreads. Once her body solidified into flesh and fur, she copied Sonic's blue colour before turning it lighter and softer, like the paler blue he had during his Sonic Mania days. Where Shadow had red markings on his blackness, she gained white markings on her blue fur.
She blinked, and where her eyes should have been, there was only transparent blue goo and a white artificial emerald floating in nothingness. She blinked again, gaining new eyes to cover that up. Her right eye was green, her left eye was purple, and when she opened her foxlike mouth, her teeth were so perfectly white that they could make smile models for dentist commercials jealous.
Slowly, she sat up and rubbed her aching head. She'd just woken up from the strangest dream, that was what it felt like, a strange dream where she didn't exist and no thoughts of hers existed either. She couldn't remember anything, but at the same time, she had terrabytes of data shoved into her head along with all the memories of all four of her genetic donors, including her own creator. It was such a strange experience, to have the elation of experiencing existence for the first time marred by memories of seeing it all before four times over.
"Oh my..." Cream whispered.
"It's alive!" Tails screamed in glee. "It's alive!"
The artificial girl, her voice was almost like Wave's, but new and uncertain with none of the usual snark or haughtiness, she was speaking for the first time and it showed. She struggled to mouth out and speak the words... "Who are you?"
"My name is Tails The Fox." Tails said. "The world is in danger, and I made you to save it."
"That is my purpose?" She asked.
Tails nodded.
The artificial girl talked, and sounded more like Wave with the mannerisms of a girl version of Sonic now. "Great, now I don't have to go through ten thousand words of existential garbage to figure out who I am. I'm a weapon, plain and simple, and I can live with that. Why do I look like this?"
"I built your DNA out of the fastest Hedgehog of all time, along with his rival and the best fliers I know: Myself, Cream, and Wave." Tails explained. "Sonic's the fastest Hedgehog of all time, Shadow's almost as fast as him and way stronger, Wave and I are geniuses, and Cream has the unique ability to amplify the strength of any Chao she bonds with. I hoped to combine speed and strength with flight and Chao to create the ultimate powerhouse!"
"Plus, you wanted to overwhelm any potential Shadow-ness I might have with as much girliness as possible." The artificial girl said flatly.
That made Tails nervous.
"It's okay, I still have your memories. I can understand why you wouldn't want me joining Eggman, not that I ever would. Did you breed any good Chao for me to bond with?" The artificial girl asked.
"There aren't any Chao left, thanks to Eggman." Cream looked down miserably, and tears welled up in her eyes. "Every last one, even Cheese... He remembered that time I beat most of his robots to save my Mom. And then he built a machine to teleport all the Chao in the world into one capsule, and he... and he..."
She burst into tears, hugging Tails and collapsing in his arms. Even after four years, the pain was still fresh.
"Eggman fired it into the sun," Tails explained. "It's why the real Perfect Chaos has gone out of control, flooding most of the world. But if we ever find some on other planets, you'll be able to help them grow faster, and stronger, and help them enough to repopulate themselves on our world!"
The artificial girl's wings flared out, her ears rose to stand on end and show off their sharp points, and her tails lashed out furiously. "That monster... He's gone too far this time!" She growled.
"Alright!" Tails cheered. "Now you're starting to sound like Sonic!"
"I'll crack Eggman's head wide open!" She snarled.
"...Mostly!" Tails smiled nervously.
"Do I have a name yet?" The artificial girl asked. "It had better not be something stupid like... Sonar the Hedgefoxrabbitswallow. Or Tanic The Hedgefox. Or Chronic The Cyber Hedgehog. Or Melancholic The Swallowrabbithedgehogfox."
"Well, I didn't just build you to be a weapon. I built you to be a hero who would never age or rest, a hero who could empathize with anyone and stare down any monster before crushing it with an arsenal of gadgets and firepower! A hero who could bring new life to this war-torn world and bring hope back to us all!" Tails began. "I was planning on naming you Melodic, because it ends with an ic, just like Sonic's name. Melodic The Weapon!"
"That name sucks, but I've thought of a better name." She decided, liquid steel jet turbines growing out of her wings as she prepared to break through the ceiling and fly away dramatically. "I'm calling myself Melody! Melody The Hope!"