Shadow's Odyssey 2: The Chaos Continues
Rouge sat hugging her legs, ears drooped low. Petro could feel her anguish and was trying to think of some way to relieve it.
"So… um… how did you meet him?"
Rouge jerked out of her daze. "What?"
"Shadow. How did you meet him?"
Her gaze returned to the window. "I work for a military organization call the Guardian Units of Nations, or G.U.N. They are a corrupt organization. They were willing to ignore my… illegal hobbies in exchange for my services. For one mission, they wanted me to spy on Eggman because he apparently stole some top-secret superweapon. They wanted me to gather information and if possible, recover the weapon. Turns out that weapon was Shadow. They stressed to me that while it might look like a person and even act like one, it wasn't. But the more time I spent with Shadow, the more I realized that was wrong. But at the time, I didn't really care."
Petro felt a hot flash of anger. "What do you mean you didn't care? Were you... actually prepared to turn him back over to people who mistreated him?"
Rouge shook her head. "That was never my goal. I only wanted one thing, or rather, seven things."
"The Chaos Emeralds." Petro realized.
"I used to be a very selfish person. I thought I was entitled to all the gems in the world just because I wanted them. I was going to take all the Emeralds for myself and let Shadow and Eggman take the blame for them going missing."
"Well obviously you care about Shadow now, so what happened?"
"I like to think I'm pretty good at reading people. When I first met Shadow, I thought I knew exactly who he was. Bitter, angry, not concerned with anyone besides himself. Relentlessly pursuing his goal, not caring who he had to kill in the process. But then something happened while we were stealing the Emeralds. I got trapped inside the vault and Shadow had planted a bomb that was going to destroy the entire base. I called Eggman for help, but he didn't care. He said it would be easier to just dig the Emeralds out of the rubble. I thought that was it. I was going to be left to die. Then Shadow swooped in at the last moment. He claimed that he only came for the Emeralds, but I didn't buy it. He risked getting blown up himself. The safer option would have been to do what Eggman said."
"He cared about you, didn't he? At least a little."
"A little, but not enough to abandon his main goal. He tried to wipe out all of humanity. Turns out, he was gonna betray Eggman too. Shadow was born on a huge space station called Space Colony Ark. The station had a weapon called the Eclipse Cannon that was powerful enough to destroy a planet when it had all seven Emeralds put into it."
"That sounds a lot like the Death Star."
"Yeah, Eggman basically just made an improved version of the Eclipse Cannon. Sonic and his friends managed to sabotage the cannon so that Shadow couldn't use it. But Gerald had come up with a plan B."
"Gerald?"
"Shadow's creator and Eggman's grandfather. When the cannon didn't work, a video of his last words before being executed by G.U.N. was broadcast to the world. In it, he said he wanted revenge on the world for the death of his granddaughter and he implied that he had done something to Shadow to get him to carry out the plan. We don't know what he might have done, or how. Shadow doesn't remember much from his time as G.U.N.'s prisoner and any clues there might have been got destroyed in the explosion I mentioned earlier. But what was important was that the space colony was on a collision course with Mobius.
"The granddaughter, that's… 'her', isn't it?"
Rouge sat up in surprise. "He told you about Maria?"
"Not in so much detail, but yeah. After a lot of convincing."
"He really is getting better." Something resembling a smile crossed Rouge's face before she shook her head and refocused on the story. "Anyway, Shadow wasn't even bothering to fight us anymore. We couldn't stop the Ark and he knew it, though we were trying our best anyway. He just stood staring out the window, waiting to go down with the ship."
"His mission was the only thing that mattered to him." Petro muttered. "Because he didn't have anything else."
"While the rest of us were running around trying to fix things, another friend of ours, Amy, pleaded with him to reconsider. She managed to say just the right thing and got Shadow to remember that he had promised Maria that he would protect the world. As soon as he realized that, he was off like a shot to fix his mistake. Turns out, everything he was doing was for her. The whole reason he was trying to destroy the world was because he thought that was what his promise was. He was just remembering it wrong, which might or might not be because of Gerald."
"So how did he fix things?" Petro asked.
"He and Sonic used the Chaos Emeralds to go Super and used Chaos Control to teleport the Ark back to where it belonged. Oh, and they fought a giant lizard."
"Wait, what?"
Rouge waved him off. "That's not important. What's important is, Shadow fell. He threw everything he had into that Chaos Control. Sonic couldn't save him; he barely had enough energy to get himself back to the Ark. We all thought Shadow had died. I was just… so shocked at what he did. Willing to lay down his life to save people he hated, all because someone he cared about asked him to."
Petro recalled the flurry of emotions he'd felt from Shadow when he'd screamed about how they murdered "her". In addition to the pain and rage, forlorn love had been a strong presence as well.
"But Shadow, of course, didn't die. He was rescued by Eggman. He kept him locked up in one of his bases and performed experiments on him. I found him a year later. There's more, but I want to hear how you met him, even though I heard the story from Shadow."
Petro summoned his memories and began. "I heard about him before I met him and what I heard was mostly that he was evil. I believed it because we were forced to flee Coruscant or be slaughtered like the other Jedi at the hands of the Separatists. Then he showed up to help us get away. I didn't see him then, but it was him who brought the ships that opened a hole in the blockade. And then I heard what the clones had to say about him. They were singing his praises all the way back to Kamino."
Again, a ghost of a smile crossed Rouge's face.
"I saw him for the first time on Mustafar. The droids had us pinned down when he dropped out of the sky and started massacring them, once again giving us the chance to get away. We reached the ship only to discover that the clones we brought with us were gone. Anakin was saying that we had we had to find them when Grievous attacked. He almost killed Obi-wan, but I stopped him with Force Lightning and made him retreat. Then Padme came in with her ship and I saw Shadow for the second time. He was just… curled up on the floor. He looked so powerful when he was fighting the droids but now he just looked… small."
"He mentioned Grievous hurting him, but it sounds like he was downplaying it." Rouge sighed. "Again."
Petro threw his hands in the air. "I know! He does that all the time! Anyway, when he heard that the clones were missing, and that Anakin had gone after them, he forced himself up and went to go find them. By this point, I had no idea what to make of Shadow. I didn't get much time to think about it though. Obi-wan and Master Yoda were really mad that I'd used Force Lightning, even though it was to do something good. After we got out of there, they locked me up. After a while, Shadow came to get me and that was when I met him properly. I was really surprised to see him and even thought he might be there to kill me, though I'm not entirely sure why, given all that he'd done to help by that point."
"The adults who were supposed to protect you had just betrayed you." Rouge pointed out. "It's only natural that you would be feeling paranoid."
"Shadow agreed with you about the adults. He freed me and then went to go chew them out. He managed to bring them to a compromise where I would be allowed to roam, but with a babysitter. That's when Shadow decided to take me under his wing. He taught me how to use the Dark Side for good. He said he did it because I reminded him of himself and he didn't want to see me turn out like he did."
The Emerald detector went off with a beep, drawing their attention to the planet before them.
"That's… Tatooine!"
Petro lowered the ship and followed the tracker's signal across the open desert. When the signal was at its strongest, he landed the ship so they could search on foot.
The ship landed next to an old wreck and a hole in the ground. A hole lined with teeth. And tentacles.
They looked at the scanner. They looked at the hole. They looked at the scanner. They looked at the hole.
"The Emerald's inside of that hole, isn't it?" Rouge asked.
"KRIIIIIFFFFFFFFF!"
"I'll take that eardrum busting noise as a yes."
"That's a Sarlacc Pit." Petro groaned.
"And that means?"
"The only way to get that Emerald out is for one of us to get eaten by that thing."
Rouge shrugged and stretched her wings. "No problem."
She flew towards the pit and the tentacles swiped at her. Rouge folded her wings and dove into the open mouth.
Petro plopped down on the sand and hoped this wasn't the last time he would ever see her. He glanced over at the wreaked ship and stood up in a rush when he recognized it. This was something that needed investigating.
