Rouge was up early for once. Usually she'd sleep all day then spend the night flying around the Floating Island. But what was the point in trying to enjoy yourself if your mind was sending out signals of something disturbing? Even though she had promised herself (as well as Knuckles) that she would get out of spying, her intuition was telling her something different. And now, here she was, on the same rock that she and Knuckles had… She tried to focus on her main agenda to stop herself from thinking about last night. "Business before pleasure..." She thought as she started up her laptop.

As it finished starting up, she immediately went into the government's military project files. She looked up Project Shadow's file first. "Destroyed by G.U.N. forces" it read. "Not bloody likely", Rouge muttered under her breath. It read the same under "The Ultimate Life Form". "Those pricks don't know squat", she thought as she scrolled down further on the page. Her eyes caught something near the very bottom of the page. "Project Aozora No Knife…strange, I've never heard of a project like that before." She clicked on the page link to it.

 "My conscience won't rest until I get to the bottom of this." She thought. "Why does that somehow sound familiar?"  

The page itself reads like this:

Thanks to the exploits of Dr. Yasutmito and Co., Project Aozora No Knife is due to be near completion on ## ## ####.

This project is said to be a breakthrough in the technology of biogenetics and a combination of ancient manuscript. Utilizing the life forces of light, wind, water, and earth, this creation can control them at will…

Rouge stopped reading and just sat there petrified, wondering at what terror this new creation could unleash upon the world.  "Aozora Knife was the name of an ancient goddess…". A memory of a certain childhood story flooded back into her mind…about Atlantis….how it had been destroyed to protect the rest of the developing world from its inhabitants, who wished to kill off the other civilizations and have the planet for themselves. She flew over to the island's supply shed and stocked up on rations for a few hours. "I better not let Knuckles know that I'm leaving", she whispered as she took off into the early morning sky. "This latest project has "disaster" written all over it…"

Meanwhile…

Tails was busy retuning the Tornado when Sonic burst in. He looked up from under the plane to see Sonic as his usual cool self. Considering what happened to him and Shadow last week, this was a welcome sight to see.

"Hey Sonic!" he yelled cheerfully. "What's up?" He came out from under the plane, most of his golden brown fur covered with the dark oil that had been leaking out of the Tornado.

The blue blur looked at his messy two-tailed friend and couldn't help but let out a little snicker. He always thought it was a bit funny whenever Tails got a little bit too involved into creating or improving one of his inventions. "I ran all the way from Amy's apartment in Station Square", he started out. The fox raised an eyebrow at him and grinned. "Sleeping over?", he said slyly. A frown formed on Sonic's face as he gave Tails a short answer to that. "No. I was over there yesterday and she used her tarot cards to tell me that Shadow's alive somewhere."

"What took you so long to get over here then? You're supposed to be the fastest thing alive you know!", yelled Tails. Sonic pointed over to the several misplaced quills on his back. "You think that Eggman would have learnt something after his grandfather tried to kill every living thing on the planet!" he said angrily. "I had to go through a whole shitload of battle zones and stop him from taking the 6 remaining Chaos Emeralds on the way here. SO CUT ME SOME SLACK!!" he yelled out. Tails lowered his defenses and apologized. "Okay, okay. I take that back Sonic. It's not my fault that you're on call 24-7."

He and Sonic started throwing playful punches at each other when Sonic realized that he had left Shadow's bracelet back at Amy's apartment. "Damnit!" he yelled out loud. "I gotta go back and get Shadow's bracelet at Amy's!" Tails began to grin again. "And that's supposed to be a bad thing?" he asked playfully. "Shut up Miles", Sonic growled at him. He knew how much Tails loathed being called by his first name.

Back at Amy's apartment…

"Where could she have gone?" asked Tails.

"I dunno, maybe there's a 100% off sale at some store", joked Sonic. "Wait, look", he said as he pointed to a piece of paper that had once been attached to the front door. It read:

Dear Sonic: I know that you rather find Shadow on your own, but that's something I have to do. I don't care if he's good or evil, all I know is that back on the ARK, he became one of my friends the moment he decided to go and help you guys.

 You'll probably be steaming mad over the fact that I actually had a good sense of where he was. This is my strongest lead and I'm going to follow it.

For once, I'm acting on my own instead of waiting around for you to do it.

Sincerely,

Amethyst Rose

Tails was on the floor, laughing his two-tailed ass off, but Sonic didn't really seem to find anything funny about it. "Loosen up", said Tails. "This is what you get for always completely ignoring her all those other times. She's probably just getting back at you."  The cerulean hedgehog glared back with fierce eyes. "Amy's too considerate of a person to be able to do this.", thought Sonic. He thought back to the Little Planet incident, how Metalla had captured her and placed her as a prize in a racing showdown…how he had won and Amy was head over heels crazy for him the moment she laid eyes on him…

He came out of his thoughts in time to see the crumbled note fall to the floor. "Let's head back to your workshop", he said dully.

A few hours later at the workshop…

 The heroic duo arrived to find Rouge waiting outside the main entrance. "You already know that Shadow's alive somewhere?" started the blue blur. She shook her head in response. "I know Shadow's a survivor", cooed Rouge, "But we have other things that we need to deal with at the moment.", She filled the others in on G.U.N's latest project.

Tails: First nuclear weapons, now this.

Rouge: If that power fell into the wrong hands, the world would be at its mercy. Even worse, if this thing was created for the soul purpose of destruction….there's no telling in what will happen…

Tails: That's just great. What is it with people and destroying to world? And why are we always the ones who have to clean up those messes?

Sonic: What about Knuckles? He'd probably want to help…well, if it involved the Master Emerald.

Rouge: I dunno…he's pretty dedicated to the emerald…so I didn't tell him about this. Don't want it to interfere with his duties….

Sonic: Alright then. Guess it's just us three then. Let's move out!