Update: I just watched the first season finale of Sonic X and I decided it
was time to update my story thoroughly. To all who have the chapters read
so far, you may wish to reread it. Time spaces, ages, and past events have
been built on or changed. Lastly, in your reviews, please do not spoil the
mystery for current readers if you think you know what it is.
//////Gear Shift
Chapter 2- The Last Stand
------------------------------------
He had won. The battle was his, but he feared he was losing this drawn out war of his subconscious and conscious minds. It felt like it had been an eternity since he had had a restful nights sleep.
Wearily, Tails sat up on his bed and contemplated his choices. He had the option of going back to sleep with the slim chance that he would avoid another mental assault from his subconscious, but the effects of the last assault still weighed heavily upon his conscious mind and he decided against it.
The only other thing on his mind was Amy. Ever since the bathroom incident yesterday morning she had been on his tails like a hound. He had been lucky enough to get even a moment's privacy at the mansion.
However, when they had gone to Station Square Mall for a last second, scholar-shopping spree, he had longed for that moment of privacy. They had divided into small groups; Cream followed Ella, Chuck took responsibility for Chris and he, and Sonic and Amy, the eldest two, had been free to roam wherever they wished. Amy's wish had been, of course, to follow Tails in the pursuit of any clue to his secret she could uncover.
At first Tails, with his foxy hearing, had thought he was being paranoid when he had heard Amy's distinct boot clips behind him in the crowded mall halls. Tails had simply dismissed it as one of many humans wearing high- heeled shoes, for every time he had turned to look, there was no pink hedgehog in site.
After two hours, when the paranoia became an annoyance, he had known he was not imagining things; Amy had really been really tagging him. He had decided that if she was going to play this game of hide and seek it would be under his rules she played.
Tails had separated from Chuck and Chris with the excuse that he was going to get a drink from a nearby pretzel vender and would meet up with them at a close young adult clothing outlet store. During the crossing of the wide mall hall, Tails had focused his entire mind and had zeroed in on the sound. The last sound he had heard came from a collection of trash bins and benches arranged so perfectly that a person the size of Amy could easily hide unnoticed.
He had ordered his drink and sat down on one of the benches in question and waited with his back to where he had suspected Amy was hidden. It took only a matter of a few minutes before he had heard the unmistakable sound of shifting body weight.
"Don't forget," Tails had said in a voice that would be just audible to the pink hedgehog, "the reason we are here. I would guesstimate we have about an hour and a half to two hours before we leave. It would look mighty strange if the shopaholic had little to show for four hours of shopping, wouldn't it, Ames?"
Tails had received a muffled gasp from the trash bins and a strange look from an old couple sitting on a nearby bench.
He had not heard the clicking of heels again until they had meet up to leave the mall.
Tails looked at his clock next to his bed and sighed, it would be another hour before Amy was up and yet another before she was done with her secret training. He had modified an average treadmill for her, but how she planned to ever become fast enough to even catch Sonic's eye was beyond his comprehension. The girl has big plans, Tails mused, and the need for speed must be a hereditary trait all hedgehogs have in one form or another.
Tails quietly stood up from his bed and, careful not to wake the sleeping forms of Sonic and Chris, he dressed himself in his mechanic's vest and gloves. Tiptoeing out the door and down the stairway, Tails slowly made his way out of the house, across the dark grounds, and into the workshop.
The low, rhythmic hum of the overhead fluorescent lights was a soothing melody to the young fox's mind and body. The sweet rhythm trickled through him like a wandering creek, washing away all vestiges of his dreams and his problems, and left his mind and body refreshed.
He was at home; this was his domain of gadgets and gyros. It was only in this safe haven that both the armies of his mind laid down their weapons and called a temporary truce. Here he was one being in harmony, not two in a sibling quarrel.
Reverently, Tails picked his way through the undergrowth of tools and machines as he forged a path to the stair leading up to the trapdoor to his and Chuck's 'Chaos Central' as Sonic had dubbed it.
Over the five years of warring with Robotnik on Earth, the room had slowly evolved from a young boy's getaway with his grandpa to a lab designed to study and document the amazing abilities of seven different gems. The room had not lost it's cozy wooden floors, or the wooden walls, but they were masked by one huge capsule used to store the Chaos Emeralds, poster sized diagrams of the different complex atomic structures of six of the emeralds, and all the equipment that Chuck and he used to unravel the mysteries behind the gems.
After the last cataclysmic battle on the ARK, the Chaos Emeralds were scattered to the winds. So far, Chris and the adopted Thorndikes managed to recover only two of the emeralds; the canary yellow and the turquoise stones. From what Tails could find out through extensive hacking, the government only had the jade emerald, the whereabouts of which no one but a select few knew of.
Eggman had mysteriously disappeared after that battle, leaving rumors in his wake. Some where led to believe by misunderstanding the president's victory speech that the would-be titan had been killed in the battle, some believed the government had finally captured him, but only a few, namely the Thorndikes, and the president and his trusted aides, knew that the doctor was alive and free, bidding his time. What truly frightened those that knew or suspected the truth was the fact that no one knew just how many emeralds Ivo Robotnik had managed to collect in these quiet times.
What astonished everyone, however, was the aftermath of the chaos controls. It seemed that whenever all the Chaos Emeralds combined, whether it be by themselves, Chaos the god of Destruction, Sonic, or the late Shadow, a chaos control ensured.
The first chaos control had sent Tails, Sonic, Amy, Cream, Knuckles, Robotnik, and Robotnik's Chaos Control to Earth. In less than six months, Robotnik and the Thorndikes had managed to locate all of the seven Chaos Emeralds and, thanks to the help of Chris, had created the chaos control that would have taken them home.
Yet, it didn't take them home. Instead, the chaos control brought a little bit of home to the Mobians. About a fifty miles south of Station Square in the Emerald Sea, the Mobian jungle had appeared as if from nowhere. With the Mobian jungle, the ancient city of Echidnopolis and Angel Island had also appeared.
Just days after the mysterious appearances, Eggman had attacked Station Square again, but this time he was armed with the power of Chaos, god of Destruction. Robotnik had managed to once again amass all seven Chaos Emeralds to perfect Chaos. Perfect Chaos had rebelled against Robotnik and had almost completely leveled Station Square. Sonic, using what power that was left inside of the drained Chaos Emeralds, battled against Perfect Chaos. The battle had been fierce, but Sonic had still managed to pull through. Almost immediately afterwards a much larger chaos control had insured.
As Station Square began to repair itself, pilots and seamen alike were discovering uncharted islands all around the world. Tails himself had traveled to many of the islands to discover, to his amazement, that they nearly identical to the Far Islands he used to fly over when he was on Mobius.
The government had found one island to their liking. It was the Mobian island fortress, Prison Island, the same one that once held Robotnik's lunatic, genius grandfather. Almost overnight it had turned from a simple cell prison to an air force base, bunker, and high security penitentiary.
From that island Robotnik had resurrected the ultimate life-form Shadow. Shadow had led Robotnik to an abandoned, overlander space colony called ARK that had also appeared from the chaos control. It was there that Robotnik, after recovering six Chaos Emeralds, had blown away one fourth of the moon and had caused terror in the world below. It was also there that Sonic and Shadow, during the crisis that followed the insertion of the last Chaos Emerald, saved the world.
The chaos control that followed had solved the crisis, but had no other visible effect on Earth. That was what worried Chuck and Tails. Each chaos control had grown stronger in intensity and range with each occurrence. They were both worried about what would happen the next time the emeralds gathered together.
However, he had more pressing issues to worry about.
Now, after five years of heavy depletion by his machines and Sonic, Tail's energy ring reserves where dangerously low. He remembered that back in Knothole the ring pool had used the power of a Chaos Emerald to create energy rings every twelve hours. One year before the Chaos Central incident that launched them to Earth, the brightest minds in Knothole, which included him, found out that if they decreased the energy rings' size the rings became stable and had a half-life of years.
Eleven months and a few weeks later Robotnik had attacked Knothole and had stolen his sixth Chaos Emerald, the canary emerald, from the ring pool. During the attack he had captured Cream and the whereabouts of the last emerald.
Without the emerald the scattered rebels of Knothole would be forced to slowly deplete it's supply of energy rings, and, without the protection of the hidden village, were vulnerable to attack. If they did nothing but run and lick their wounds, Robotnik would hunt them down and eliminate the threat. They had to strike soon or face annihilation from either Robotnik's Chaos Control or Snively's army in the Robotropolis.
Aunt Sally had a plan, but unlike any other of her plans it called for an all or nothing strategy. If they held back anything in what appeared to be the final stretch of the war, they could lose it all. Thus, Sally had called upon the strength of all the able people from the underground cities and the continent Down Under to amass one large rebel army to fight the final battle.
Robotnik, by moving thousands of swat-bots and other robots from the city to Chaos Control, had left the city very exposed to an all out assault. Aunt Sally, with the aid of the fellow rebels leaders, would attack her ancestral home on all sides and reclaim the city that Eggman had captured so long ago.
Sonic and Tails would then attack Chaos Control. Their objectives; retrieve the stolen Chaos Emerald and as many others as possible, rescue Cream and Cheese before Robotnik robotized them, and to cause as much damage to Chaos Control as possible. If the opportunity arose they had also been commanded to bring back the doctor, dead or alive.
Tails had brought all of the energy rings the army could spare him for if Sonic and he failed their mission then the recapture of the city would mean nothing. Eggman would just overtake the freed city with the crushing power of Chaos Control.
Tails, a few minutes before Sonic attacked, had flown as close as he dared to Chaos Central. After landing the Tornado X, Tails had used a new weapon. This weapon, located deep within the heart of the Tornado X, emitted a specific sound frequency so high that it could fry the delicate circuitry of all swat-bots in a five-mile radius. The deployment of the weapon had given away his position to Robotnik's scanners like a beacon of light.
The deactivated swat-bots had been Sonic's cue to launch his attack on the heart of the complex, which had given Tails the distraction he had needed to head for a safer place and to position himself in case Sonic needed backup.
Tails shook himself from the memories, he was starting to get as bad as Chuck when it came to reminiscing. The important thing now was trying to mimic the machine and environment in which the energy rings were formed.
After typing in the code to release the canary emerald from it's Chaos Container, Tails began his experiment. He had created a glass hourglass-like apparatus that would house both the emerald and what he hoped would be the correct raw materials needed to create an energy ring.
Tails undid the complementary caps and separated the hourglass structure into two triangular glasses. After uncapping the one with a ring- shaped indention in the bottom, he dropped small pebbles of silicon into the indention. The soil around the pool was mostly clay, and he figured that the silicon in the clay was the one of the key elements in the rings.
He had always wondered why the ring pool created rings every twelve hours, but now he thought it had something to do with the life cycle of the pond. When living things died they release methane as they decomposed. Tails was fairly sure that when the levels of methane in the level reached a certain level the machine in the lake was triggered on and the Chaos Emerald created an energy ring from the gas and the silicon in the water.
After recapping the bottle, Tails reached under the table and pulled out a small gas tank full of methane gas with a nozzle complementary to the cap on the bottle. After filling the bottle nearly to the exploding point, Tails disconnected the tank and the bottle and inserted the canary Chaos Emerald into the other part of the hourglass.
After reconnecting the two half of the hourglass Tails set it inside a machine and set the timer on it. Excitement coursed through his veins as his gloved hand lay inches above the ignition button, this was the moment of truth. If all his calculations were correct, there would be one perfectly formed energy ring at the bottom of the hourglass.
Tails depressed the button and a wide laser shot from the top of the machine, rebounded off the emerald's facets, and superheated the trapped gas beneath creating plasma streams from the tip of the emerald to the bottom of the hourglass.
The bright light from the glass rapidly grew in intensity; Tails covered his eyes and stumbled backwards with a shocked gasp as the searing yellow light enveloped him and his Chaos Central.
//////Gear Shift
Chapter 2- The Last Stand
------------------------------------
He had won. The battle was his, but he feared he was losing this drawn out war of his subconscious and conscious minds. It felt like it had been an eternity since he had had a restful nights sleep.
Wearily, Tails sat up on his bed and contemplated his choices. He had the option of going back to sleep with the slim chance that he would avoid another mental assault from his subconscious, but the effects of the last assault still weighed heavily upon his conscious mind and he decided against it.
The only other thing on his mind was Amy. Ever since the bathroom incident yesterday morning she had been on his tails like a hound. He had been lucky enough to get even a moment's privacy at the mansion.
However, when they had gone to Station Square Mall for a last second, scholar-shopping spree, he had longed for that moment of privacy. They had divided into small groups; Cream followed Ella, Chuck took responsibility for Chris and he, and Sonic and Amy, the eldest two, had been free to roam wherever they wished. Amy's wish had been, of course, to follow Tails in the pursuit of any clue to his secret she could uncover.
At first Tails, with his foxy hearing, had thought he was being paranoid when he had heard Amy's distinct boot clips behind him in the crowded mall halls. Tails had simply dismissed it as one of many humans wearing high- heeled shoes, for every time he had turned to look, there was no pink hedgehog in site.
After two hours, when the paranoia became an annoyance, he had known he was not imagining things; Amy had really been really tagging him. He had decided that if she was going to play this game of hide and seek it would be under his rules she played.
Tails had separated from Chuck and Chris with the excuse that he was going to get a drink from a nearby pretzel vender and would meet up with them at a close young adult clothing outlet store. During the crossing of the wide mall hall, Tails had focused his entire mind and had zeroed in on the sound. The last sound he had heard came from a collection of trash bins and benches arranged so perfectly that a person the size of Amy could easily hide unnoticed.
He had ordered his drink and sat down on one of the benches in question and waited with his back to where he had suspected Amy was hidden. It took only a matter of a few minutes before he had heard the unmistakable sound of shifting body weight.
"Don't forget," Tails had said in a voice that would be just audible to the pink hedgehog, "the reason we are here. I would guesstimate we have about an hour and a half to two hours before we leave. It would look mighty strange if the shopaholic had little to show for four hours of shopping, wouldn't it, Ames?"
Tails had received a muffled gasp from the trash bins and a strange look from an old couple sitting on a nearby bench.
He had not heard the clicking of heels again until they had meet up to leave the mall.
Tails looked at his clock next to his bed and sighed, it would be another hour before Amy was up and yet another before she was done with her secret training. He had modified an average treadmill for her, but how she planned to ever become fast enough to even catch Sonic's eye was beyond his comprehension. The girl has big plans, Tails mused, and the need for speed must be a hereditary trait all hedgehogs have in one form or another.
Tails quietly stood up from his bed and, careful not to wake the sleeping forms of Sonic and Chris, he dressed himself in his mechanic's vest and gloves. Tiptoeing out the door and down the stairway, Tails slowly made his way out of the house, across the dark grounds, and into the workshop.
The low, rhythmic hum of the overhead fluorescent lights was a soothing melody to the young fox's mind and body. The sweet rhythm trickled through him like a wandering creek, washing away all vestiges of his dreams and his problems, and left his mind and body refreshed.
He was at home; this was his domain of gadgets and gyros. It was only in this safe haven that both the armies of his mind laid down their weapons and called a temporary truce. Here he was one being in harmony, not two in a sibling quarrel.
Reverently, Tails picked his way through the undergrowth of tools and machines as he forged a path to the stair leading up to the trapdoor to his and Chuck's 'Chaos Central' as Sonic had dubbed it.
Over the five years of warring with Robotnik on Earth, the room had slowly evolved from a young boy's getaway with his grandpa to a lab designed to study and document the amazing abilities of seven different gems. The room had not lost it's cozy wooden floors, or the wooden walls, but they were masked by one huge capsule used to store the Chaos Emeralds, poster sized diagrams of the different complex atomic structures of six of the emeralds, and all the equipment that Chuck and he used to unravel the mysteries behind the gems.
After the last cataclysmic battle on the ARK, the Chaos Emeralds were scattered to the winds. So far, Chris and the adopted Thorndikes managed to recover only two of the emeralds; the canary yellow and the turquoise stones. From what Tails could find out through extensive hacking, the government only had the jade emerald, the whereabouts of which no one but a select few knew of.
Eggman had mysteriously disappeared after that battle, leaving rumors in his wake. Some where led to believe by misunderstanding the president's victory speech that the would-be titan had been killed in the battle, some believed the government had finally captured him, but only a few, namely the Thorndikes, and the president and his trusted aides, knew that the doctor was alive and free, bidding his time. What truly frightened those that knew or suspected the truth was the fact that no one knew just how many emeralds Ivo Robotnik had managed to collect in these quiet times.
What astonished everyone, however, was the aftermath of the chaos controls. It seemed that whenever all the Chaos Emeralds combined, whether it be by themselves, Chaos the god of Destruction, Sonic, or the late Shadow, a chaos control ensured.
The first chaos control had sent Tails, Sonic, Amy, Cream, Knuckles, Robotnik, and Robotnik's Chaos Control to Earth. In less than six months, Robotnik and the Thorndikes had managed to locate all of the seven Chaos Emeralds and, thanks to the help of Chris, had created the chaos control that would have taken them home.
Yet, it didn't take them home. Instead, the chaos control brought a little bit of home to the Mobians. About a fifty miles south of Station Square in the Emerald Sea, the Mobian jungle had appeared as if from nowhere. With the Mobian jungle, the ancient city of Echidnopolis and Angel Island had also appeared.
Just days after the mysterious appearances, Eggman had attacked Station Square again, but this time he was armed with the power of Chaos, god of Destruction. Robotnik had managed to once again amass all seven Chaos Emeralds to perfect Chaos. Perfect Chaos had rebelled against Robotnik and had almost completely leveled Station Square. Sonic, using what power that was left inside of the drained Chaos Emeralds, battled against Perfect Chaos. The battle had been fierce, but Sonic had still managed to pull through. Almost immediately afterwards a much larger chaos control had insured.
As Station Square began to repair itself, pilots and seamen alike were discovering uncharted islands all around the world. Tails himself had traveled to many of the islands to discover, to his amazement, that they nearly identical to the Far Islands he used to fly over when he was on Mobius.
The government had found one island to their liking. It was the Mobian island fortress, Prison Island, the same one that once held Robotnik's lunatic, genius grandfather. Almost overnight it had turned from a simple cell prison to an air force base, bunker, and high security penitentiary.
From that island Robotnik had resurrected the ultimate life-form Shadow. Shadow had led Robotnik to an abandoned, overlander space colony called ARK that had also appeared from the chaos control. It was there that Robotnik, after recovering six Chaos Emeralds, had blown away one fourth of the moon and had caused terror in the world below. It was also there that Sonic and Shadow, during the crisis that followed the insertion of the last Chaos Emerald, saved the world.
The chaos control that followed had solved the crisis, but had no other visible effect on Earth. That was what worried Chuck and Tails. Each chaos control had grown stronger in intensity and range with each occurrence. They were both worried about what would happen the next time the emeralds gathered together.
However, he had more pressing issues to worry about.
Now, after five years of heavy depletion by his machines and Sonic, Tail's energy ring reserves where dangerously low. He remembered that back in Knothole the ring pool had used the power of a Chaos Emerald to create energy rings every twelve hours. One year before the Chaos Central incident that launched them to Earth, the brightest minds in Knothole, which included him, found out that if they decreased the energy rings' size the rings became stable and had a half-life of years.
Eleven months and a few weeks later Robotnik had attacked Knothole and had stolen his sixth Chaos Emerald, the canary emerald, from the ring pool. During the attack he had captured Cream and the whereabouts of the last emerald.
Without the emerald the scattered rebels of Knothole would be forced to slowly deplete it's supply of energy rings, and, without the protection of the hidden village, were vulnerable to attack. If they did nothing but run and lick their wounds, Robotnik would hunt them down and eliminate the threat. They had to strike soon or face annihilation from either Robotnik's Chaos Control or Snively's army in the Robotropolis.
Aunt Sally had a plan, but unlike any other of her plans it called for an all or nothing strategy. If they held back anything in what appeared to be the final stretch of the war, they could lose it all. Thus, Sally had called upon the strength of all the able people from the underground cities and the continent Down Under to amass one large rebel army to fight the final battle.
Robotnik, by moving thousands of swat-bots and other robots from the city to Chaos Control, had left the city very exposed to an all out assault. Aunt Sally, with the aid of the fellow rebels leaders, would attack her ancestral home on all sides and reclaim the city that Eggman had captured so long ago.
Sonic and Tails would then attack Chaos Control. Their objectives; retrieve the stolen Chaos Emerald and as many others as possible, rescue Cream and Cheese before Robotnik robotized them, and to cause as much damage to Chaos Control as possible. If the opportunity arose they had also been commanded to bring back the doctor, dead or alive.
Tails had brought all of the energy rings the army could spare him for if Sonic and he failed their mission then the recapture of the city would mean nothing. Eggman would just overtake the freed city with the crushing power of Chaos Control.
Tails, a few minutes before Sonic attacked, had flown as close as he dared to Chaos Central. After landing the Tornado X, Tails had used a new weapon. This weapon, located deep within the heart of the Tornado X, emitted a specific sound frequency so high that it could fry the delicate circuitry of all swat-bots in a five-mile radius. The deployment of the weapon had given away his position to Robotnik's scanners like a beacon of light.
The deactivated swat-bots had been Sonic's cue to launch his attack on the heart of the complex, which had given Tails the distraction he had needed to head for a safer place and to position himself in case Sonic needed backup.
Tails shook himself from the memories, he was starting to get as bad as Chuck when it came to reminiscing. The important thing now was trying to mimic the machine and environment in which the energy rings were formed.
After typing in the code to release the canary emerald from it's Chaos Container, Tails began his experiment. He had created a glass hourglass-like apparatus that would house both the emerald and what he hoped would be the correct raw materials needed to create an energy ring.
Tails undid the complementary caps and separated the hourglass structure into two triangular glasses. After uncapping the one with a ring- shaped indention in the bottom, he dropped small pebbles of silicon into the indention. The soil around the pool was mostly clay, and he figured that the silicon in the clay was the one of the key elements in the rings.
He had always wondered why the ring pool created rings every twelve hours, but now he thought it had something to do with the life cycle of the pond. When living things died they release methane as they decomposed. Tails was fairly sure that when the levels of methane in the level reached a certain level the machine in the lake was triggered on and the Chaos Emerald created an energy ring from the gas and the silicon in the water.
After recapping the bottle, Tails reached under the table and pulled out a small gas tank full of methane gas with a nozzle complementary to the cap on the bottle. After filling the bottle nearly to the exploding point, Tails disconnected the tank and the bottle and inserted the canary Chaos Emerald into the other part of the hourglass.
After reconnecting the two half of the hourglass Tails set it inside a machine and set the timer on it. Excitement coursed through his veins as his gloved hand lay inches above the ignition button, this was the moment of truth. If all his calculations were correct, there would be one perfectly formed energy ring at the bottom of the hourglass.
Tails depressed the button and a wide laser shot from the top of the machine, rebounded off the emerald's facets, and superheated the trapped gas beneath creating plasma streams from the tip of the emerald to the bottom of the hourglass.
The bright light from the glass rapidly grew in intensity; Tails covered his eyes and stumbled backwards with a shocked gasp as the searing yellow light enveloped him and his Chaos Central.