FriedBrickWall: Mind? Why should I mind getting more feedback and reviews:D The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned. And the toolbox, heh, I'm impressed! I didn't think anyone'd pick up on that ;) Same goes for Knuckles' journal...though I think it's something that's been passed down, judging from the number of entries ;)

Samantha27: (grins) Actually, to tell you the truth, I didn't. Tails' and Sonic's, erm, argument was mostly written just after I'd finished chapter 2. That's kinda why Sonic was like he was; it was all leading up to that :P

Guardian's Log No. 11458

I'm getting very tired of this. That's the second time I've had to talk Tails round. Sonic seems to have learned his lesson though; maybe it won't happen again, at least, hopefully not before I'm safely back on Angel Island. No amount of treasure is worth playing counsellor to those two!

Speaking of treasure, we ran into a new acquaintance today; Rouge the Bat. An interesting character. I don't believe for one minute that she really would have let us go if Sonic had handed over the Chaos Emeralds; she didn't strike me as the kind of person who'd leave witnesses alive.

I can't believe I was able to pull that move off though; it was far more luck than judgment. Not that I'm going to tell Sonic or Tails that; way I see it, they owe me. I was glad to see the kid almost have a panic attack when Sonic looked like dying though. Sonic himself looked a little shaken. I guess it was too much danger even for that hedgehog. At least it helped those two make up; that's one good thing, especially given what Tails put in that damn note!

Query: do my spines really make my head look pointy?

--Knuckles the Echidna

My Memoirs by Me

Wow. What a day. What a damn frigging day. I upset and pissed off Tails royally and got knocked off a platform to a mile and a half drop. I was way beyond relieved when Tails caught me; I guess I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd left me to fall. That's not an insult, Tails, in case you read this again.

That Rouge character picked about the worst time to make her grand entrance though. What do she and her friends want with the Chaos Emeralds? And speaking of friends, that black hedgehog was way freaky. I swear it was like looking in a warped mirror. He was fast too; as fast as I am, and I never thought I'd write those five words! Bottom line, Knux kicked 'em all off the platform and we hotfooted it out of there. I just realised I never got to give Tails that toolkit.

Now we're on the edge of that weird thing I told Knuckles about, somewhere I swore blind I never wanted to be again. Man, I'm not spooked by much but this is creeping me out big time.

--Sonic the Hedgehog

Dear Diary

Why'd Knuckles have to drag me back down to Sonic? I was perfectly happy on my own!

Well...actually, no I wasn't. I still can't believe Sonic would write that stuff about me. I guess I believed him and Knuckles when they said he didn't mean it, but he still shouldn't've written it! On the other hand, I guess I didn't mean all that stuff I wrote earlier either. It's not here anymore; Knuckles ripped those pages out and burned them. I didn't mean what I wrote about him either. He's an okay guy really, although he makes me a little nervous. He always seems to be judging everyone all the time, but I think he could be nice if he'd loosen up a little.

I don't like this Rouge person though. Especially after she tried to stop me helping Sonic! I did manage to catch him though, about ten feet from the ground. I think it really freaked him out; he doesn't usually risk his life that much.

--Tails

Knuckles understood for the first time why Sonic had been unwilling to describe the 'weird thing' that he'd kept referring to. No, unwilling was the wrong word; the word was unable. It was...wrong. That wasn't a much better description than Sonic had given, but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Somehow, it managed to show both utter nothingness and what looked like some kind of star-filled space at the same time.

The echidna turned away abruptly. Something told him that if he looked at it for much longer, or spent any amount of time trying to work it out, he'd go insane.

"It's grown." Sonic stood at Knuckles' shoulder, his face unusually sombre. "I dunno what it is or how it was caused, but that thing's spreading and between you and me, I got no idea how to stop it."

"Can't you fly up to it?"

Sonic shook his head.

"It seems to be on the outer rim of our atmosphere. Even the Tornado can't fly that high. Besides, I'm not sure I'd want to."

Knuckles' eye ridges shot up.

"You're turning down a chance to risk life and limb? Are you sickening for something?"

By way of an answer, Sonic nodded to the ground underneath the nothing-void.

"Look at it, Knux. See anything strange?"

Knuckles' gaze swept the ground, then he shrugged. Sonic let out a guttural noise of frustration.

"I wish you'd seen it over the Jungle Zone; it was obvious then!" He scanned the area, one hand shielding his eyes against the bright lights, then finally pointed. "There! See that tree?"

Knuckles followed the hedgehog's finger and his frown deepened.

"It's...dead. Isn't it?" he added.

Sonic nodded. He could understand the echidna's hesitation; the leaves on the tree itself weren't a healthy green or a dead brown; they were a sickly grey, and the trunk looked somewhat shrivelled.

"It's dead alright, Knux. That void thing's so bad that the Jungle Zone looks like it's been buried in ash. And it's not just—" Sonic broke off abruptly and paled. "Oh no," Knuckles heard him mutter.

"Amy turned up again?"

"No. But some unlucky guy did." Sonic exploded into a run, skidding to a stop on the very edge of the void and grabbing a pole to hook the foot of the unlucky guy in question and pull him out. There was no question he was dead; his face was frozen in an agonised contortion and both hands seemed to be clawing at his throat.

Arriving behind Sonic at a more sedate pace, Knuckles stared at the body, frowning.

"His face is almost black."

"Suffocation," Sonic said, with almost frightening composure. "The plants are the same. That thing, whatever it is, is sucking the air out of everything it covers, plants, animals, people, everything. Witness the main reason why I don't wanna go near it. I'm not suicidal, whatever else I may be!"

Knuckles, who had his own opinion on that matter, kept quiet.

"No, Knuckles, I am not suicidal!" Sonic repeated, glaring at the echidna. "Getting out of the void doesn't help either; once it touches you, you're dead."

Knuckles shifted his weight edgily, feeling a sudden urge to get as far away from this strange void as he could.

"Alright. You were right; it is weird. How the hell did it come to be here?"

"Robotnik, of course." Sonic sounded impatient. Knuckles shook his head slowly.

"I dunno. I'm not sure what race has the credit of him, but he breathes oxygen like we do. If that thing spreads to his fortress, he'll be as dead as anyone."

"Not if he's the one controlling it," Sonic argued. "People are running from it already. All he has to do is use it to herd them to wherever he wants them, then he can pick them up any time he likes."

Knuckles frowned. The plot was devious enough for Robotnik, but something about it didn't ring true.

"Sonic, this is the guy who's come after you with guided missiles, bombs, plasma cannons, lightning, flamethrowers, toxic waste and a wrecking ball the size of a small house, to name but a few! Robotnik has many traits, but I think it's safe to say that subtlety is not among them! Besides, why would he go to all that trouble to trap people he could pick up with about the same amount of time and effort you or I would use to snag a pella fruit?"

Sonic took a deep breath.

"I don't know, okay? You're right; something about it doesn't make sense. But I want to check Robotnik out, because if it is him then we can get him to put a stop to it, and if it's not, he'll want it gone as much as us."

"Don't tell me you're thinking of joining forces with him!" Knuckles said. "Because if you are, you can count me out! He's—"

"I know what he is, Knux!"

"Yeah," Knuckles said, his voice strangely quiet all of a sudden. "I know you do, Sonic."

Sonic shifted his weight and opted to steer the conversation out of these dangerous waters.

"Look, Knucklehead, if you're gonna yammer on at me, at least say something deep and meaningful. What happened to all that philosophy and duty trash you usually spout?"

"You want deep and meaningful? Fine!" Knuckles leaned against a wall. "You want me to say something about duty, something really profound? How about I start by saying that this is all your fault!"

Sonic jerked as if he'd been slapped (an idea which was, Knuckles admitted, gaining more and more appeal with each passing second).

"You have ten seconds to explain that crack, Knuckles," he said, his normally cocky tone absent. Knuckles folded his arms coldly.

"Fine. You were the one who made Robotnik what he is today. You were the one who made him so damn obsessed with power and cruelty. And not only that, you used to be his number one sidekick. Like the kid is with you." Knuckles nodded towards Tails, who was watching the whole thing wide-eyed. "Tell me something, Sonic; why do you really want to stop Robotnik? Because he's evil and you hate the things he does? Or because you're terrified he's going to tell people you and he practically lived in each other's pockets at one time?" Knuckles shook his head, clicking his tongue pityingly. "Such a thing would really screw up your good-guy image, huh?"

"Sonic is a good guy!" Tails said emphatically. He attempted to dive for Knuckles but the echidna had – quite inadvertently – leaned against a wall with a large overhanging and the fox couldn't get in at the right angle. Nothing daunted, Tails landed next to Sonic and looked up at him beseechingly. "He's wrong, isn't he, Sonic? Tell him he's wrong!"

Knuckles raised both eye-ridges coldly.

"Well? Come on, Sonic; tell me I'm wrong. Tell me that you weren't his lab assistant, that you didn't cause what was possibly the biggest screw-up in the history of Mobius."

"The intentions were good, Knuckles."

"Robotnik's were. Yours weren't."

"I didn't know what would happen! I didn't think."

"You never do," Knuckles said flatly.

"Sonic?" Tails continued staring, eyes big. "Knuckles isn't right, is he? Is he?"

Sonic took a long, deep breath, held it for a few seconds while he considered his options, then expelled it in a sigh.

"Yeah, li'l bro. He's right." He glared at Knuckles, who looked back coolly, completely undaunted. "I don't wanna know how he found out about it, but he's right. The doc and I used to be pals, way back in the day. He wasn't always as bad as this; he used to be a pretty cool guy. I used to hang out in his lab, help him with his experiments. He let me build up my speed on his treadmill until I finally broke through the sound barrier. When that happened, he made me these to protect my feet." He lifted one red and white sneaker for inspection.

Tails sat down hard, eyes now so huge they seemed to fill his entire face.

"He what?"

"I said he wasn't bad then, okay?" Sonic said irritably. "He was working on a way to remove and store all of the evil on Mobius – all the chaos, if you wanna put it like that. The doc found seven huge emeralds that he thought would contain the evil safely. He managed to transfer it into six of those emeralds but to stabilise things for the last one, he needed the eighth emerald, the Master Emerald."

Knuckles snorted.

"My people have been guarding the Master Emerald for generations. You expect me to believe there are two of them?"

Looking him straight in the eye, Sonic said quietly, "The doc invented a time machine."

Knuckles opened his mouth, then shut it again rather abruptly. Sonic continued.

"I dunno how he activated the Master Emerald – science was never my bag – but he did, and he went back in time five hundred years to the most secure place he knew; Angel Island. He entrusted it to your ancestors and made them promise to guard it for at least a thousand years. The rest is history."

"No it's not," Tails protested. "What happened next? Why'd he go all mean and start destroying people and stuff?"

"He probably just got out the wrong side of bed one morning," Knuckles drawled.

He barely had time to blink before Sonic had rammed him hard, sending the two of them rolling back in a tangle of arms, legs and spines. Hitting a spring at the bottom of a hill, both of them exploded back up simultaneously, Knuckles holding a seriously angry Sonic at arm's length with an expression that said he'd release his grip when Mobius stopped spinning, and not a nanosecond sooner.

Tails took off and flew to the roof, peering down nervously. Sonic and Knuckles had had their differences, but since Robotnik's exposure as a liar on Angel Island, it had never come to blows before.

In all fairness it wasn't coming to blows now, although if Sonic's almost apoplectic complexion was anything to go by, that wasn't for want of trying on his part. Occasionally words managed to fight their way out of his throat.

"Don't...if you dare...if you think..."

"Yeah, I think," Knuckles interrupted him coldly. "I think that you're in serious danger of making me mad."

Sonic paused, glaring at him.

"Oh sure. It's always about you, isn't it? That's all you've ever cared about, is yourself. Listen, Knucklehead, if you knew—"

"Which I might do if you'd stop trying to filet me and finish your story—"

Sonic dropped onto all fours, preparing a spin attack, but Knuckles simply scooped him up, leapt into the air and slam-dunked him into the floor. He almost said, "Two points," but restrained himself. If he said that, there really would be no going back.

"Okay," he said, breathing rapidly. "Go back to Tails' question. What happened next?"

Sonic picked himself up, tense but in control again.

"First tell me how you found out about all this! Nobody knew except me and the doc. Robotnik won't admit that he was anything other than evil now, and I know I sure didn't tell anybody!"

Knuckles shook his head.

"Uh uh. First you tell me the rest of it and then I'll tell you how I found out."

Sonic slumped against the wall next to him.

"There's not much more to tell. I got hungry while the doc was gone and opened the refrigerator for a snack. There was nothing in there but a very old, very rotten egg. I was still very much a kid at that point, pretty immature."

Knuckles started to say that Sonic clearly hadn't changed, then bit his tongue for the second time that day. Even he knew when he was pushing his luck.

"I thought it'd be a good joke to give it to him to smell," Sonic went on. If he'd noticed Knuckles' brief struggle with himself, he gave no sign. "You know; kinda like the whole 'open your mouth and close your eyes' deal. He was working on the emeralds at the time, getting ready to finalise things, and I gave him the egg. It screwed up his concentration big time and he pushed the wrong button. Instead of the evil being sealed inside the emeralds, it was ejected into the nearest thing. In this case, the good doctor and that egg. It kinda combined the two – that's why he looks like he does – and turned him into the Robotnik we all know and hate. The good part of him was taken out by what happened and became those gold rings that are all over the place."

Knuckles frowned.

"Yeah? Why rings?"

Sonic shrugged.

"The doc was married at one time, only his wife died. He always wore his wedding ring; just a plain gold band. It probably represented the best and happiest time of his life, and so that's what the Emeralds made it. That's just a theory, though. I think it had something else to do with the ROCC – whatever that stood for – but like I said, science was never my bag." He narrowed his eyes at Knuckles. "Your turn. How did you find out?"

"Do you think echidnas never talk to each other, Sonic? When Robotnik dropped off the Master Emerald, he told us what he was planning to do with the others. That was five hundred years ago, and in that time we forgot the names involved – if we ever knew them – but we remembered two things. One was that nobody who came asking for the Master Emerald should be allowed to have it. The other was that when the rings appeared in the sky, war was imminent and we'd have to guard the Master Emerald like never before." Knuckles shrugged. "None of us understood that second part to begin with." He nodded towards the sky, where three gold rings hung in an arc above their heads. "Now I do. I was asleep when the rings appeared. My mother told me the story much later, how there had been a massive explosion on the planet's surface and the rings had been scattered all over the world, even as far up as Angel Island itself. Nobody had any idea what caused it, but she said she saw a blue streak heading away incredibly fast."

"That could have been anybody's blue streak," Tails said defiantly. Knuckles shrugged.

"I thought it was an aftermath of the explosion when she told me. It wasn't until I actually saw Sonic running away from Angel Island at top speed that I put two and two together."

"That's not answering my question," Sonic said flatly. For the first time, Knuckles realised that despite his thrill-seeking ways, Sonic was far from stupid. He sighed.

"Okay. You really wanna know the truth? I didn't know, at least, not really. All I had were my own theories drawn from what I've just told you. All you did was confirm them."

Sonic opened his mouth, then closed it again rather abruptly. Tails stared at him, eyes big.

All this time...we've been up against Robotnik for ages and all that time Sonic knew he was responsible for him.

"I'm not doing it for the accolades, Knucklehead," Sonic added. "I do it because I have to. I'm one of the very few who can fight Robotnik on his own terms. And...well...I started this crap. I oughta be the one to finish it."

The look in Knuckles' eyes altered slightly, became keener.

"You know, I think I owe you an apology, Sonic. I think I've misjudged you all this time."

"Most people do," Sonic said with a martyred expression. "It's my curse."

"You're responsible for it all," Tails said wonderingly, and Knuckles seriously doubted that the fox had heard any of the previous dialogue. "Everything that's happened, you did it."

Sonic winced as though Tails' words were physically painful, then, to Knuckles' private amazement, shook his head.

"No go, little bro. I'm not and I didn't. Sure, I screwed up with Robotnik, but I'm not carrying the can for everything he chose to do."

"He's right," Knuckles said with a shrug. Sonic's jaw dropped.

"I'm what?"

"I said you're right."

There was a long, long silence.

"Could I get that in writing?" Sonic asked eventually. Knuckles rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, but—" Tails began.

"But nothing. I'm not Robotnik's keeper, Tails. What he did was his own choice, not mine." There was something in Sonic's voice that discouraged the fox from pursuing this line of questioning too far. "Anyway," Sonic added, "it doesn't matter how the doc came into being; right now, the only thing that matters is finding him."

"Yeah?" Knuckles said flatly. "And how are you planning to do that, Sonic? Last time I checked, Robotnik wasn't handing out business cards."

"That thing looks like it's heading towards the terminals," Sonic said. "If we go now, maybe we can get there first and at least warn people." A now-familiar gleam crept into his eyes. "You ever go rail-grinding, Knux?"

"What's rail-grinding?" Knuckles said, a little warily. Sonic and Tails exchanged grins, then Sonic clapped the echidna on the shoulder, ignoring the resultant stiffness.

"Follow us, Knucklehead."

Okay, another chapter finished :D Please review!