Chapter 19: All in the Same Boat
September 4th, 2316 – 3:40 AM – Robotropolis, Robotnik Empire
Slowly, but surely, Tails began to regain consciousness. He felt himself sleeping against something, and it definitely wasn't a bed. A cold, hard, slimy feeling ran all up and down the side of his body pressing against it. He wasn't sure if he wanted to know what that was, but he started to open his eyes anyway. Slowly, his surroundings came into focus. At first, all he saw was nothing but black, but then he began to make out details as his eyes adjusted to the dark. He saw a pipe...a puddle of murky water...a metal bar...
As he began to sit up, he realized he had been sleeping on a cold, wet concrete floor, with puddles scattered all around. Water continually dripped from the ceiling, feeding the small pools. Tails internally gagged and started rubbing the side of his body that had been against the floor, trying to get the cold, slimy feeling to go away. As he did that, the fox began glancing around his cell.
The walls were made of dirty concrete, with fungus and mold growing in through the cracks. Exposed pipes lined the ceiling, while a single naked light bulb sticking out of an outlet on the wall provided the only light. Set off to one side was a series of metal bars. They didn't look very sturdy. However, every so often a blue flicker of electricity passed over them, indicating they were electrified. Tails instinctively backed to the other side of the cell away from them...and then he felt himself step on something soft and furry.
"Ow!" the furry thing gasped out. Tails looked down, and saw that he'd stepped on Knuckles' arm.
The room had been so dark that he hadn't seen the echidna. Tails leaned down next to him, as Knuckle started to sit up and cradle his arm.
"Sorry Knuckles," Tails apologized.
"Err...ow... It's okay Tails," he mumbled, rubbing where Tails had stepped on the limb. He took a quick glance around. "Where are we?"
"Oh come on Knuckles," the fox said, rolling his eyes. "Where else would Robotnik take us after he's captured us? Robotropolis!"
"Yeah...I guess it was a stupid question. Is there anyone else in here besides us?"
"Yep..." someone said behind him.
Off in the corner, they saw Nail sitting against a wall. He was covered with a few small scrapes and bruises, and his T-shirt was ripped. However, Tails noticed this was because he'd torn up his shirt to make a makeshift bandage for his leg. Blood seeped through the blue cloth, darkening it to a crimson color.
The half-of-a-robot dog that had been with him was also sitting in the corner, but he must have been turned off or lost power since his eyes weren't glowing.
"You again?" Tails said.
"Yeah..." he snorted, turning to look at the wall.
Knuckles laughed a bit, and started to climb up on his shoulder.
"Wow! It would be totally awesome to kidnap Sonic and his friends for money!" Knuckles said sarcastically, trying to imitate Nail's voice as best as he could. "Oh no! There wasn't any money after all! Now we have to rot in the same jail cell as the people we kidnapped! Boo hoo!"
Nail rolled his eyes and looked at Knuckles. "No shit Sherlock. Thanks for stating the goddamn obvious."
Knuckles smiled a bit, apparently thinking he'd gotten under Nail's skin a bit.
"Now look what going against your own blood has gotten you."
Nail turned back to look at Knuckles.
"What are you talking about?"
"Your little sis Carrie. Do you have any idea how much pain you've caused her? And how much more she'll hate you once this is all over? Now it looks like you're finally getting to pay for it by having to suffer the same fate as us."
Nail hardened his gaze. Knuckles grinned, knowing that he'd hit a soft spot. He continued to speak.
"Why am I even talking to you about this? I bet you don't love her since you were still trying to capture us, so I bet you don't care what happens to her anyway. I bet you'd have kidnapped her too if you were paid to do it."
"Shut your stinking mouth, you son of a bitch," Nail growled, showing his sharp teeth. "You need to stop talking shit about things you don't know about."
"Oooh…struck a nerve, did I?" Knuckles teased.
Nail bared his fangs, as he jumped to his feet and rushed Knuckles. He did it with a surprising agility for someone who had such a bad wound on his leg.
"I still love her you goddamn asshole!" Nail screamed, aiming a fist at Knuckles' face.
Knuckles grinned as he held up a hand to block. However, the smile faded as Knuckles winced in pain from his wounds, and he stopped raising his arm. Nail's punch cleanly connected on Knuckles' face, causing a stream of blood to escape his mouth. Despite being much more injured than Nail though, Knuckles was still no softie. He used his other arm to throw a punch, and his fist caused the fox to bounce backwards like a rubber ball. Nail landed with a splash in one of the murky puddles on the floor.
Nail scrambled to his feet as quickly as he could, while Knuckles got up slow, apparently trying to minimize his aches. Fueled by the demons of rage, the fox plunged a fist into Knuckles' chest as the echidna was standing up. That sent Knuckles colliding into the wall at the back of the cell. Knuckles responded by pushing off the wall and socking Nail clean in the head. That sent the vulpine back down to the floor, into another puddle of water.
While Knuckles advanced towards Nail, the fox struggled to drag himself up off of the floor again. Tails saw his chance to stop the fight, and moved to stand between the two of them. It wasn't easy though with all the burns the electric net had given him. He just managed to do it anyway though.
"Stop it! Both of you!" he shouted. "This isn't helping anything!"
Nail and Knuckles thrashed to get past Tails for a moment, but then they both started to calm down. Finally, Knuckles gave a little 'hmph' and moved to sit against a wall with his eyes closed, while Nail did the same.
"Good," Tails said. "Now…let's just calm down, all right? We're in Robtonik's clutches, so now's not the best time to go hurting each other even more than we are already."
Nail glared at Tails, and then at Knuckles. "...Fine," he spat out, before he resumed staring at the wall.
Knuckles merely grunted in confirmation, not even bothering to open his eyes.
Tails inwardly sighed at his cellmates. They had to think of a way to escape this place before Robotnik tossed them into the roboticizers. That was going to be tricky though when one of his cellmates was turned off, and the other two would rather kill each other than help each other.
Wait... There's only four of us in here? There were seven of us back at that field! What happened to Nack, Canma...and oh no!
"Where's Sonic?" Tails asked.
Knuckles snapped his eyes open and stared at Tails, before taking a quick look around the cell. Meanwhile, Nail just continued to sit against the cell wall, not bothering to respond in any way.
"I never realized he wasn't here until now..." Knuckles said. "You think he's in the next cell over?"
"Maybe..." Tails said, as he got as close to the electrified bars as he could without being shocked.
"Sonic!" Tails cried out. His voice echoed back to him down the hall. The fox waited a few seconds, but there was no reply apart from his own voice bouncing back to him. He decided to try again. "Sonic!"
Again, the echoes were the only answer he got. Now Tails was starting to get a little worried. He tried it again, and this time the echoes sounded even more desperate. Tails found himself even more anxious than before.
"I guess he's not here..." Knuckles said.
"And whatever reason he's not here, it's not good," Tails said.
Tails cast his eyes over to Nail, who was still sitting against the wall with his arms folded. Tails didn't know if Nail knew anything more about Robotnik's plans than they did, but he figured it was worth a try to ask him since he was one of the people who'd gotten the mission in the first place to capture them.
"Nail?" Tails asked.
"What do you want?" Nail shot back, sounding very harsh in his delivery. He didn't even bother to look at Tails or open his eyes.
"Um..." the other fox started. "How much did you know about the job that Robotnik gave to you?"
Nail let out a sigh, before opening his eyes to look at the younger fox.
"Well...since we're all in the same boat anyway and the mission was just a hoax, why not tell you?" he replied. "On Merc Net...we were told that Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles would all be at the Grakoran Tournament for a few days. All we had to do was capture you and deliver you alive to that field we were fighting in before, and then we get paid. The client was a pig calling himself Kenny Oviron. Obviously, it was just an alias and the money was never real."
"Were you told anything else?" Knuckles asked.
"Nope...that was it. The job details were pretty vague, yes, but the money was so good that me and Redrum didn't really care. Now though I know why we weren't told a lot when we signed on."
Tails frowned, looking down at the floor. He hadn't expected any useful info from Nail, and that's about what he got. Oh well, it was worth a shot. However, a question just crossed his mind.
"How'd Robotnik know we'd be at the tournament?" Tails asked.
Before Nail could open his mouth, someone else answered for him.
"Because I bought the tickets."
Tails recognized the voice in an instant, and turned around to look towards the cell bars. A large dark shadow crossed through the darkness on the other side. Since there was no light outside the cells, the shadows mostly covered his body. However, the occasional flicker of the electricity in the bars illuminated his face, showing it was Robotnik. A most sinister grin was plastered across his face.
"President Rudot never gave you those tickets as a reward," Robotnik said, speaking again. "I'm the one who did it. It was to draw all of you out into one place, to make it easy for my bounty hunters to capture you. Did you enjoy your vacation?"
Knuckles and Tails cast hard glares at Robotnik, and didn't say anything.
"You didn't like it?" Robotnik said, with sarcastic shock. He clasped his hands together. "But I paid so much money for them! It's so...horrible they went to waste!"
He buried his head into his hands and mock cried.
"Cut the crap Robotnik!" Knuckles screamed. "Why'd you send all these little bounty hunters after us anyway?"
Putting his hands down again, Robotnik smiled.
"Well...since most of my robots never seem to do any good in stopping you, I figured I might try something new this time to capture you. So..." He pointed at Nail. "I rounded up a few scoundrels like him to do my bidding, and I have to wonder why I didn't come up with this idea sooner."
Robotnik smiled at Nail.
"You did a fine job, Mr. Strafer."
Nail frowned at him, before he looked the other way and stuck out the middle finger on his left hand at Robotnik.
"Fine fine..." Robotnik said with a smile. "Ignore my praise if you like. It's not like I really need you anymore. Well...except for one last thing..."
"What's that?" Nail asked, staring at the wall.
"You'll find out soon. Oh, Tails and Knuckles. You get to join in too. But for now, I want all of you to rest. See you tomorrow, Heh heh..."
He walked out of sight of the bars, and then there was the slam of a closing metal door. About two seconds after that, a low hissing sound filled the air. Tails didn't need to guess to know what that was. He pulled out his oxygen bottle. Unfortunately, he'd used up all the oxygen trying to keep Nack's gas from knocking him out earlier. It looked like Knuckles had the same result with his bottle. The echidna let out a sigh, as he let the bottle fall from his hand and bounce across the floor.
"Great..."
The familiar Sconocea gas seeped into the room through vents, quickly filling the entire space. Tails tried to resist going to sleep, but it was no use. He was out in less than a minute.
One day later…As Tails started to wake up again, he noticed something odd. He didn't feel himself sleeping against the wet concrete floor of his jail cell this time, but instead against smooth, polished metal. Opening his eyes, the fox realized he was inside a gigantic dome-shaped room. It felt familiar somehow. As his eyesight came into focus, it finally hit him.
This was the Robot Generator room, and it looked very much the same as the last time Tails had been here. There were only two differences. The Robot Generator was gone, which wasn't a surprise. It had collapsed to pieces while they were here. The second difference was the cracks in the floor left behind when the generator came crashing down and left holes in the floor. They hadn't been repaired.
A few months ago, Robotnik sent Tails, Sonic, and Knuckles on a mission to stop the Robot Generator to this very room before it exploded. At least, that was the mission, until it turned out to be nothing but a trap to get Sonic into Robotropolis. Before they realized what was happening, Robotnik had scanned Sonic's life data and raised Metal Sonic...
Tails blinked.
I just had a terrible thought... What if Robotnik has—
Tails was interrupted by a groan off to the side. He looked, and saw that Knuckles was lying on the floor with him. The echidna had a bandage over the wound on his head, and more bandages around his arms. Instinctively, Tails looked down and noticed that he'd received bandages covering his cuts and everything as well. Knuckles stirred again, and mumbled a bit more in his sleep. Tails crouched down next to him to wake him up, but the echidna's eyes were already starting to open.
"Hey Knuckles," Tails said. "How do you feel?" he asked.
"Err...fine, I guess," he replied. Knuckles got into a sitting position, and stretched as he yawned. "I feel like I was never in that battle that we were in."
He brushed his hand across his forehead, and felt the bandage. His eyes widened open.
"What? What's this?" he asked.
"It looks like…" Tails started. "Robotnik fixed our injuries. What's going on? Why would he do this for us?"
"I dunno Tails," Knuckles said, as he stood up. He started to stretch his arms and do some punches. "But I feel great. It feels like I was never in that fight yesterday.
"Me too," Tails said, standing up. "But, while it's good that we've been healed, I don't think now's the time to celebrate. We're still in Robotnik's hands, and we've got no idea what's going on. I don't think he'd heal us just to be nice, but because of something that he's planning."
"You think?" Knuckles asked. "I can't think of any evil reason he'd wanna heal us..."
Suddenly, a loud whirring sound in the ceiling of the room interrupted him. Tails looked up, and saw a sight he wished he would never see again.
A glowing purple sphere descended through a door opening in the top of the dome, and inside the sphere he could see the outline of a hedgehog robot. And it was starting to move... It was the Metal Sonic incident all over again, only this time Metal Sonic looked even deadlier than ever before. As the sphere came downwards more it faded slowly, and Tails could examine the robot in detail.
The blue robot looked to be about one and a half times bigger than the original Metal Sonic, which allowed more room for a larger jet engine in its back. Several long spikes extended from the head. White streaks ran down each spike, in addition to the armor covering his arms and legs. The metallic armor sparkled in the fluourescent like it was made of diamond. Claws extended out of both the hands as well as the feet, and each one of them looked to be at least a foot long. A black cape ruffled around behind the robot as he descended to the floor, extending out from black shoulder pads covering the upper arms. The eyes glowed an eerie red, like hot coals. Overall, the machine looked even more evil than the first Metal Sonic had been.
"Tails and Knuckles, meet Metal Sonic version 2.0!" Robotnik's voice said, booming out over a loud speaker.
Tails closed his eyes, trying to erase from his memory what he'd just saw, but it was no use. His fears had been confirmed. Metal Sonic was back once again, looking stronger than ever, and this time Robotnik had him and all of his friends under his thumb. How were they ever going to stop the mad doctor from conquering the world now?