Anonymous Review Replies!
FoxFan: I think the Ninetales would see the absolute vortex of chaos that is Sonic and his friends on a mission and decide that her little daredevil almost-foxkit has the best-fitting family of choice there is :P
Chapter 16: Chaos Eleven
"Okay." Sonic was already kneeling on the ground in the position of a sprinter. "Everyone all set? Everyone know what to do?"
"Sure do!"
"You can count on us!"
"Can we get going yet?"
In the narrow, dark alley on the other side of the street from the museum, the only light illuminating the four small figures was that of Tails' laptop, shielded from view of the sidewalk by some conveniently arranged trash cans. Sonic, Amy and Knuckles were peering out behind them, while Tails was sitting on the ground, intently staring at the screen before breaking out into a grin.
"Got it! Hacked into their wi-fi and system, I should be able to open any door or window you need from here. Just tell me when and which door or window you're in front of via your communicators. Also, contact me whenever you need directions – remember, since I have the translator and its range won't extend to you, you won't be able to read or understand anything you see or hear," Tails gave them a meaningful glance, holding up his wrist with professor Oak's translation device. They knew he needed it to be able to work the laptop, but it was an inconvenience that they still only had the one so far.
"We know. But Robotnik's labs hardly ever had signposts either and we managed," Sonic gave a confident grin. So let's go!"
Xxx
Oh yeah. This feels more like it, rushed through Sonic's head as he zoomed up the side of the building that housed the museum, cool night air blowing past his spines. Breaking into a place, stealing a Chaos Emerald? Finally some familiar territory compared to the weirdo customs and traditions of this place they had been dealing with all week, here…
The wall abruptly came to an end beneath his feet and Sonic used the momentum to somersault and flip himself onto the rooftop, coming to a three-point-landing right in front of a skylight.
"Jackpot," he grinned. "Tails, can you hear me? I'm on the roof, can you find some sort of unlocking mechanism for the window up here?"
"Yup, got it right here," the electronically buzzy voice of his brother crackled through his receiver. "Good luck!"
"Nice work," Sonic muttered appreciatively as the sky light gave an ever so subtle click at his feet, opening up easily as he knelt and hoisted it upwards.
Heh. Rouge would be proud, he chuckled internally as he peered into the darkness of what had to be the president's office, right before dropping down nearly soundlessly onto the thick carpet below.
Xxx
Knuckles watched as Sonic zipped away and up the building and Amy made her way quickly across the street into the side alley next to the museum to find a window to break into. This was going well so far. With any luck, they'd be home by morning.
With a last nod toward Tails, Knuckles bent down and lifted the manhole cover at his feet, easily jumping down into the sewer tunnel below. Echidnas were a burrowing species with fantastic night vision and he always appreciated how humans tended to have a handy tunnel system beneath their cities to get you where you wanted to go undetected.
At least, Knuckles thought as he had walked along the tunnel to the spot where he estimated the cellars of the museum to be, it works if you can punch through walls.
He smirked and drew his fist back.
xxx
"Alright, I'm in," Sonic whispered into the communicator, flicking on a small torch and cautiously peering around the lavish bureau. It was decorated with framed oil pictures, heavy velvet curtains before the large window in the wall, and an impressive, jungly array of exotic-looking potted plants on the other side of the room. Sonic walked around a few steps before he stopped in front of a large metal box set into the shelving opposite the broad mahogany desk. "I think I found the safe, too. How do I open it?"
"Hold on, let me pull up the combination…."
Sonic pressed close to the safe door as he followed the instructions the kit read out, one ear flat against the metal to listen for the tell-tale clicks and clacks of the safe's locks sliding open. Even the numbers on the dial were now unfamiliar symbols, except for "1", which was also written as a single line in this culture, so it was thankfully easy enough to count upwards from there. Finally, with the last turn of the old-fashioned dial, the door slowly slid open, revealing…
"Tails?"
"Yeah?"
"The only thing in this damn safe is what looks like a picture of the museum director's family. I'm pretty sure in this cutesy universe this is heart-warming somewhere, but right now also pretty friggin usele-"
"Sonic!" Tails panicked voice cut him off abruptly, "There's somebody coming! Hide NOW!"
"Oh sh-" Sonic slammed the safe shut and broke off his own curse, both because Tails was listening and also because more noise was the last thing he needed now. He frantically looked around for anywhere, anyplace in the office he could hide.
Xxx
Plaster hit the floor of the museum's cellar with a crackling spray as a fist smashed through a wall in the near-darkness of the emergency exit lights. A second fist followed soon after and a chunk to create a hole just large enough for, say, one anthropomorphic echidna approximately 3 feet and 2 inches tall, crashed down next to it.
"Tails? I'm in," Knuckles curtly announced into his communicator before switching it off again. He preferred working alone.
He looked around the corridor he had arrived in. Storage boxes lined it on both sides, but there was also the slight suggestion of fresher air and therefore recently used rooms coming from one side, so he turned and followed that. And stopped when he heard voices.
And even if he didn't have the translator, he wouldn't have needed to know a single word to understand what they said.
"Urgh, I don't understand why the boss wants us to steal this thing now all of a sudden –"
"Well, I fink da boss wants to trade it wid dat weird guy for somefing, but after you guys botched capturing dat crazy red fing, we really need to quit yacking and get somefing right-"
"SHHH! James, Meowth, will you shut up! We're gonna get-"
Which was exactly when Knuckles rounded the corner and through an open door saw the three members of Team Rocket, currently busy trying to crack a glass case that very prominently held a certain Emerald.
What happened next, happened very fast.
"YOU!" Knuckles pointed.
Team Rocket whirled around, abruptly terrified. "THE THING!"
Next, there was a combined shout that sounded something like "ArbokweezingsvictreebellGO!", Knuckles had barely time to realize there were suddenly Pokéballs flying, and then there was the noise of one very surprised Echidna being buried abruptly by three monsters that should never have been released in a very enclosed and very narrow corridor.
Xxx
"H-hello? Anyone here?" the door of the director's office creaked open and a beam of light sliced through the darkness, closely followed by the freckled face of a young man wearing a security guard cap poking through. "If there is anyone in here, you're not supposed to be so!"
The room remained utterly silent. The sound of steps followed as the guard hesitantly walked into the office, the beam of his flashlight travelling over the furniture in the room, but not snagging on anything.
"Huh," the young man muttered, sounding more like he was talking to himself than anyone else. "Nothing out of the ordinary…but I could have sworn I'd heard something." He paused a minute longer, squinting into the darkness. Then he shrugged and turned to leave. "Oh well..."
"Rrrrrr…rrf!"
"Hm?" Now the guard looked down at the dog-like Pokémon he held on his leash. "What is it, Growlithe? There's nothing in here. What do you want?"
"Growwwr…!" the Pokémon sniffed and barked again, pulling at its leash in turn and refusing to budge. Now the guard frowned and started tugging harder, but as Growlithes also tended to be the size of full-grown tigers, this didn't help much.
"Stop it! This isn't anything for you to chew on!" the young guard now sounded just a tad exasperated, much like someone who would much rather have a quiet sit-down night and didn't quite understand why his Pokémon side-kick couldn't quite see it that way. "Come, now, let's just continue our rounds and –"
Which was, of course, the moment the Growlithe bit into a rather spiky pot plant, and the pot plant screamed.
Xxx
"Tails?" Amy asked. "Opening the window worked. I'm in."
"Great. Make your way north, that's where the lab is. I'll work on unlocking the door."
"Roger. Over," Amy whispered into her communicator before silently slipping down the corridor and across the exhibit hall they had seen earlier today, heading for the back of the museum where the laboratory was located. She couldn't hear any alarms or fighting sounds from above or below where Sonic and Knuckles were supposed to break in, so she supposed their missions had been going smoothly as well so far.
"Daaa, daaa, daaa, daaa; daaa, daaa, daaa, daaa, da-da, da-DAH, da-da-da…"
"Amy?" Tails' voice crackled back through the speaker.
"Yes?"
"Stop humming the James Bond theme."
"Ugh. Fine."
Amy rolled her eyes but quieted down, closing the distance to the laboratory door and slipping inside. The beam of her flashlight illuminated the room in front of her, a fairly typical lab stuffed chock-full with strange machines and small labelled plastic boxes.
"Nothing here that looks like an Emerald at first glance…"
Tails didn't reply. Amy supposed he was probably talking to one of the others on a separate channel and pulled a face. Maybe that meant one of the others had found the Emerald. Pity. It would have been nice to have been faster than Sonic for once…
Well, as long as the mission wasn't called off, the lab still warranted a thorough search. There was a collection of what looked like large slate slabs leaning against a wall and various rocks lying on tables in front of them, so it was logical to assume that if the Chaos Emerald was here, it might be in that area. Amy scanned the tall stone slabs in front of her, squinting at a very large one in particular that seemed to have been made out of spiral-shaped fossils, pressed together so tightly that there easily could have been hundreds of them.
"Huh." Amy walked closer and trailed a hand against its rough, ridged surface. In front of her a large shelving wall was filled with labelled boxes upon boxes and her shoulders slumped a little. This could take ages…
"This would be so much easier if they didn't insist on using that stupid language of theirs. Why can't they speak New Mobian like everyone else," Amy muttered under her breath and was about to start pulling boxes out when she paused. Her gaze snagged on a large machine of some sort. A machine that almost looked like….
"Tails? Tails, come in! I think I found another one of those translating machines! Should I switch it on?" Amy asked excitedly into her communicator. "That would make looking for everything so much easier!"
"Sorry Amy, not now, I need to-shoot!"
Amy rolled her eyes as the transmission broke off. Was it too much to ask to be able to work for once with professionals?
"Don't wanna help me, fine. I'll get this thing to work myself, then." Amy scowled at her communicator for a moment before turning back to the strange machine again. Her gaze fell onto a large, conveniently-placed lever and she pulled it.
The fact that the machine wasn't in fact a translator like in professor Oak's lab was very unfortunate, because then at least Amy would have been able to read the big sheet of paper taped to the very same machine, reading "Seymour! Seriously, STOP USING THE MACHINE to bring the friggin dead fossils back to life this random kid constantly drags in!".
(Of course, if this had been a translator, that sheet of paper also wouldn't have been on it. Such are the intricacies of What-if scenarios.)
As it was, Amy didn't have much time to think about either possibility, mostly because the large slab of stone immediately exploded into hundreds of now very much alive ammonoid Pokémon.
Xxx
"Tails! Better open any and all doors, because I'll need them soon!"
"Uh, shoot," Tails could feel sweat prickling underneath the fur on his brow at Sonic's panicked shouts, the fox kit despite his young age already very familiar with the overtones of a mission about to go south.
"Tails? Tails, come in! I think I found another one of those translating machines! Should I switch it-?"
"Sorry Amy, not now, I need to-shoot!" Tails hit another key on the keyboard, switching his frequency back to Sonic's. There were sounds of crashing furniture and a dog barking in the background now and he internally sighed.
"Okay, Sonic, lemme just-"
"Rattata?"
"No, not now," Tails replied, staring at the screen while his fingers flew over the keyboard, "I need to get these doors open."
"Rattata."
"Look, I said-" Tails broke off, mostly because he had just realized he had no idea who he was talking to. "Uh…."
He looked up. And came abruptly face to face with a small horde of large purple rat creatures that seemed to have surrounded him, all presided over by a giant brown rat creature. The giant rat extended a claw to point at Tails.
"RATTICATE," it intoned.
"Oh," Tails said, "Oh no."
The rattata swarm attacked.
xxx
"Growlithe! Catch that thing!"
"ROFF!"
"What-the-why-do-even-the-guards-have-frigging-Pokémon-in-this-place-this-SUCKS-!"
Sonic was currently tearing down the corridor like a hedgehog possessed, a ball of flame (of course a ball of flame, what else) singing his heels. The Pokémon of the guard, a sort of large, dog-like creature but with a pelt like a tiger, was bounding after him and breathing flame in its pursuit. It wasn't much faster than a normal feral dog or wolf, but given their surroundings of dark, narrow corridors unfamiliar in their layout to Sonic but not to the dog, escaping wasn't that easy.
"Tails! Better open any and all doors, because I'll need them soon!" Sonic yelled into his receiver, careening around a corner, hoping to be able to find his way back to the lower floors – the rooms there were larger and it would be far easier to escape from there.
xxx
"Tails?! Tails!"
"Oh chaos, just one moment – agh!" Tails kicked at a rattata that had leapt up on a trash can and tried to get at him; the young fox had taken off the moment the rat creatures had apparently believed him to be food of some sort, and was ascending in the alley now, dodging leaping rats, still-open laptop clutched securely in both hands while Sonic's stressed shouts crackled in his ears. "There are – there are some sort of trash Pokémon even here, this place sucks-"
"Yeah, tell me about it," came Sonic's terse reply. "Tails, you need to open the doors NOW or else I'll have to crash through them!"
"Yeah, yeah, on it-!"
Which was the exact moment one of the rats leapt up and bit at Tails' wrist hard enough that the translator was cleanly bitten in half. Tails blinked as abruptly, all of the perfectly legible words of the hacking program on his screen and all the letters on his keyboard had turned into complete and utter gibberish.
"Oh. Uh. Fudge."
To be continued…
Raise your hands who expected this to end any differently? Uh-huh. As always, would love to hear any lines or parts you particularly liked and if you read, please review! :D