Anonymous Review Replies!
Guest: Thank you! And yes, I will not ever pass a chance up for the most stupid memes possible :D
LoneGarurumon: Hahah, nice to know I can still surprise :P And hm, personal headcanon is that in a normal Pokéball, Knuckles would go to Angel Island and Tails to his workshop in his house in the Mystic Ruins, but - they weren't exactly caught by normal Pokéballs, were they...:P Also, Robotnik and Team Rocket were a scene I have been waiting to write for literal years. Thanks so much for your continuing reviews, as always :D
Recap Time!
When we last saw our heroes, evil scientist extraordinaire, Dr. Ivo Robotnik, had just shown up over the Xenocup Tournament - and released hundreds upon hundreds of so-called 'Snag Balls', designed to capture already-owned Pokémon - and another version captured humans! As one of the first of our protagonists to fall victim to this contraption, Sonic awoke to find himself in what could only be described as Glitch City, a virtual world where all 'habitats' of the captured Pokémon ran into one another. Fortunately, there seems to be a way to manipulate this environment and one of these environments is rather special indeed...
Chapter 25: The Internet Is For Po...kémon...
Sonic and Shadow were running along corridors aboard the Space Colony ARK.
This was nothing new in itself, nor something they hadn't done before - the main difference was that this time they weren't trying to kill each other (or trying to stop a giant murderous space lizard) and also that this time the ARK was ending approximately 2 metres behind and in front of them, currently also bordered by water on the one side and a desert on the other.
Also, Sonic was carrying a Pikachu in his arms which was staring at the entire thing in amazement and their running seemed to be a bit...erratic.
"Okay, you do know where the computer room is, right?" Sonic asked as Shadow had paused, frowned and then took another turn through another door, the corridor rendering itself in front of them as they ran through, dodging startled Pokémon in their wake.
"The layout of the ARK is complicated, okay?" Shadow snapped back, somehow slightly more agitated than the situation warranted, Sonic thought, but then again, 'high-strung' was usually default-mode for the black hedgehog.
"Okay, okay," Sonic tried to calm the other down. He was also doing the best he could to concentrate on his memories from the ARK when he had visited, and for the creepy virtual world engine that was apparently enough to now replicate a 'habitat block' three times the normal size for their trio, all of them racing through the abandoned space colony together. Sonic was also pretty sure Pikachu hadn't been on the station, but maybe it was enough if the Pokémon simply actively suppressed its own default habitat?
"Ah-hah!" Shadow blazed to a stop in front of one of the doors, then typed in something on the little keypad next to it and the door opened with a hiss. Inside, there were indeed several large terminals in the center and screens above them, the walls consisting of glowing server panels, matrix-like power lines forming a green grid around them, red and blue lights blinking in random intervals and next to control boards set in between the paneling.
"Right. And now what?" Shadow asked as they stepped inside, ignoring how half of the room across from them was currently a large wall of water home to various fish Pokémon staring at them. Sonic walked over to one of the terminals, pressing a button at random to bring the screen above to life.
"Well, I was kind of hoping that - oh. Cool, it worked! I, uh, think, anyway…"
"You think that's a control interface for our current environment?" Shadow asked, stepping up next to him. All three of them were currently looking up at the screen displaying a simple text box with two options labelled "Ivo's PC" and "Log Off", a small triangular cursor currently hovering before the first one.
"It looks like it could be, right?" Sonic asked, rubbing one of his ears. "I mean, I don't know why, but-"
"Probably because an actual computer - nevermind one as powerful as the ARK's core - would be too complicated for this artificial environment to replicate, so it defaulted to having it as a system interface instead," Shadow said with narrowed eyes. "Try 'Ivo's computer'."
"Right," Sonic, used to people technobabbling at him under even more strenuous circumstances, nodded and hit the ENTER button, which let a new text box appear, this one with the options "Storage Humans" and "Storage Fleabags", the cursor again blinking in front of the first one.
"Huh. Seems like Egghead didn't have the greatest run-in with the first Pokémon he met," Sonic said, lips twitching. "Serves him right."
"Go to the second one," Shadow said, not to be distracted. "That's where we should be 'stored', right?"
Sonic navigated down and clicked, the screen abruptly filling with names upon names displayed like files in an explorer window, listed alphabetically and ending with a small 'return' arrow probably meant to navigate to the higher level again.
"Looks like it. Hey, there we are," Sonic said, having rapidly scrolled down until he had come to the names starting with 'S', 'Sonic' and 'Shadow' neatly inserted in between more unfamiliar ones like 'Snorlax' or 'Seaking'. "This is super weird, by the way."
"Try clicking on one of them," Shadow said, ignoring him. "Preferably not one of us, just in case you manage to accidentally delete the file."
"Chuuu?!" Pikachu protested, and Sonic shifted it with the arm he kept it cradled in. "Yeah, no worries, I won't. Shadow is just being optimistic as always."
"Click on the one named...'Sharpedo'?" Shadow raised his eyeridges at the word. "At least, with a name like that, deletion might actually be desirable for the creature."
"Shads, seriously-" Sonic shot back, but did as the black hedgehog suggested; as he clicked on the file, another box of options sprang up next to it, the words inside reading 'Move', 'Summary' and 'Release', though the last option was greyed out.
"Hrm," Sonic looked at the options, eyes narrowed. "Well. Guess that would have been too easy. Man, I wish Tails were here, I'm sure he'd have some idea how to enable that 'release' button again…"
"Well, let's try the next best thing," Shadow said, stepping closer to the keyboard, ignoring the herd of rattatas skittering past, turning the ARK temporarily into a half-glitched garbage container before they were gone again. Shadow hit the 'enter' key on the 'Move' option.
"Huh. Seems like Egghead really only programmed these two giant storage boxes," Sonic said, looking at the screen now displaying a 'Move to' window, the options being 'Storage Humans' and 'Return'. "I'd say you click 'return' on that one, Shads. Try to move someone from the other box here instead."
"Preferably the fox kid, I'm guessing," Shadow said, already moving back through the menus, scrolling through the name list in the 'Storage Humans' box.
"Well, I mean-" Sonic shuffled a bit, shifting Pikachu again, but Shadow waved him off.
"Spare me. If there was Maria in the other box, I'd get her first, too."
"Pika-Pikapi?" Pikachu piped up, squirming to get a better look at the screen and then at Sonic's face.
"Yeah, we'll get Ash too, no worries. Only my kid bro might actually have some ideas how to not accidentally install Windows Vista or something on this thing while fumbling about, so he is definitely our first pick, okay?"
"Pi," Pikachu commented what Sonic hoped meant acknowledgement of his argument, and settled back against his chest. They both watched Shadow scroll through the list of names, hundreds, their friends' names thankfully somewhat standing out by the three word 'Name the Species' format compared to the humans, who seemed to have a First Name - Last Name naming convention like those on Earth.
"There," Shadow said, hitting the enter key on 'Tails the Fox_Miles Prower" and then onto 'Move' - only for the screen to immediately display an error message.
"'File is restricted and cannot be moved'" Sonic read aloud. A few more clicks on other names of their friends and even the humans yielded the same result. "Oh, come on-"
"Well. If the mountain can't come to the prophet," Shadow commented and Sonic turned his head.
"Say what? Did Eggman scramble your speech programming?"
"What I meant is that if we can't move any of the others here, then we might need to go there," Shadow rolled his eyes. "Illiterate."
"Nerd," Sonic shot back without missing a beat, "You think we might not be 'restricted'?"
"Pretty sure," Shadow nodded. "I think the problem is with the file extensions - look, everyone in the human box is saved as a .zip."
"Of course," Sonic nodded. "This makes everything clear."
"Oh for - it means they're compressed. And possibly password-protected," Shadow said, displaying some of the same exasperation Tails usually did whenever he tried to explain anything computer-related to Sonic, only Shadow seemed to get twitchier far faster. "So. We need to go there and figure out how to unzip them."
"This sounds incredibly wrong."
"More wrong than the whole 'ball' business this world has going on?" Shadow asked flatly and Sonic winced.
"Point taken. Okay. Try and move me to their box and I'll see what I can do."
Shadow threw him a look - Sonic got the impression that if this were Tails, or maybe even Knuckles, they might have asked 'You sure?' but Shadow then merely nodded, navigating back and scrolling down toward the 'Sonic the Hedgehog' entry. Sonic swallowed as his name flashed up and Shadow selected 'Move' and then let the cursor hover next to 'Storage Humans' now suddenly feeling a bit apprehensive. Even with the weird trainer ID number around your wrist in this virtual world, it didn't feel like you merely existed as a...file (or program?) but knowing someone was about to just essentially Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V you somewhere else at the press of a button was something else entirely.
"Alright. Let's make this a recon mission first. I'll move you there for a minute, then move you back," Shadow said. "Unless you want to try it with one of these 'Pokémon' first."
"They're not lab animals, Shadow," Sonic pointed out, also setting Pikachu down on the console. "We try this with one of us or not at all."
"I've been a lab animal, Sonic, and the way these humans treated me wasn't much different," Shadow retorted, unimpressed. "But go ahead, your funeral. Ready?"
"With an uplifting speech like that, how could I not be?" Sonic replied dryly, then crossed his arms. "Okay. Hit me."
As instructed, Shadow hit the enter key, and everything went dark.
xxx
"Uuoooh," Sonic groaned for the second time that day. Getting dis- and re-assembled as a data file kept feeling like you just tried a Chaos Control when hungover and now your spleen was on the wrong side. Also, he was lying on a cold steel floor and right now becoming aware that there was an entire cacophony of sounds and shouting and wailing voices surrounding him, deafening in its intensity.
"Uuugh, please be quiet-" Sonic winced, hands instinctively pressing on top of his ears as he tried to get to his knees, shaking his head and blinking to get rid of the dizziness of being "moved" - and then froze when he actually beheld his surroundings.
There were cages.
Two near-endless rows of cages, on both sides of the steel-walled, steel-floored corridor he was staring down, and each cage held a human.
The cages were barely tall enough for them to stand in and not nearly long enough to lie down.
It means they're compressed, Shadow's voice repeated itself in his head and Sonic had a brief, irrational stab of guilt for every time he had ever re-sized an email attachment -
"Hey, there's a Pokémon!"
Sonic's head snapped around at a man's voice calling out and his eyes fell on a human looking approximately in his twenties, standing in his cage and pointing at him - and now other humans turning, noticing him as well.
"Yeah! I think it's that new Pokémon from the last contestant!" A girl clutching the bars of her cage exclaimed. "What is it doing here?"
"Maybe it can get us out!" Another boy next to her called out, at once dropping into a crouch, stretching a hand through the bars of his cage, rubbing his fingertips together. "Hey, come here, li'l guy. C'mon, I'm sure you can destroy these bars, c'mon, c'mon-" he beckoned, looking at Sonic hopefully, who was feeling just slightly overtaxed with the situation.
"Uh…" he briefly sized the cages up - they looked like they were made of ordinary steel, so if this were reality, Sonic guessed he should be able to slice through them with a well-aimed spin-dash (Eggman had long since learned that imprisoning Sonic with anything less than full-body restraints or behind super-reinforced bars was SUCH a bad idea), the only danger was that the human inside would have to curl up really small so Sonic wouldn't accidentally hurt them.
Which was when he heard the scuttling.
"Huh?" Sonic turned his head, eye ridges rising as the sound of metal clacking got louder, the noise emanating from the corner on his right - and then his eyes widened ever more when he saw the first wave of spider-like orange robots, each no more than half a metre tall, but a lot of them, flow out from the end of the corridor towards him, bots tumbling over another in their many-legged haste to get at him.
"Containment breach detected!"
"Webcrawler alert! Alert! Uncompressed file!"
"DELETE!"
"Uh, yeah. No," Sonic said and promptly turned tail and ran, the humans in the cages yelping and shouting after him.
"No! Don't leave us here!"
"Oh my god, what on Earth are they?!"
"MOM! Help me, where are you?!"
"Sorry, sorry-!" Sonic winced as he dashed past the trapped people, the expressions of the terrified younger kids especially tugging at his heart strings, but a glance at the pursuing crab robots behind him at least confirmed that they left the human prisoners alone, just intent on catching him.
"Oh shoot, oh shoot-AGH!" Sonic cried out as one of them dropped onto his head from above, a panicked glance upwards revealing an opened hatch in the metal ceiling where more of them had come crawling out and were now scurrying along the walls and the roof of the corridor - or falling down onto him like a species of predatory oranges.
"Get off, get OFF-!" Sonic grunted, yanking at the fat body of the spider-like robot clinging to his head, inwardly shuddering as its legs were dragging over his skin, tapping and sucking, feeling almost as if they were trying to insert themselves into his body-
"Wha-?" Sonic's eyes grew wide as for a moment, his right upper arm seemed to flicker for a second, blue fur and peach skin underneath replaced by green numbers on black void for just a beat of his heart before they were back to normal.
"Incongruous file type. Attempting compression."
"Oh like hell you will-" Sonic began, still wrestling with the spider-thing, right before suddenly bars began to flicker to life in front of his eyes, not quite there yet, but-
"Fine. I tried to go without collateral damage, but you're asking for it." Sonic gritted his teeth, then abruptly leapt into the air, over another wave of webcrawler bots coming at him from the front and curled up as soon as he was airborne - before starting to spin at sonic speed, quills on his back fanning out to deadly blades able to cut through steel, the spider creature on his head dislodged immediately by the centrifugal force, smashing into pieces on the floor.
The barely-there bars in the air flickered and disappeared with the bot's lost hold and Sonic used the chance to plow forward into the mass of writhing webcrawler bodies, shredding crab-like limbs and orange shells like someone absolutely determined to get their money's worth at a seafood buffet - but even as he did, he could feel his own momentum slowing, threatening to grind to a halt by the sheer quantity and weight of the robots trying to get at him, limbs everywhere twitching to rewrite the data that made up his body. It took all Sonic had to not let a shudder run through him and thereby ruin his own spin, but with a supreme effort of will he managed a final burst of speed instead, busting out the other side of the webcrawler pile in a shower of spasming metal legs, fizzing, broken bodies and shrapnel cascading onto the floor with him.
"Oh god, it's that thing! The blue thing! That's friends with the red thing!"
"What's it doing here?!"
Sonic's head snapped up from the crouch he had landed in after spinning to slice his way through the robots, aware of more of them already clawing through the pile of their broken brethren, only moments to spare for him before he would have to fight them off anew.
But those voices sounded familiar.
"You guys?" Sonic's voice expressed his disbelief as his gaze fell upon the two humans next to him in their cages (albeit without their cat Pokémon). "Didn't you - weren't you literally exploded or something-?"
"Wait, you can talk?" the man, James, stared at him with wide eyes, before reaching through the bars of his cage and shaking the woman by the arm. "Jessie, it can talk!"
"I can see that, you idiot!" The woman snatched her arm back, before also trying a sugary-sweet smile at Sonic (who felt a bit overtaxed with the current situation). "Heyyyy there, li'l guy, do you think you could possibly maybe get us out of here…?"
"Uh-" Sonic took another step back, the other humans in the cages next to Jessie and James mostly pressing themselves against the back wall to avoid the parts that had flown around when Sonic had spun through the pile of robots and were now silently staring at their exchange - until another spider-crab-thing was suddenly hurled from around the corner, shattering against the wall there, along with a scream of primal rage that Sonic thought was difficult to imitate.
Team Rocket, actually, seemed to recognize it as well and went immediately as pale as the wall plating.
"Oh god."
"It's here."
"Knuckles?!" Sonic shouted, immediately disregarding the human pair and - seeing as there were some robots already crawling towards him and now almost in reach now of him - started to run toward the corner of the corridor where the webcrawler bot had been hurled from.
"I will - crush you -! When I get my hands on that human I swear I will-Sonic!" Knuckles, wrist-deep in crushed crab robots, more of them trying to claw at him by the minute, froze for a moment as he saw Sonic - and then immediately narrowed his eyes.
"I swear, if you say anything along the lines of 'Long time no-'"
"Long time? Knux, we have no time - yeesh!" Sonic yelped, jumping back as a claw of a particularly forward webcrawler bot tried to close itself around his leg. "How'd you get here?"
"Got caught in one of the Doctor's contraptions, woke up in a cage, busted out - only there doesn't seem to be an exit anywhere," Knuckles grunted, still punching at the spider-like robots trying to overwhelm him, kicking them off his feet and struggling to get out of their midst, the entire scenario akin a rather aggressive stomp dance performance. "Please tell me you know how to get out of here," he managed, for the first time a glimmer of apprehension visible in his eyes, as they were starting to get surrounded by crabs on all sides.
"Well, it's not really a physical exit, we're in this weirdo virtual world-" Sonic began, also edging closer to Knuckles, the two of them now in the midst of a ring of ever more towering webcrawlers in what was possibly the epitome of a 'crabby' situation, the corridor on both sides stuffed with the things, a twitching, clicking, seething mass threatening to engulf them by sheer numbers no matter their speed or power or strength.
"So what do we do?" Knuckles asked, voice tense, their shoulders finally bumping together as the available floorspace was getting ever smaller. "If these things catch us-"
Which was, of course, the moment one of those things finally got ahold of Sonic's leg, plunging its cable-like limb into his thigh and things flickered into darkness for a second time that day, Knuckles' shocked face the last thing he saw.
To be continued...
Whew! That was once again a MASSIVE break (IRL stuff, real life full time job now here'n all) but I do hope everyone who enjoyed this story is still reading and had fun with the new chapter! So if you read, please review, would love to hear what you think!