Anonymous Review Replies!
Guest: Thank you! Sonic and Shadow are my favourite two characters so I'm always happy to write interactions between the two, now that Shadow is finally here :D More of that incoming!
MyName: Ahahah, that is EXACTLY what I was going for, glad it worked!
Jet The Hedgehog: I'm glad I'm not too old so that people still got that joke, but yeah, one of my fav lines in the chapter XD Thanks for pointing it out, I love hearing which jokes in particular landed well!
Nobody: It's a bit of a running joke in my fics, glad you read further ;P
Sarah: Thank you for all those reviews! :D I'm glad you're enjoying the story, I had fun with the Poképuff concept - they look so delicious, but the ingredients are so gross! XD
Guest: Rules are made to be broken, otherwise all stories would be predictable, no? :P And yeah, I figure Robotnik made a suitably impressive entrance? XD
LazyWriterLady: Aw thank you! I try :) Please enjoy the next chapter!
Recap Time!
Well, when we last left our heroes, Sonic and Shadow had been transported to a strange virtual world that seemed to be a containment box for all the Pokémon captured by Robotnik - and the two hedgehogs soon figured out that the humans and most of their friends where trapped in a different box and couldn't be transferred over!
After recreating the space colony ARK to get access to computers in their virtual world, Shadow was able to transfer Sonic over to the 'human storage' - only for our favourite hedgehog to discover all of the humans in cages and the place crawling with evil robots designed to capture him, too! Knuckles apparently had broken out of his cage, but the two of them barely had time to exchange a few words before the webcrawler bots came and overwhelmed them, Sonic's entire world going blank - has our hero finally been captured and this tale is coming to an end?!
OoO
Chapter 26: Blowing This Joint
Sonic didn't think he'd ever been as relieved to see Shadow's face.
"Shadow, I don't think I've ever been as relieved to see your face."
"Interesting. The transfer must have scrambled your brain after all."
"Wha - no," Sonic shot back, shaking his head at the black hedgehog still standing at the console (and also looking slightly alarmed at Sonic's statement), "What I mean is you transferred me back at the last second and now we need to get Knuckles out of there pronto!"
"He's - did you see him, is he-?" Shadow began, stepping aside to let Sonic in front of the console, Pikachu also moving away from the keyboard to make room.
"Oh, he's definitely unzipped, believe me, but I don't know how long that will last," Sonic said, already scrolling along the names of the people in the "human storage" box. "So we need to transfer him now."
"Right," Shadow said, his eyes also beginning to scroll through the myriad of entries, "Dammit, why isn't there a search function- ?! Got it."
There were two more clicks done with lightning speed, and not a second later, Pikachu gave a startled yelp as next to them, a red shape popped into being, stumbling forward as he'd been apparently mid-swing.
"Knux! Long time-!"
"I will put you back into a Pokéball if you finish this sentence," the echidna managed, for a moment holding his head in disorientation before blinking and taking in their surroundings (which were also already trying to glitch into Angel Island around him, half of Shadow's computer fighting a flickering battle. "...the hell? Where are we?"
"Well, let's just say it's a bit late for threatening to put anybody back into a Pokéball," Sonic quipped. "How do you feel?"
"Like I've been downloaded through dial-up," Knuckles gritted out, squinting at their surroundings trying to imitate a VR game run on Windows 95. "I…assume we're still in some kind of virtual world, then? Or at least I hope so and you didn't manage to actually break reality," Knuckles grunted, also favouring Sonic with a look that implied he wouldn't be all that surprised.
"Gee, thanks. No, this is actually the inside of the Pokémon storage box, where we can control the environment to suit your needs. Try and focus on the space colony ARK, will you?"
"We need its computers to access the interface between the storage boxes," Shadow explained, Pikachu nodding and also imitating the black hedgehog's serious expression. "Although we haven't yet figured out how to transfer anyone out to the real world."
"So we need to get Tails," Knuckles said, nodding. "Got it."
"Pika! Pikapi!" Pikachu piped up, jumping down from the console to grab a tiny fistful of Sonic's sock again and was now tugging on it, its other hand pointing toward the human storage box on the screen. "Pikapi!"
"...and get Ash, too, I presume." Sonic said with a sigh. "And probably Oak as well. Alright." He turned to Knuckles. "Shadow can transfer us back and forth, but we need to make this a quick hit-n-run."
"Well, at least you're both specialists for at least one part of the operation," Shadow muttered, already focusing on the screen again. "Will you be taking the yellow thing with you, too?"
" 'Pika pika'?! Pika-CHU, pikapi!"
"Uh, yeah, maybe don't call it that," Sonic said, wincing. "Gets painful quickly. But anyway, team of three? Why not. Feels like old times," he grinned. "Give us five minutes, Shads. You ready, li'l guy?"
"Chu!" Pikachu agreed, seemingly satisfied and with another click from the console, there was already blackness again, the world flickering away.
xxx
"Intrusion detected! ALERT!"
"Dammit. Seems like this time they're faster on the uptake. Where do we go?" Sonic's head whipped around as they had materialized in another corridor again, rows of caged humans lining the walls, the ones closest to them gasping in shock as they popped into existence out of seemingly nowhere - but this time, the hallway was also already crawling with orange spidercrab robots, Sonic's latest excursion apparently having put the system on high alert.
"Pikachu! Pikapi!" Pikachu, nose raised into the air and scenting, squeaked and pointed into a direction down the corridor before jumping down and immediately breaking into a gallop toward it, heedless of the now rising cries and exclamations of the other humans surrounding them.
"Looks like the critter has some idea where its owner is," Knuckles nodded. "Let's follow."
"Oh, I think we can do better than that, Knux," Sonic said with a grin, at the same time taking a hold of the echidna's wrist. "Gotta…go…."
"Wait, no-!"
"FAST!" Sonic cheered, revving into high gear fast enough to yank Knuckles off his feet, having caught up to and grabbed the running Pikachu off the floor in fractions of a second. "Just tell me where to go, buddy, I'll take us there at sonic speed!"
"Pii!" Pikachu yelped at being grabbed, but adjusted to the hold in Sonic's arm pretty quickly, long pointy ears upright and attentive, straining toward the right when they reached the end of the corridor and a T-section crossing. "Pi!"
"That way, huh?" Sonic asked and looked down the corridor - there were robots on the floor, robots on the ceiling and robots crawling along the cages with terrified humans inside, scarcely a part of surface not covered by a moving, grasping, orange robotic mass. Sonic grinned. "Alright."
They took off like a bullet.
There wasn't a sonic boom - nothing that could have hurt the trapped people around them. But if hitting robots at 99% the speed of sound wasn't almost as satisfying, Sonic would have been lying. Red and white sneakers crunched on top of webcrawlers with a glee usually reserved for plumbers and mushrooms, Sonic leaping on top of cages and dashing along walls and ceilings with an ease born of experience; the familiar thrill of being just that little bit faster and more clever than any bot Robotnik could throw at them letting his lips pull into a wildfire grin.
"Piiiii!" Pikachu, apparently not quite viewing it the same way, was buried deeply against Sonic's chest as the trio thusly proceeded down the corridor with robot parts flying everywhere, screams and a general disrespect for gravity, until -
"WATCH OUT!" Knuckles shouted, just as Sonic came to a halt before what was now an actual wall of the webcrawlers, swaying like a giant block in front of them.
"Uh," Sonic managed, but by then Knuckles had already stepped up next to him, cracking one set of his namesakes and proceeding to take Pikachu out of Sonic's hold.
"Just like 'old times' when we went up in a team against Neo Metal Sonic, you said, right?" the echidna asked, before grabbing Sonic's shoulder, grip hard.
"Wha-no, WAIT-!" Sonic managed, instantly remembering his least favourite part of that whole 'Power of Teamwork' thing, but by then, of course, Knuckles had already screamed and hurled him at that whole robot wall headfirst.
xxx
"I should leave you to the robots' mercy next time."
"I got us through, didn't I?" Knuckles replied as he was once again pulled along by Sonic, entirely unperturbed. Right now, there were noticeably less robots in pursuit, the corridors Pikachu had them turning through thankfully not as crowded. Sonic glared over his shoulder.
"Yeah, but believe it or not, I'm not a Pokémon, so I swear if if you toss me again-"
"PIKAPI!"
Pikachu's shout let Sonic's attention snap back into the present and he instantly saw why - and then came screeching to a halt in front of a cage holding a very familiar, very surprised black-haired boy.
Right until now, Ash seemed to have been kneeling in a corner of his prison, trying to talk soothingly to an even younger human girl in the cage next to him, curled up with her face hidden between her knees and shaking, but as soon as Pikachu called out, his head snapped up.
"Sonic! And Pikachu!"
"PIKA!" Pikachu had immediately leapt at the bars of Ash's prison, now apparently trying to pull them apart by horizontally hanging onto them and bracing its hind legs against them, straining.
"Uh, yeah, li'll buddy, I don't think that's the way to get Ash outta there…" Sonic tried, but was then pushed aside by Knuckles.
"No. Let me."
"Pi?!" Pikachu squeaked as Knuckles plucked it off the cage, but the echidna didn't pay it much heed. Instead, he positioned himself squarely in front of it, briefly bashing his fists together. All around them, exclamations of other humans in the cages had started, the children, teenagers and adults calling out to each other, pointing, gripping their cage bars and asking what was going on.
"Okay, kid. Better step back," Knuckles said, ignoring them while also gripping two of the bars of Ash's cage. The human boy blinked, but immediately did as he was told, albeit eying the echidna somewhat doubtfully.
"Yeah, better listen to macho Winzip here," Sonic quipped. "And you, Knux, better speed up before we get comp-"
That was as far as Sonic came before Knuckles heaved and the bars of the cage didn't so much as bend but broke, straight in half. The people around them immediately went into a frenzy, calling out to please open their cage next.
"Did you see that?!"
"What kind of Pokémon is that, not even my Machamp is that strong-"
"Here! Please, do my cage next!"
"Pikapi!"
"Agh!" Ash, for a moment staring in awe at the sheer strength of the echidna, gave a yelp as Pikachu took not so much a leap but a tackle into his arms, paws clawing into his vest and clinging onto him fiercely.
"Chuuu!"
"Yeah, alright, we got your kid out of there," Knuckles said, sounding impatient. "But now we need to get moving to find the fox kit and your old man before it's crawling with crab bots again, no thanks to the noise everybody's making. Where to next, mouse…thing?"
"Wait a minute, what about all the others?!" Ash protested, cradling Pikachu with one arm while waving a hand at the girl in the cage next to him, watching all of them with wide eyes now. "Wherever this is, we can't leave Melody here, she lost her parents and she's scared! Or leave anybody!"
"We won't. I swear," Sonic assured him. "But to get everybody out we need to rescue Tails and Oak first. Probably. And in the next two and a half minutes."
"But-!"
"Ash. I know," Sonic said, and he did. Everybody here needed help. And Melody looked so frightened.
"Can we get going already?" Knuckles urged, also very aware that they needed Pikachu to guide them to their friends, and that the little mouse Pokémon very likely wasn't coming if Ash wasn't. "Or else it'll be us joining them behind bars."
"Are - are you sure we will be able to come back to save them?" Ash asked, not paying attention to Knuckles, just focusing on Sonic, Pikachu held in his arms. His jaw set. "Because I won't run and leave them if we can't."
Sonic chanced a look up at Ash.
"You really wouldn't, huh?"
"Never."
And, even if in the midst of what was basically an enemy fortress, with robots approaching and their seconds dwindling away, Sonic couldn't help but grin.
"I knew I didn't make a mistake when I let you become my trainer."
Then he stretched out a hand toward the kid. "Ash. I promise we'll save each and every one of them." Sonic glanced straight up at him, expression just as serious and intense as the human's. "Do you trust me on that?"
For a moment, Ash seemed to hesitate, just looking down at the hand Sonic was holding stretched up toward him, the cries and pleading for help from all the humans around them the only sound around them….
Then he reached out and grasped Sonic's hand back, holding on tight.
"You're my Pokémon. Of course I do."
And with that, they took off again like a rocket.
xxx
"Oak! We need to leave, now!"
"No, no, no, this is fascinating," the human professor said, completely ignoring Sonic while still examining the bars of his cage Knuckles had just broken open, clearly a man with the eternal yet worrying enthusiasm of a scientist a bit too into his profession, "Cage bars as physical representation of virtual file compression, this is marvellous-"
"Shall we let him guess what my physical fist represents?" Knuckles suggested, corner of his eye twitching. "We now have a minute left to find Tails."
xxx
"Sonic! The algorithm didn't encrypt you because your basecode must have been extrapolated from the Pokéball matrix instead of generated by Eggman's digitizer, I knew it!" Tails in his cage exclaimed in joy as the entire troupe came to their thankfully last halt, Sonic by now pulling a three-person-tail behind himself that was getting slightly ridiculous. Oak immediately detached himself from the human-Mobian chain, lighting up as he held up a finger.
"Yes! That was also my idea, mostly because I think the sampler routine running on the Pokénet mainframe-"
"Can anybody shut them up," Knuckles grunted, also tearing up the little fox' cage, "If I'm right, we only have another second before-"
xxx
The ARK exploded into being.
"You've actually gotten all three of them," Shadow commented as a greeting. "Huh."
"You say that's like a surprise," Sonic shot back, smirking. "Yeah, you guys, welcome to the inside of the Pokémon-container," he added to Oak, Ash and Tails. "Though apparently it doesn't recognize you as Pokémon since it isn't going all weird and flicker-y with you guys here now."
"Where are we?" Ash asked, sounding flabberghasted and clinging to Pikachu in his arms. "And where did we just come from?" The virtual environment apparently really didn't recognize the humans as targets to extract habitat memories from, but definitely viewed them as files taking up space - or at least, that was a possible explanation for the ARK environment now also having expanded further around them, walls and windows into corridors outside visible.
Which were now also filled with audible gunfire.
"Well. It's sort of like the inside of a Pokéball?" Sonic said, giving a bit of a wince at a particularly loud shot. "The moustache guy who showed up at the tournament apparently managed to engineer some to be able to catch humans. He is sort of a jerk from our world. Sorry."
"This is the inside of a Pokéball?" Ash asked, for the moment apparently ignoring the second part but also sounding not at all assured, while Oak and Tails also looked around in fascination.
"Well, it's the inside of Shadow's Pokéball," Sonic amended, jerking a thumb at the black hedgehog. "Your thingamajiggys seem to put you in a virtual world that looks like your childhood home, if it thinks you're a Pokémon. Shadow grew up on a space station and I visited once, so we concentrated on that one because we figured a computer might be helpful to get you guys," he explained for the second time, Tails and Oak nodding along at the explanation, both of them actually wearing the same pursed-lips expression of being mildly impressed.
"Fascinating. Your friends really are quite smart, Tails."
"Thanks!" the little fox beamed up at the human professor. "Usually, they're super lost with computer stuff so I'm really proud of them, too!"
"Thanks, kiddo," Sonic commented wryly, "So, anway-"
Outside there was briefly the definite scream of someone being shot at, and also the sound of a body hitting the floor. Sonic winced as the humans jumped and Ash looked at the four of them with slowly deepening terror.
"Why are there people shooting each other?"
"It's how I remember my childhood home," Shadow commented wryly. "Also thanks to your species, by the way."
"Shads, he's ten. Lay off," Sonic sighed, before looking back at Tails and Oak. "Anyway, we were hoping that if you guys took a look at the computer screens, maybe-"
This time, they were interrupted by another scream, this one definitely inhuman and from the other window in the room - which was now actually showing the Biolizard's cyborg head howling and yelling in the emptiness of space.
"And what is that?!"
Sonic grimaced again at Ash's next shocked outburst - poor kid really wasn't having a good time. "It's, uh, how I remember the space station. There was a sort of failed experiment that tried to kill everybody on the planet by dragging the station down like a comet. That's, er, that thing outside. I don't think it'll kill anyone in this simulation, though?"
Ash stared at them. "Where do you guys live."
"If we could get back to the problem at hand," Knuckles cleared his throat, interrupting the conversation. "Tails. Can you and the professor do something with this computer system that'll get us out of here and back into the real world? We don't know why Robontik captured everyone, but it can't be anything good."
"We can definitely try. That is the console you've been using, right?" Tails asked, him and Oak moving up to it and starting to press a few buttons, calling up a different black box with white text inside it and going 'hmm' a lot while scrolling through more stuff. "Hm…I think we can do something with this. What do you think, Professor?"
"Certainly. Give us ten to fifteen minutes, everyone, alright?" Oak said, also already tapping away on one of the keyboards, fox and human already lost to the outside world anyway.
"Well, seems like the two pixel-brains already have an idea what they're doing," Sonic said, patting Ash on the arm, and trying to gently lead him away a little from both military massacre and genocidal space station lizard, mostly because the kid looked like he really needed to see something else. "Let's take a walk for a minute, kay? I'm sure we'll get Melody and our friends and everyone out in no time."
"Pika!" Pikachu also seemed to agree, gently nudging the underside of Ash's chin with the top of its head.
"O-Okay," Ash seemed to notice the attempt and therefore put some effort into giving Sonic a (slightly strained) smile back. "If you're sure."
"Well, I don't quite know how all of this really works, to be honest," Sonic said, giving a slight shrug, before nodding back toward Oak and Tails (who at least both seemed to be really excited over one code line, and then seemed to also be very excited over another). Sonic looked back up at Ash with a grin. "But I also trust my friends."
"...Yeah," Ash let out a breath and seemed to sag into himself a little as they ambled, passing a moving stream patch with a single Goldeen in it. They continued on for another moment in silence, their steps taking them in a wide circle around the patch of ARK in the middle of the flickering chaos. With Tails, Knuckles, Shadow and Oak still standing at the computer, the space station was still taking up a good few square metres of virtual real estate, even if Sonic had let his own patch of environment flicker back to Green Hill Zone to calm Ash down while they walked.
As they did, the grassy ground underneath their feet shifting occasionally to sand or rock depending on which Pokémon they passed, Ash continued to fidget somewhat uneasily, before finally taking a breath.
"Um. Sonic?"
"Yeah?"
"I just wanted to say…getting captured by that guy's weird human-catching Pokéballs was…super scary. I think I can understand now why you were so worried about it," he said, giving an apologetic expression.
"Definitely wasn't my favourite part of this trip, yeah," Sonic shook his head with a snort as a square metre of Savannah with a Tauros inside swooped along closeby. "But it definitely saved our tails now. And like I said," he shrugged, looking up at Ash again. "I was sure you wouldn't capture me against my will, so."
"I would never," Ash vehemently shook his head. "And I hope anyone who would do that has changed their minds now that they've seen what it's like," he shuddered. "Thanks for saving me and the Professor from that."
"Don't sweat it. And actually, the normal Pokéball you put me in was sort of okay. Was just me in there, so I got to run around my childhood home," Sonic said, a small smile flitting across his face at the memory as he lifted his hands to lock them behind his head. Their circle track had taken them once around the ARK and almost back to where they had started. "Wouldn't want to stay in that simulation forever, but fun for a while."
"Ah. That's good, that - that I didn't throw you into this sort of chaos, then - or a cage," Ash swallowed, his eyes still trailing over the glitch city mess surrounding their little ARK island, hundreds of Pokémon still milling around them in their ever-changing habitats.
Returning to Sonic, his gaze seemed to snag on something. "Hm? Hey, what's this number on your wrist?"
"Ah. Yeah," Sonic said, now also remembering the black numbers lasered into his skin again, apparently exposed by the cuffs of his gloves snagging on his spines. "That's your trainer ID, buddy," he informed Ash dryly, shooting him a sideways glance up, not bothering to either hide or better show the cipher now encoded in his body. "Seems like when you get caught in a Pokéball it gets assigned to you this way. Thankfully only shows up in this virtual world, though."
"Oh," Ash blinked. "I...I didn't know it worked like that. I'm, uh, really sorry?" He looked somewhat embarrassed.
"Yeah, seeing as you saved my life and all and none of us could foresee this happening, I think I can forgive you for that," Sonic replied, briefly poking his tongue out as they arrived back with the others. Tails and Oak were still hacking away at their keyboards while Shadow stood and watched as if he had to make sure they didn't damage even this virtual version of ARK (while Knuckles mostly looked wary about a Hitmonchan hanging around the area). Sonic nodded over to Shadow. "Then again, Shads has gotten a number, too, and something tells me he might not forgive his 'trainer' that easily…"
"Give me ten minutes with that human and a brandingiron," the black hedgehog informed them, causing Ash to suddenly also look rather alarmed, and Sonic to sweatdrop.
"Uh, yeah, maybe-"
"Okay, I think we've got an idea how to get out!" Tails thankfully interrupted their conversation and all heads turned toward him (though Sonic made a note of definitely keeping Shadow away from any human children when they actually did get back outside).
"It appears there's a file directory that does lead to what we're guessing is an outlet back into the real world," Oak nodded, "We haven't quite found the exact IP address but we think we can get the process right."
"We also noticed that there's a coding suite running somewhere on the server this is all happening on which is taking up a lot of processing power," Tails said, looking mildly worried. "So it looks like
Eggman is right now programming something pretty big. Maybe a new sort of giant webcrawler he wants to sic on us?"
"Okay? So we should probably get out before he does, right?" Sonic asked. "I mean, to be honest, I got maybe about 50 percent of what you guys just said, but-"
"Essentially, yes. But for that, first we need to go over again and free all the people trapped in the human storage box and transfer them here," Oak said. "I have a hunch that if you tried to transfer a compressed human file into the real world, the result would, uh. Well," Oak faltered a bit, also shooting a kind of worried look over at Ash and perhaps wondering how to phrase that next bit mostly delicately. "Uh, the result would…"
"Paint the stadium red with the blood it should be stained with?" Shadow asked flatly and Sonic resisted the urge to bury his face in his hands when both Ash and Tails had very large eyes at this mental picture.
"Um, well, let's just say it…would not be a good idea," Oak said, also looking highly uncomfortable at the very apparent discrepancy in violence inherent in their universes. "So yes. We should all decompress them first. So there won't be any…painting…whatsoever."
"Okay," Sonic said. "How do we get them all out?"
"Well," Tails drummed his fingers on the console. "There's a lot of them and also a lot of robots so I think we need more firepower."
"...Firepower. Yes," Shadow nodded, now also with a somewhat worrying glint in his eye that let some of them take a bit of a step back. "Can we manifest guns in here or-?"
"Uh. I mean," Ash cleared his throat, clearly hoping to direct this conversation somewhere less homicidal, "I don't know about…firepower," he said, also shooting another slightly freaked-out glance at the soldiers outside and at Shadow in general, "But," he continued, before sweeping his arms wide, indicating the wide and colourful chaos still going on everywhere around their space island, a world filled with even more Pokémon as there had been people in the stadium, "- I think I know where we might be able to get an army!"
To be concluded…
WOOOH! Six months break, but still going strong, and one final chapter coming up! :D Thank all of you for sticking with this story so far and would love to hear what you think of it! Let's see what Robotnik has in store for our heroes and whether that escape will go so easily...and whether Shadow goes through with that branding iron plan if it does ;P Hope you liked, and if you read, please review!