Chapter 6: Ulm I
March 14, 1938
Mob of 25,000 Riots at London in Nazi Protest
LONDON, MARCH 13. (U.P.) More than 25,000 angry Laborites and a sprinkling of Communist supporters fought hand-to-hand with reserves of mounted and foot police outside the white-stone German Embassy tonight, shouting "Hitler is driving Europe to war!"
Between taking care of his stitched arm, avoiding roads, and surviving off the fruits of the forests, Sonic's trek towards any large town had been slow and arduous. He did not want to risk being spotted again, given the getting shot that happened last time he was seen, so Sonic had to take more precautions than usual. It was making him anxious. In the two days, Sonic estimated he had only traversed around fifty miles. Also not helping his anxiety was that he had been waiting the better part of the day for nightfall to sneak into the city he had found.
Based on the signs outside the city, he correctly guessed the city's name to be 'Ulm'. The day prior, Sonic had come across the widest road he had seen on this planet and shadowed it from afar until he reached the city.
He was hanging off the side of a tall pine a ways off from the edge of the city, waiting for everyone to go to sleep. The town itself was not all too large. It was tightly compact and radiating the distant past. The stone buildings that were sprinkled in the interior of the city reminded Sonic of stereotypical medieval times. In the middle of the city stood a building unlike any he had seen on either his planet or this one. A rectangular, brick, monolithic structure with multiple stone towers coming out each side of the building. High arches covered and flanked the entrance, multi-paneled glass murals glimmered under the last light of the setting sun. But most impressive was the steeple coming out the top of the entrance. Even at a distance, Sonic could tell by the subtle changes in lighting across the tower that much detail went into the design of the whole tower structure. The top of the spire was over three times as high off the ground as the primary red-tiled roof. Sonic knew the first thing he was going to do once he entered the city was climb to the top of the steeple.
The lack of streetlights signaled to Sonic that his plan to find a computer was unlikely to come to fruition for a couple more decade's minimum if at all. He did not have that much time, so Sonic settled for finding a world map or an atlas.
Gradually, the bustle of downtown Ulm quieted down with its civilians leaving the stone streets for their homes. Once the sounds of wind whistling through trees and grass replaced the movements of the city, Sonic knew it was time to move in. He swung himself on the tree to have his shoulder facing towards the city and kicked off against the bark, launching himself towards the storybook city.
Sonic's legs were already in motion when they hit the ground. Chunks of grass and dirt were ejected behind Sonic into the tree he where he was perched prior, and on March 14, 1938, at 11:37 P.M., Sonic became the first living thing on Earth to break the sound barrier. A conical burst of wind blasted into the surrounding flora from the shockwave of the sonic boom razing the more loose brush from the ground. His rapid acceleration forced his arms backwards, but Sonic did not let up for one second. He leaned forward into the air to decrease the surface area the wind bounced off of, aerodynamically giving his body an advantage. He sliced through the crisp early spring air, sliding past the oxygen atoms meandering in his path. The 770 mile per hour breeze Sonic was generating pushed any glimmer of warmth off his body, especially around his non gloved hand, but he did not care.
The city rapidly approached. Sonic stuck his feet out to go into a controlled slide while he scanned the city for the best way to make it to the top of the steeple he had spotted from outside of Ulm. Two jumps, he decided, was all he needed to make it onto the steeple.
His sliding feet transitioned from the grass onto the pavement of a road heading into the city; the extra friction stopped Sonic near the center of the road. He continued towards the city in what Sonic would self describe as a quick jog.
His slower speeds allowed Sonic to lightly peruse the city as he approached. Like the last town he was in, red flags were adorned from the sides of many of the buildings, all centered with the same black 'X' with its crooked ends as the last town. Every window and door was closed, Sonic attributed this to the time and weather. The streets themselves were empty of life. While empty of life, plenty of cars lined the sides of the narrow streets. They would be his first jump. He approached at an angle, coming from the right side of the street towards the driver side headlight. He kicked off the street with his left foot, brought his right knee up to his chest, sailed across the street towards the parked vehicle, and drove his right foot down onto the hood of the car to propel himself upwards. The shock absorbers behind the wheels were exceptionally tight, as Sonic felt little give as he jumped off the car. Still, the jump gave enough height for the hedgehog to leap from the car onto the rooftop of a nearby building without needing to pull himself up from the side.
Immediately, Sonic began slipping down off the rooftop. It was slanted and tiled, two things Sonic had not noticed from the streets. He began swinging in arms in circles, trying to balance himself forward as he began teetering over the edge of the roof. His foot slipped back, a tile came loose, it fell towards the ground below. Sonic planted his foot on the newfound landing below where the tile was. In rapid succession, his mind flickered from his foot, the tile, to the car below.
"KARASH!" The stone tile plummeted through the glass windshield, filling the peaceful March air with a sound reminiscent of a mirror being tossed off a cliff into a bed of hammers. The insides of Sonic's ears felt as those they had been pried open, and then jabbed with a crosshead screwdriver continuously as the glass shattered onto the seats of the car. Sonic's eyes widened, his teeth ground against each other, and he froze. Slowly, he turned back, and looked down.
"...Uh-oh." The driver's seat had cushioned the tiles landing ensuring that the tile was still in one piece. The windshield, however, was in a worse off shape. Rather than remaining in one piece, like the tile, the windshield had transformed from one continuous, transparent mold into thousands of little glass flakes. While some chunks of glass clung onto the frame of the windshield, many of the fragments found themselves puncturing into the seat, seated on the seat, or scattered about across the car's hood or on the road. As the hood had been washed, clay barred, and waxed only days prior, the glass laying on top of the pristine hood transformed from simple chunks of glass into low strength mirrors. And Sonic only saw one thing in those hundreds of mirrors on the hood: himself. Sonic was no stranger to collateral damage to public property, even specifically cars, so his next actions were a surprise only to the unfortunate owner of the vehicle.
Once Sonic had taken the angle of the rooves into account, as well as placing his feet more carefully across the tiles, running across the tops of the buildings became trivial. His extended gait alongside the compact inner city design allowed Sonic to move from rooftop to rooftop in a single, natural stride, so he did not add to his mental 'Ulm Jump Count'. He dodged the occasional smoke stack and took care not to accidentally kick any pots sowed with edelweiss (Sonic's least favorite plant) off the ledges of the gables jutting out of the buildings.
Sonic quickly traversed over the rooftops until he reached near the center of the city where the brick temple stood. He stopped on the edge of a rooftop to admire the structure with its steeple seemingly stretching up into heaven. Upon closer inspection, Sonic noticed that the steeple itself had plenty of spirals coming out of it, with each of the spirals topped with what appeared to be a 't' shape much akin to a sword sticking straight up out of the ground. Sonic could not wait to catapult himself off the objects higher up the building. There was an expansive brick courtyard surrounding the ministry, so to reach the roof of the building Sonic would need to expend his second jump. He walked to the opposite edge of the roof he was standing on, lined up with the brick building across the courtyard, and began running. Three steps, right foot, left, right again, and he jumped.
In order to achieve the distance to clear the courtyard, vertical height had to be sacrificed. Coupled with how the roof of the ministry was higher off the ground than the building Sonic was standing on, and Sonic could not simply jump from roof to roof like previously. Knowing this, Sonic extended his arms in midair, and began scanning the building for spots to latch onto. Luckily for Sonic, directly above the entrance were small stone statues serving as decorative lining for the arch of the entrance, statues which could easily be grasped with large hedgehog hands. He reached out with his arms towards the heads of the statues, and palmed the skulls of the statues with both his unwashed gloved and non-gloved hands.
A bolt of agony shot through Sonic's stitched wound as his hand gripped down against the statue. The muscles in his arm contracted to hold onto the statue and support the weight of Sonic's body swinging under the arch. His skin on the arm expanded, the stitches dug into his flesh to hold the wound shut. Despite his natural urges to yell out, Sonic gritted his teeth and relinquished his hold of the statue with his one arm. Being strong enough to easily support his weight with just one arm, Sonic silently chastised himself for over exerting his injured arm.
Glancing at the statues, Sonic took note how all were sculpted with sharp crowns, flowing robes, and eyes which looked past you. He imagined that whoever they are, they were all dead by now.
Using his one arm, Sonic pulled down on his grappled statue, lifting his body until his arm was extended fully beneath him. He then lifted his legs, placed his feet on the statues to the sides of himself. Carefully, he released his grip of the statue, and brought himself to a stand against the brick side holding up the statues. Sonic shifted his eyes up, as to not affect his center of gravity by moving his unproportionally large head backwards, to discover that the start of the steeple proper was only a couple feet above. The base of the steeple was outlined with a shallow landing similar to the rooves of the other buildings of Ulm. Sonic gently pressed down against the statues with his feet to confirm that they would be able to support himself before hopping up to grab onto and pull himself onto the landing above.
Rising to his feet, Sonic was confronted with an expansive display of stained glass. Each pane was carefully crafted to ensure the window could sustain itself in the turbulent weather changes of southern Germany while working with the lead separators which were precisely placed for maximum survivability of the work of art. Sonic, understanding the risk he posed on the priceless works of arts, decided not to stick around.
From the roof to the top of the steeple were a multitude of stone pillars spaced out just enough that a normal human would not be able to stretch out their body to wedge themselves between the pillars to slowly ascend the building. As Sonic was neither human nor normal, he decided the best course of action was to repeatedly wall jump up the pillars until he reached the top. He placed himself in between two pillars near the center of the roof, looked straight on towards one of the pillars, cracked his knuckles, gave a solid pull to each of his legs, and jumped forwards towards the stone column. Just before contact, he twisted his body to face away from the pillar before letting his hand catch the face of the rock. His feet went flat against the stones, giving Sonic a brief window of time to kick off against the pillar to reach the next post. He kicked down against the pillar, sending him higher into the air. He turned his body once more to catch the next stone pillar, and repeated the process. His wounded arm could support being pressed against the column, so Sonic knew he had not re-injured his arm catching the statue earlier. To one side was the city of Ulm, with its medieval architecture and glass covered roads, and the other was the minister of Ulm, with its medieval architecture and glass covered sides. Sonic was too focused on not falling to wonder at the beauty of either the city or the minister.
Eventually, the pillars reached the roof of the next section of the steeple, so Sonic had to jump off an angle to catch the next roof. He pulled himself up, took care not to break the second set of stained glass, spotted more pillars and continued his climb. In the back of his mind, Sonic imagined how cool it would be to have a drone following him up with a camera, taping him jumping between pillars with the stained glass in the background. He reached the next roof attached to the pillars. Again, he leaped off at an angle to grab the third section of the steeple and pulled himself up. The stained glass in this section was in fact not stained glass, but regular see-through glass, and any pillars that were present were merely cosmetic, as well as embedded into the side of the building, preventing Sonic from scaling them with any wall kicks. Sonic placed his face against the glass—careful not to break it in a freak accident—and peered into the building. Due to it being midnight, Sonic was unable to discern more than a few lone support beams under the dull moonlight.
Sonic decided that rather than meticulously scaling the rest of the building, he would fling himself up to the top using the 't' shaped objects coming out the sides of the walls. Sonic would later learn that what he was about to do would generally be considered blasphemous. He jumped up, grasped the cross with both hands, and planted his feet against the side of the church so he was hanging beneath the cross, and tugged down against the stone cross to test for stability. Satisfied with knowing that he was not about to damage more property, Sonic tensed up his legs, began flexing his arms, and in one synchronized motion, kicked off against the minister while pulling down against the cross. To compensate for both the horizontal acceleration he had gained from kicking off the wall and the steeple angling inwards to meet at a center point five hundred thirty feet off the ground, Sonic held onto the cross for an extra moment to redirect the horizontal movement upwards and slightly forwards. He pushed off with his hands and he was in the air. While this method of transportation was less efficient than scaling the building using more traditional methods such as slotting feet into nooks and pulling with the hands on ledges, Sonic figured it was more fun.
With the peak in sight, the still airborne hedgehog smirked at his climbing abilities before reaching out to grab hold of and climb on top of another cross coming out of the tower. The rest of the steeple was built like a hexagonal pyramid with various gothic crosses and swirls decorating the stone sides. With supreme balance, Sonic hopped off his cross onto a higher up cross, just planting one foot before jumping to the next. And after one last jump, Sonic planted his foot on the final skyward cross. Only clouds, the moon, and stars hung overhead. Not worried about falling, he brought his feet together and rose upright.
A breeze rustled through Sonic's blue quills introducing a soft whistle into the dry air. No sounds emanated from the city below, only wind and whistle whispered into Sonic's ears. Now aloft to Ulm as well as the entire Württemberg state (excluding the Alps) he could survey the city for a library to find a map or an encyclopedia.
Lacking much electrical street light architecture, it was difficult for Sonic to make out more than the overall shape of the buildings and the materials the structures were primarily made from. The collective dark mass that defined the city made Sonic wish he had summited the church during the daytime so he could have enjoyed the view. It was like viewing a black and white photograph in a dark room, the definition of the landscape existed but its beauty and characteristics did not. He could have squinted and made up features to fill in the desires of his brain, but it would have been mental vandalism of the world. Sonic reminded himself that just minutes prior he had shattered a window before immediately running off performing actual vandalism to the world. Refocused, he began his search for which buildings to investigate for a library. Any building which had thatch walls were crossed off Sonic's mental list of buildings to investigate, as were the single family homes which dotted the outskirts of town. All of the buildings located towards the center of Ulm which bore striking resemblance to each other were struck off, leaving Sonic with the few structures both unique and large scattered across the city. Of the buildings, the most striking of the bunch was the sprawling, presidential palace-esque, multi-winged behemoth a distance south of the church. While it was the furthest away of the buildings Sonic planned to visit, it being the only one with proper illumination made it stand out among the rest.
After giving one last fleeting glance across the city to confirm that Sonic had not missed any potential targets, he hopped down from cross to cross to the edge of the hexagonal pyramid which made up the top of the spire before jumping off the building entirely. Having strong knees—as hedgehogs are famous for—Sonic did not give much thought before jumping down five hundred feet onto the brick courtyard below. During the fall Sonic reminded himself to brace the impact using his left arm, but besides that the only other thing he gave thought to was the dim light which had sprung to life near the window he had broken. Sonic landed.
"Guess I should go and try and cool things off with the locals, and here I thought my actions had no consequences." Figuring that he was going to be seen anyways, Sonic skipped traveling by roof and just took the streets. For what it was worth, his first planned building to visit was in the direction of the vehicle he had vandalised so he would not be wasting much time.
As Sonic rounded the corner the car was parked on, he discovered the dim light had grown into multiple dim lights all surrounding the vehicle. With less grace than Sonic would have preferred, he ducked down into an alley between buildings to figure out how to defuse the crowd which had formed.
"Shoot! Just what I need, a mob. Why couldn't've they made the roofs out of stronger stuff?" Sheepishly, Sonic poked his head around the corner of the alley to make a count of the group. "...Four, five. And they all have electric lanterns, guess they didn't have plans to burn the car down which would have been convenient for me. Okay, I run out there, start waving my hands back and forth, point up at the roof, point back at me, walk my fingers across my palm, point down from the roof to the car, hand explosion. Universal language. And hopefully they are in shock the whole time so I can explain and run off. Okay, go team."
Happy with his well thought out plan, Sonic jumped back onto the street from the alley and bolted in front of the group. Their lanterns shook back and forth from the wind Sonic stirred up, and one nightcap came flying off the blond head of one of the men. Each person looked wildly back and forth to find the cause of the sudden burst of wind until, one by one, each settled upon the three foot, blue hedgehog waving his hands back and forth with a dopey smile across his face.
"Was zu Hölle…." The man with the now exposed dirty blond hair murmured, voice faltering upon the realization of what was standing in front of him. No one else spoke. Standing with their heads slightly forward and their mouths ajar, the group was flabbergasted. Someone lost grip of a cinder block; the thud between the block and road colliding created the only noise beside the hum of the electric lanterns.
"I know you can't understand me, but whatever I like talking." Their shock would not last for long, so Sonic jumped into his prepared speech. "I jumped onto this roof to avoid the streets," he aimed his finger up to the roof before twisting his finger around to point back at himself, "and when I landed up there, the shoddy craftsmanship of the roof caused a brick to fall." With exaggeration, Sonic strutted his fingers across his palm, before switching mid-sentence to pointing back at the roof. "And unfortunately, someone parked their ride in a high risk zone, and there was nothing I could do." He dragged his finger down to point at the car before making an explosion gesture with his hands. "So while I would love to speak to a lawyer and get this sorted out, I have to find some mystical rocks that can control time and space, now if you'll excu-!"
A man from the back shoved his way past the other five men, fire and brimstone in his eyes, teeth ready to shatter under the pressure of his jaw biting down, and swung his lantern towards the head of the hedgehog babbling away in front of the group. If the metal case of the lantern had collided with Sonic's skull, he likely would have been incapacitated, but Sonic simply leaned back to avoid the blow. The momentum of the man carried him forward towards Sonic; Sonic stepped to the side. Not prepared to miss, the man stumbled towards the ground, but caught himself before potentially face planting onto the street.
With a rage in his voice that could only be caused by someone shattering your windshield, the flustered man yelled back towards the group, "Hol ihn!" before swinging at Sonic, again, which he dodged, again.
Spurred on by the man, the rest of the group charged towards the hedgehog. Two swung out with their lanterns, another with his fists, and the final with the brick he had dropped. All aimed at the common target of a three foot tall creature standing just beyond arm's reach. They stepped forward, brought down their weapon of choice at the hedgehog, and found they had hit nothing. In reality, there was nothing to hit, since Sonic had repositioned himself behind the mass of people the moment they began to swing downwards with their weapons.
"Look, I understand why you're mad..." Sonic tilted his head to the side to avoid the brick being thrown at his head, "but I really gotta go." Satisfied with the outcome of the encounter, Sonic decided to take his leave.
The building Sonic had decided to scope out was away from downtown proper, but the distance was not of concern to the hedgehog. Under the assumption that there would be no one else out on the streets—so long as he did not shatter any more windshields—Sonic coasted down the street at a gentle two hundred miles an hour. Two river bridge crossings and a minute later, and he had arrived at what was essentially a castle sans walls.
Of concern to Sonic, who was sliding to a stop, was the multitude of flags hanging limp against the side of the building. They were the same red, white, and black flags as the ones downtown and the flags in the previous town. Under the harsh glow of the rare street light, the collection of flags held a dominating presence. Without worrying about anyone hearing, Sonic spoke.
"Well, rather a political building or some sort of flag collector. Not a whole lot of variety there bud." Not desperate enough to try knocking on the front door, Sonic looped around to the back of the building to see if any windows were open or if any other entrance was present. While no windows were open, the back door seemed more promising than barging in through the main entrance. He placed his ear against the door to try and hear if any movement was occurring inside, but the only noise that Sonic could make out was the blood rushing through his head. Unable to think of any brighter ideas, he tried turning the door knob, and to his shock, it turned and opened the door. "Vandalism, breaking and entering, and trespassing. Great going Sonic."
Like a bad cliche, the door slowly swung back with a constant creak piercing the silence in the air. The room that was revealed was no more than a thin hallway lacking any decoration or lighting. With his eyes already adjusted to the darkness, Sonic did not waste any time before stepping into the room and closing the door behind him.
Slowly poking his head around the corner of the hallway, Sonic was greeted with an assortment of general purpose tools. This section of the building must have been for the maintenance crew, he assumed. Knowing that robbery was only if you keep something, Sonic had no qualms about digging through the mix of screwdrivers and pliers and hammers and spanners and etc. until he found a flashlight. The back had a strap to hook onto a shirt's button, but given Sonic's near total nudity, it was going to be used as a handheld. He twisted the knob at the bottom of the light to test out its abilities, shined it to the end of the room, and twisted it back off.
At the end of the second room stood another, much larger, door. Really, it was a double door, with each side reflecting the ornate patterns of the other. There was no door knob, just a simple handle on each side. The door was locked, but fortunately the lock was on Sonics side of the door, so he simply unlatched the lock and pushed the doors open.
For Sonic, it felt like uncovering a hidden chamber in a pyramid when he saw what was on the other side of the door. A tall, rectangular room, with painted murals adoring the ceiling and every wall of the room. Marble posts rounded the perimeter of the room, swapping between the colors of sapphire and aquamarine in sets of four, flowing patterns of clouded waves on each. The floor, also marble, had the illusion of ascending cubes carved into it. In the middle of each side of the room stood two statues, also marble, dressed in flowing robes and with noble, yet stern, looks upon their faces.
Sonic stepped into the middle of the room to marvel at the painted ceiling. First to catch his eye were the two nude people, man and woman, standing under a tree. Both looked terrified, presumably due to the snake with a head of a human slithering down the tree towards them. Slightly disturbed, but impressed, Sonic had to force himself to look away and return to his search. He twisted his flashlight on and aimed it around the room where he saw the most beautiful thing yet: a bookshelf. In fact, every wall had multiple bookshelves, and the room had a second level with even more bookshelves. Sonic never considered himself the reader type, but he was overjoyed to see such a large selection of literature.
Of course, he could not read any of the spines of the books. Lots of the titles did not even have text on their spines, just a dull dusted over leather cover wrapping the whole book. But the strategy was simple, encyclopedias are big, so pull out the largest books and rifle through them. Sonic ran from shelf to shelf, pulling out the biggest book from each bookshelf and towering them in the center of the room. Before long, Sonic had amassed a collection of texts with each nearing a thousand pages in length. He plopped himself down on the cold marble floor and pulled the top book off the multiple feet tall stack.
"Heilige… Schrift. Sounds like a fun read." Greeting Sonic on every page as he thumbed through the book were either neatly structured blocks of unintelligible text, or the occasional drawing of men in some perplexing situation with golden disks floating behind their heads. Not seeing any maps, Sonic decided the book was worthless to him and gently slid the book towards the bookshelf the he took it off of.
This pattern continued for the next dozen-odd books. Sonic would pull a book off the top, skip through large chunks looking for maps, and would disappointingly slide the books on the ground towards their home bookshelf. In a rhythmic and systematic groove of page turn and book sliding, the hedgehog nearly gave the same treatment to the black bound "Der Große Brockhaus" before he decided to take another look at the page spanning colorful illustrations.
It was a topographic map, a two-dimensional plane with height represented using a green-brown gradient. A rustic brown covered the center of the picture, presumably the Alpen mountains if the title of the page were to be believed. An uncontrolled smile grew across Sonic's face excited to finally have a lead. Only being in this new world for three days, the sole clue Sonic had to determine his current location was the flags he had seen in the two towns he had been in. Being a striking red banner, Sonic figured it would not be too hard to fish it out of the book. So he began turning pages. While Sonic's speed was primarily in his feet, he had no issues with grabbing corners of pages and flipping them over rapidly in succession. After fake-outs from other flags, page 225 contained the bright banner with shuriken like centerpiece that Sonic had grown to dislike but appreciate how distinct it was. On the page contained a variety of different flags, some with stripes, others with birds, but all used the same black, white, and red color scheme. At the top of the page was the title, "Deutsches Reich". Sonic guessed that that was the name of the country he was in.
Turning back to the two-page spanning world map he had passed earlier, he began to drag his finger across countries to scan for a country name match. A long continent snaked down the western section of the map north to south, with it nearly splitting in two in "Panama", but it held together. With none of the names matching, he crossed over an ocean into the mega continent filling much of the central and eastern parts of the map.
"Norwegen, no, Schweden, Fin-land, Russland. Neiydur-land, Doytchest Reyke… Doychest Rieke!" There, a bit right of the center of the two pages, was an area demarcated as 'Deutsches Reich,' or 'German Empire,' or 'Germany'. The country was actually split into two parts, a large central area, and a significantly smaller section enclaved by the baltic sea and 'Polen'. "And with this newfound information I can reveal that I still have no idea where the Emeralds are." He scanned through the rest of the map, but sadly there were no spots listed as Chaos Emerald landing spots.
"Okay, seven Emeralds, all spread out across the globe, but where?" All the previous lectures Tails or Knuckles had given about how the Emerald spread themselves out had largely gone in one ear and out the other with Sonic. He rubbed his eyelids with the palm of his gloved hand trying to excavate any long since buried memories. "The planet has energy pumping through it…." By now he had switched from rubbing his eyelids to tapping his forehead with the knuckles of his index and middle fingers. "...And the Emeralds try to store as much of it as possible. So they spread to evenly take in as much as possible. And this energy comes from, well, everything. The sun, machines, plants." Anyone listening in could have practically heard the cogs in Sonic's mind bashing against each other. "And with the ocean splitting the land up, the Emeralds should go to each continent. Okay, this long continent, Nord-America and Saud-America, basically splits in the middle. I'm thinking an Emerald each for the two halves." The cogs were getting oiled and beginning to spin rapidly. "And there's always an Emerald at one of the poles. Three Emeralds down. Uh, Afrika is kinda off on its own, so it gets its own Emerald. And so is Aus-traylien, so another Emerald there. So the last two Emeralds should be at the ends of this continent, one here in Europa, and another in Asyan." Sonic plotted mental dots on the map trying to visual where the Emeralds likely were. "But where here?"
Forward a couple pages was a blown up map of Europe with cleaner borders and the largest cities marked with varying sizes of dots. It did not take long for Sonic to find 'Ulm' in the south half of Germany, narrowing down his location to a couple square miles. For Sonic, the most eye-catching feature on this new map were the stars used to note the capital city of each country, such as 'Bern', 'Dublin', and 'Helsinki'. The grandiose of the five-pointed stars simply trumped any of the mere circles on the map. Nothing important had ever happened in München, Sonic figured, all the action was happening in Luxemburg.
"Actually, there are a ton of capitals by Luxemburg. And they're all sandwiched between Frank-rieke, doychest-rieke, and Vere-ing-test, Ko-nig-rieke. I bet the only way these small countries could survive next to these bigger ones is if they were, like, super powerful. If the Emerald in Europa was anywhere, I don't see why it wouldn't be in Luxemburg. Route from Ulm to Luxemburg, go north west." Content knowing his guess on the where a Chaos Emerald may be located was based exclusively on the contradiction that a country was strong since it was small and that another country was strong since it was big, Sonic shut the encyclopedia and slid it towards its home bookshelf. He jumped to his feet, whirled around the room putting the books back in their respective slots, and turned off his flashlight.
"And if it isn't there, I can always check the North Pole next." Knowing he would likely never see this place again, he gave the room a once-over to absorb the architecture and mural one last time before grabbing the ornate, but dinky, door handle to exit out the way he came. Returning to the maintenance lounge, Sonic tossed the Diamon flashlight onto one of the piles of miscellaneous tools before leaving out the still unlocked back door.