The loud incessant alarm woke me from my doze, almost causing me to fall out of my chair in surprise. Other than the beeping from my computer, I heard a different, more interesting sound outside—a rumbling? Car alarms?!
"Mom?" I called, opening my bedroom door and stepping into the hallway. "I'm not the only one hearing car alarms, right?"
I was late to the punch. Mom already had her car keys and pepper spray in hand. "This better not be another prank," she muttered derisively, yanking open the front door and stomping out.
Sliding back into my room, not wanting to get caught in Mom's angry crossfire, I glanced at my main computer screen—of the 3, I might add—and read the lines of code that appeared on it. My eyes widened in disbelief. "That's not possible," I murmured, tapping around in the keyboard and logging onto a local satellite. I used a secure network so no one could see my activity or track my location. The source of the chaos was something breaking the sound barrier, that was the only explanation by the numbers I got. And, it was relatively close by, too. There wasn't any airspace over Middleton. The nearest airport was the next town over in Upperton, 30 miles away. We would have felt something but not as loud. After a few seconds of cross-checking exact coordinates of the alert and satellite imaging, I found the source and got an image of the culprit.
It wasn't any sort of aircraft.
Who is that? I thought, taking the image of the guy's face and scanning it against different world identification records I'd created. I also used face recognition. Since the last time Kim went on a mission, I'd upgraded my tech and software. Now, my CPU runs at light speed. I had my results in less than 10 minutes—versus what it was a week ago: 3 hours.
Those results made no sense either. It registered "No ID Found." As though this person had never existed in the first place. There wasn't even a name to fit with the guy.
But, wait a minute…
He had strangely familiar blue hair. Where had I seen it before? I moved to the satellite-imaging's next frame, but he was gone.
What the heck is going on? I thought, configuring the parameters on the imaging program to see if it was a glitch. There was no glitch. The guy had simply vanished.
I configured the satellite imaging to refresh every 3 seconds and show a mile radius and ran the few seconds before again. Like before, he was there one second, then, 3 later, he had disappeared without a trace.
Lost, I called Kim on her Kimmunicator. She picked at the second ring. "Are you seeing all this, Wade? What's going on?"
All I could really do was shrug because I'd hit a dead end. "I got a glimpse of the person responsible with satellite imaging. He managed to break the sound barrier."
Her eyes widened, and she glanced up, talking to someone. "May I be excused? It's important."
"Is everything alright, Kim?" Mrs. Possible asked on the other end.
Kim grimaced and side-glanced me. "Depends." She got up, and it got quieter on her end. "Things were really crazy over here the moment cars started going off. Mom almost dropped the pot of boiling pasta all over the floor, and the tweebs declared an apocalypse. What happened?"
I sent the image of the guy to her screen. "I think this guy broke the sound barrier. He looks familiar, but I don't remember where I've seen him."
After a painful moment of silence, she snapped. "That's Sonic! That's totally him! How could I forget that hair?" Her eyes turned a little dreamy, at which my respectful cough awoke her.
"How is that possible, though?" I asked, genuinely curious. "He doesn't have any equipment to make him go that fast. How did he do it?"
Without warning, she launched into a summary of the past 2 days about Sonic and some strange goings-on with him. By the end of it, I found there to be much more to this than she'd originally let on.
"Hold on, let me try something," I said. I found the energy signature that had spawned and vanished instantly and ran an energy sweep across the globe, using several different satellites at once, to find similar signatures. Apparently, the one signature that had shown up near the school was a particularly large, but controlled, explosion of energy. But, all around Middleton, smaller signatures that I would have easily missed if I hadn't been looking for them appeared and dotted the city map. Something else caught my eye, though. It wasn't anywhere Middleton. It was on the other side of the world.
Draken's last known location.
Supposing he hadn't moved lairs, he was still there. The energy signatures were slightly larger than the ones around the city and more noticeable. They were stronger, and there were more of them.
Suddenly, all my screens shut off.
"Hey! Kim? Can you hear me? Kim? What the—" A single sentence crossed the screen in front of me.
"Back off, or I'll fry your system"
My computer wasn't responding. How did someone manage to get inside my system without my knowing?! I thought, shocked, still trying to reprogram my firewalls to trace the source and shove out the viral code. Nobody fries my system. After several seconds of intense counter-coding, I sat back in my chair, waiting for my computer to reboot, contemplating the events of the past 20 minutes.
A sonic boom sets off half the cars in Middleton; Sonic is the one behind it; an entirely new type of energy never documented before appears out of nowhere and everywhere at the same time; Draken is somehow involved with the mysterious energy signature; my precious system is threatened.
Huh. Well, we have dealt with weirder. This was utter chaos!
I paused suddenly. The beep of my fully rebooted computer didn't even cross my mind as I made a massive connection.
Chaos.
As in chaos emerald.
Kim said that Sonic had talked with someone about a chaos emerald. It didn't make any sense when I first heard about because there wasn't anything I could find on it. It's new. Completely new. As though it never existed before we met Sonic.
Which means, those chaos emeralds must give off some sort of energy—the energy that's all over Middleton.
Which means, Draken must have either gotten ahold of a chaos emerald, or some of its energy.
I groaned. There were still a lot of holes in this entire theory, but—you've got to say—a lot of it totally made sense.
So, wherever Sonic came from, he brought a chaos emerald and used its energy in these different locations. What did he do with it? At Draken's lair, the signatures are larger and more numerous; therefore, he used more of its energy. Around Middleton, they're smaller and more disperse. But, there was no pattern. It was random.
I ran another, more thorough, scan over Draken's lair for the chaos emerald energy. The place seemed almost to be radiating it. And, with all the heat inside, there was no way that Draken had moved. He was definitely involved somehow.
I finally glanced at my rebooted computer and called Kim back. She came on in seconds.
"Sorry about that, Kim," I said, scratching the back of my head apologetically. "Someone decided it would be a great idea to break into my system and remotely shut it down." The mere thought made me nervous since my system had more security than every government agency in the world. How someone managed to do it, I will get to the bottom of.
I relayed to her what I'd found about Draken's involvement. "Any ideas?"
Kim thought for a moment. "There might have been more than just Sonic and Shadow that came here. I heard Shadow say something about someone named Tails. He had brought equipment for tracking something. It must for tracking that energy."
I leaned back in my chair, thinking. I've never had to do so much deduction with so little information. I tapped around on the keyboard. "Well, whatever this is about, I'd say it's worth checking out."
She nodded, jumping up from her position on her bed. "Agreed, I'll call Ron."
"Global Justice dispatching to your location in a few minutes," I responded before ending the call. There were several tasks left on my agenda at the moment.
For one, that hacker. No one can break into my system! It's impossible. I mean, for anyone but me, but I built the system, so…yeah. But, this was different. They didn't just break in, they managed to shut everything down. My tracer program had to have picked something up. On the monitor to my right, I ran the code from the hack and, in the monitor to my left, the results from my trace. The hacker's code—I'd never seen it before. I didn't even know what language it was. It didn't look like any foreign country's language I know. And, I know all of them. But, the trace, why would it go there?
Kim's house?!
With that realization, there was a small explosion behind me. All my monitors went blank.
"Nononono!" I yelled, rolling my chair back to my fried computer. All 8 of my stand-alone servers were smoking. I ripped off the backing on each of them, finding all the metal inside melted and dripping. The only explanation: the hacker couldn't be taken lightly.
"This means war," I whispered angrily, clenching my fist.
Stomping out the door, leaving Mom with an extremely questioning look, I walked all the way to Kim's across town and knocked on the front door. It was probably a little harder than I intended because Mrs. Possible poked her head out, slightly alarmed.
"Hello, Wade," she said, opening the door more after recovering. "What brings you here? Kim already left."
I forced a small smile onto my face. It was very hard. "I wanted to see if I could speak with Jim and Tim, if that's no problem."
She nodded and let me in. "They're in their room upstairs. Last I checked, they were playing videogames on the computer."
"Thank you." Oh, really? Videogames, huh? I thought, almost stomping up the stairs. I reached their bedroom door, which was closed. I could hear Kim's twin brothers laughing their heads off inside. They are so dead, I thought, opening the door.
I didn't see what I expected. The tweebs were standing on either side of the desk chair, watching a boy in the chair play a videogame with a nice X-box controller. The kid was giving me a weird vibe, for some reason.
One of the twins noticed me. I think it was Jim.
"Hey, Wade, what's up?" he greeted with a massive grin. The other twin waved.
The person in the chair swiveled around, game controller in hand. He had red hair, blue eyes, and wore a normal green T-shirt and denim shorts. I can't say he looked familiar to me, but, from his slightly shocked gaze, he recognized me.
"Hey, Miles, this is Wade," one twin said. "Wade, Miles Prower."
Miles waved hello nervously. I guess he's shy. Whatever, that's not what I came for. "You guys have some explaining to do," I said sternly, crossing my arms to keep my hands from shaking with fury. One, most likely both, brother had destroyed my system—I was ticked.
"Uhh," the other twin started, "Know what he's talking about?" he asked his brother.
"None," his brother replied, shrugging, clueless.
"I don't want to play games with you guys," I snapped, losing patience. I'm surprised by how much I'd had up until this point. "My entire system just got fried, and it came from your guys' computer!"
The brothers glanced at each other blankly for answer. Then, at Miles, who was a little late to shrug his confusion.
"Guys, you've got to tell me what's going on because I just sent Kim off to Draken's lair to check out a strange energy called chaos emerald energy. And, I don't have any way to do comms. She could be in trouble for all we know."
"She's not in any danger," Miles said quietly, fiddling with the controller, opening the battery compartment, thinking a moment, then closing it again. "At least, she shouldn't be." He glanced up suddenly, as though what he'd said, he'd had no control over saying.
I glared suspiciously at him. "What are you talking about?"
Miles chuckled nervously and looked away, scratching his face, smile disappearing. "Sonic was right. We can't hide from you guys."
"What are you talking about?" both twins asked at the same time.
Miles hung his head for a second. "Alright, then, fine. You got me, all of you. Don't get me wrong—I love hanging out with fellow geniuses. I don't get to do it often. But, there are some things you need to know." He glanced in my direction apologetically. "I'm the Tails you've heard so much about. Sonic has wanted Kim's help ever since he found out about her reputation. Shadow never wanted any of it. He insisted on doing things his way—alone. He left this morning during lunch to retrieve the last chaos emerald, but he should have come back by now with it. He hasn't."
I interrupted him. "You fried my system?!" My shock overcame my anger. A kid?! "What did you do that for?!"
"Thing is," Miles continued calmly, "you really don't want to get in Shadow's way when he's on a mission. To be honest, in case he lost it, I was trying to protect Kim from getting caught in crossfire. By the time I'd gotten through though, you'd already sent her on her way."
The tweebs looked at each other, trying to process. I understood what he was talking about, but I didn't know enough about Shadow to make any conclusions. If what he was saying about him was true, Kim could actually be in danger. Why was Miles being so nonchalant about it?!
I rubbed my face, shoving the information away for late processing. "Alright, let's just accept you were trying to protect Kim. Why do you need her help in the first place?"
He stuffed his hand into his shorts pocket and pulled out a beautifully cut, glowing yellow gem. "This is a chaos emerald. You've already put together the concept and the energy signature of chaos emeralds. The power within these emeralds reaches an infinite limit. Where I come from, Sonic and Shadow use the power to save the world from an evil roboticist named Dr. Ivo Robotnick, nicknamed Eggman. However, our last run on saving the world didn't go according to plan. We ended up in space, trying to prevent a space station called SpaceColony Ark from crashing into the planet. Shadow managed to stop it from happening, but, as a result, we ended up here on your world. Our only way home are the chaos emeralds, which came with us into this world. We have 5 of them, but one is where Shadow is now, and Sonic said he knew where the last one was, but he hasn't come back either." He sighed. "I guess we needed Kim's help up until the point when Shadow decided to go it alone to get the last emerald. You know, since she travels around the world so frequently. Any questions?"
I blinked. There was some information in his little explanation that defied every law of reality known to man, so, yes, I have questions! But there were more pressing matters—Kim going in blind to Draken's lair, when even Miles didn't know what was going on.
"Fine," I said, jerking my thumb over my shoulder. "Let's say I accept that. Now, move so I can brief Kim."
Miles jumped up when I said the words. One of the twins tugged the gem out of his hand and asked him question after question about it. One question caught my attention after I'd logged on to a new session on their computer.
"Did you look like this when you came to our world?" one twin asked.
Miles paused, grinning nervously. "Well…I…"
"Come on, you can tell us!" the other twin whined, putting on his brightest expression.
I must say I was intrigued as well.
Sighing, he answered. "Promise not to make fun?"
The twins nodded rapidly.
He glanced at each of us in turn. "Fine. No, I just took this form to…not get taken in by animal control." He opened the battery compartment on his game controller and flicked a switch. His form flickered electric blue and speckled away. In his place was a bright orange fox, about as tall as the brothers, with 2 identical massively bushy tails. "This is what I actually look like. I've been invisible with Sonic for the past 2 days, until this afternoon when I realized how pointless it was to try and stop him from doing something stupid."
"Whoa, cool!" one twin said, awed, geeking out. "Hologram!"
I grinned in spite of myself. "I guess I know why Rufus was so…vocal earlier yesterday. You built that?"
Miles nodded, looking nervously at the door. "Yeah, but I was the only one who needed it since Sonic and Shadow turned human. Some sort of energy here must have reacted with the chaos energy we used to get here. I was the only one not touching an emerald when we teleported."
"Cool tech!" one twin said, snatching the game controller and flicking the hologram switch. Kim speckled into view in the brother's place, grinning maniacally.
"Ew, dude!" the other brother said, taking the controller from him and flicking the switch on himself. A hologram image of Dr. Draken appeared.
"Dude!" Kim-tweeb snapped, slapping Draken-tweeb upside the head. "He's evil!"
"I know, but that's what's awesome about this!" Draken-tweeb replied, returning the slap. "We can ruin his reputation of being evil! We can turn him into a big cuddly teddy bear!"
The door opened behind them. Miles' expression contorted to pure horror. Mrs. Possible stood in the doorway, a small tray of juice-filled paper cups in her hands.
"Uh-oh," both tweebs muttered simultaneously.
Mrs. Possible glanced at each one of us, surprisingly calm. Dr. Draken, Kim, me, and a fox with 2 tails all in the same room. How calm would I be?
"What am I looking at right now?" she asked suspiciously. Her gaze found mine first, expecting an explanation.
"Well…this is…" I started, trying to come up with words on the spot. "Okay, you caught us."
Miles gave me another horrified look.
"I built a new hologram device that projects a hologram onto your body," I finished. "The twins wanted to surprise you with it, but—" I scratched the back of my head awkwardly "—you walked in too soon."
She shook her head in dismay. "It's brilliant what you come up with, in any case. Dinner will be done in a little while. Is it safe to say that you two will be staying?" she asked Miles and I.
I shook my head. "I wouldn't want to bother you. Kim just went on a mission that I wanted the twins' help on. It shouldn't be much longer." I side-glanced Miles, hoping a wink or a slight nod could give me reassurance of that. I got nothing from him.
Mrs. Possible smiled warmly. "It's no trouble at all! Spaghetti is the menu…with homemade lemon meringue pie for dessert," she added, leaving the juices on table next to the desk and closing the door behind herself.
Both tweebs fist-bumped excitedly. "Yes! How could this day get better?" they asked each other in unison.
"Let's try to focus please," I said, swiveling back to the computer. That pie was calling my name for later. Back to Kim! Kim needs to know what's happened. Know that I'm still pretty sour about Miles destroying my system. But, I have to keep that under wraps until we finish with Draken cleanup.
Within seconds, lines upon lines of code appeared across the screen. I needed to configure the tweebs' computer to match, at least, the multi-tasking capacity. If I couldn't have several things open, running at the same time and smoothly, we could have a problem.