6. Creation of a Weapon
Rouge waited for Shadow to turn the corner, then took to the air and followed him for a few blocks. He made one slight detour for a line of golden rings on the opposite side of the street, but seemed to be walking well enough. The rings should boost his energy a bit, as well. She wondered if she should have told him about Gerald's journal, but while he could probably have read it a lot faster than she could, she wasn't totally convinced he'd tell her what was in it, or (more accurately) everything that was in it. She wondered why a group of agents would be trying to use him and bring her down at the same time. Or are they trying to use him to get to me? She snorted. I may play the games, but I'm not hung up on anyone; that way lies disaster for any agent. Other women might gush over love and husbands and children, but that wasn't to Rouge's taste, and any agent who let emotional entanglements develop tended to cease being an agent rather swiftly. The object of said emotions became either a potential hostage or a potential threat, and Rouge had seen several other agents' supposed 'one-nighters' become exactly the snare that brought them down. Therefore she adhered to her 'look but don't touch' policy; she was privately convinced it got better results anyway, since males seemed to imagine far more than reality could possibly give them. She teased, hinted, and implied, but committed to nothing. The incredible part was that she could go back a few days later and go through the whole rigamarole again, and most males would fall for it even harder. But right now plain speaking was what was needed - or as plain as she ever spoke. The question was how much she should actually tell Sonic.
She guessed that Tails would either go home with the robot, or take it to Sonic, so she headed for the suburb of Emerald Town, where they both lived, and on which beach the Gizoid had been found. Sure enough, she spotted the fox cub and the robot just heading out toward the ocean, and followed them right to the blue hedgehog. He was sprawled on one of the outcrops, looking enormously bored and kicking one toe against the rock. Rouge dropped down as Tails hailed him and Sonic sat up.
"Tails, what took you so long?" she overheard. "What's going on?"
"Sonic, you won't believe what I found out about Emerl," replied the cub. In contrast to the hedgehog's eager questions, he sounded solemn, almost frightened.
Before Sonic could ask for details, Rouge stepped up behind the fox and declared, "Emerl's the world's deadliest weapon!" Grab 'em fast, and give 'em a shocking enough lead that they won't think too hard about the rest of your speech.
"Rouge!" gasped Tails, jumping aside.
"You!" exclaimed Sonic, automatically suspicious.
"Me!" answered the bat, in a fit of mischief.
Sonic was not amused. "What are you talking about?"
"Yeah, it's the truth!" interjected Tails. "That's what I discovered at the Central Lab!"
"A weapon?" Sonic looked skeptically at the robot. It was cleaner than when he'd found it but it looked nothing like a weapon or fighting machine, even to Rouge, who'd fought it already, and seen it fighting Shadow twice.
"Yes, and a very lethal one!" She debated whether to explain Eggman's plot. Sonic probably wouldn't believe it, and if he did, she wasn't sure if he'd dump the robot to spoil the plan, or play along with the intent of foiling the villain at the last moment.
"No, I can't believe it!" The blue brow furrowed, and the emerald-green eyes flickered as Sonic thought furiously. Then he brightened, turning to Tails. "He's just a robot, right? You could change its insides real quick, and fix this problem, right?" Problem solved, said his attitude.
But Tails was shaking his head. "Actually he's not just a robot," he contradicted, "my lab computer got fried when Emerl was connected to it, and we were chased by Guard Robos when we accessed Emerl's data at the Central Lab!"
Sonic's quills seemed to droop a bit. "Seriously?" He listened as the fox explained what he had managed to recover, the Gizoid's history and ability to copy weapons and fighting moves. Rouge listened and watched the blue hedgehog seem to change slightly, becoming more focused and actually reminding her faintly of Shadow. He's taken the Gizoid on as a cause, she realized. Not just a casual lark, something to do on a dull day, but an actual threat that needs to be countered. She decided it was time to intercede.
Sonic was asking, "And there's no way to shut it down?" Tails shook his head.
"But there is one way," the bat offered.
Green eyes locked onto hers, and she was startled at the intensity behind them. "Well, let me hear it!" snapped the hedgehog impatiently.
"Chaos Emeralds!"
"Chaos Emeralds?" Sonic and Tails chorused in unison, exchanging glances.
"That's right," Rouge confirmed, hurrying before they decided she wanted the gems for herself (she did, of course, but not this instant). "Collect all seven Chaos Emeralds, and insert them into Emerl."
The two exchanged another glance, this one more puzzled and less suspicious. After a moment Sonic scratched his head and looked back at the bat. "What happens then?"
"Then we can reset Emerl and turn him into an ordinary robot, and erase all his data as a battle weapon." That wasn't exactly what Shadow had told her, but as long as the Gizoid wouldn't use the data, it was as good as erased, wasn't it? And telling them it would be gone seemed more likely to encourage them to follow her suggestion.
Sonic considered briefly then brightened. "Sounds like a plan! So how would we reset him?" Tails was still thinking it over, but looked at Rouge as Sonic asked that question.
Which she didn't have an answer to. She opened her mouth, ready to say something that sounded good. "I - I don't know," she admitted. She was as surprised as they were by the admission.
"What?" Sonic couldn't believe it. "You don't know?"
"I know there is a way," she explained a bit stiffly, "but I don't know the exact method, yet. I'm still researching the matter."
Sonic snorted and looked away in disgust. Tails was still staring off into the distance, flicking his tails slowly back and forth. "So all we have to do is find seven Chaos Emeralds and then find a way to reset him," he said thoughtfully. The hedgehog frowned at him, but held his peace, waiting impatiently. Tails was young, but extremely smart, and Rouge knew if either of them was going to reject her plan, it would be the cub. And Sonic went along with him more often then not, despite his vaunted independence. "He's got two already," Tails went on slowly, "the one we got from Knuckles and the one I had. Shadow's probably got one; GUN's got one, I remember they mentioned it in the news report about him stopping the meteorites; so we need to find the other three and get Shadow and GUN to give us theirs." The orange fox looked at Rouge dubiously. "Can you get those? And help us locate the other three?"
The bat nodded. Certainly she could - he hadn't asked if she would do it. Smart as he was, he still had a lot to learn. But having the robot blow up the planet was hardly in her best interests, so she'd probably help them anyway. "Then, he'll be free, once and for all!" she said encouragingly.
Tails grinned at her. His older friend was still not entirely convinced. "Let me ask you one more thing, Rouge,"said Sonic.
She suppressed a sigh. "What is it?"
He raised and eyebrow at her. "What's in it for you by giving us all this information?"
Ouch! He might not be as smart as the fox boy, but he's not dumb. He acted so spontaneously it was easy to forget that. "You make it sound like I never do a good deed unless I profit from it," she countered.
"Am I wrong?" He saw her counter and raised it.
"Well, I do good deeds sometimes," she replied, a bit feebly.
"Well, I do good deeds," he mimicked, paused significantly, then concluded, "on occasion."
The bat glowered at him, ignoring the cub, who had started to giggle. Reaching a decision, she told them, "As you probably already know, Doctor Eggman is also hunting Emerl down."
"Eggman!" Surely the hedgehog wasn't really that surprised?
"Yes and he's still trying to do the same old thing," she expanded, raising a querying brow of her own.
"Conquer the world!" crowed Tails.
Rouge grinned at him. "Yes. And if he conquers the world," she buffed her nails along her collarbone, drawing Sonic's eyes if not the fox's, "it'll make any job involving stealing jewels more difficult. So I guess I'm doing the world a big favor." She finished humbly, peering at Sonic under her lashes. Actually, she rather suspected that if Eggman took over the world, the ensuing chaos would make stealing jewels easier, at least temporarily, but she doubted Sonic really cared, as long as she offered him a superficially plausible explanation. He wasn't stupid, but he wasn't a deep thinker like Shadow, either.
"A big favor?" he snorted. "You're a thief! And, you're after Emerl too, right?"
Rouge bristled in mock indignation. It allowed her to puff out her chest nicely. "Hey, these accusations aren't very nice. And that kid over there knows that I'm more than just a thief." She huffed a few times to show that he'd vexed her. (Which puffed her chest even more nicely.)
"Is that true, Tails?" He knew perfectly well she was an agent, but for some reason (perhaps because his eyeballs were glued to her cleavage) he didn't seem to remember.
"Y-yeah," said the cub slowly, looking back and forth between the other two, "I guess." He might know intellectually why Sonic was staring at Rouge's chest, but he didn't understand yet, not at a gut level. (Or perhaps a bit below the gut, the bat thought with a mental smirk.) Tails knew that Sonic knew what she was, and he didn't know why the hedgehog was asking him. Rouge had to fight not to laugh at his bewilderment.
She relaxed and folded her arms across her chest, cutting off Sonic's view. "Oh," she said as he shook his head and blinked, "and can you finally introduce me to your little robot?"
Still a bit dazed, Sonic looked up. "Don't you know Emerl already?"
"It– " she corrected herself, "he won't even say 'hello' to me unless you order him to do so." Her ears twitched; someone was approaching on foot, but still out of sight behind the rocks.
"Oh, yeah," the hedgehog seemed to come back into focus. "He was like that with Tails too in the beginning. Emerl, come here!"
"Come! Come!" agreed the robot, walking up behind the bat.
"Listen. You have to listen to Rouge from now on, OK?"
"Listen! Listen!"
"All right!" said Rouge smugly. She'd identified the steps as probably being Knuckles - the echidna had a rather emphatic walk, almost a march, when he was off his island. Time to go. "See ya!" she said and spread her wings.
Sonic gaped. "H-hey Rouge! Don't you want to talk to him now?"
Again she had to smother a laugh. "No more time to chat now," she feigned regret well, if she did say so herself! "Maybe some other time."
"Some other time! Some other time!" she heard Emerl calling as she flew away. A glimpse of crimson fur confirmed that the approaching dokan was Knuckles, but she had other things to do right now than tease the echidna.
She decided that there was probably too much confusion back at Central Labs to do anything useful there, so she returned to her own apartment, located above Club Rouge, a nightclub she actually owned. Booting up her computer, she started a trace on the GUN Chaos Emerald. She found numerous references to the vault on Prison Island (although most of the sources didn't know the actual location), where GUN had once stored three of the Emeralds before she herself had liberated them during the second ARK crisis. But she also found several of the reports Tails had mentioned, describing how Shadow the Hedgehog was taking on the fragments of the Black Comet armed only with 'a jewel that glows like blood'. Hah. Obviously the red one then, so let's try searching for that. She started another search - and sat back, laughing. GUN, it turned out, had borrowed it from a jewelry store right there in Central City, and it was now back on display - less than twelve blocks from her apartment.
Well, that'll be no problem to get hold of. Actually, I wonder . . . . She considered what she'd said in that monologue that the bug had recorded. An absolutely evil grin formed on her lips as a plan formed in her mind. She pulled open a specially shielded drawer, and pulled out the bug that the janitor had planted on her, and her transmission detector. Rolling the fake rhinestone between her fingers, she worked out her schedule for the next day, saying just enough out loud to verify that the device was still transmitting. Whether anyone was still listening was another question, but it cost nothing to lay a trail, even if nothing took the bait. Shutting the computer down, she heated up a frozen meal, then took a long, leisurely bath before bed, putting in her earplugs to block the noise of the nightclub downstairs.
She was up fairly early the next morning, and turned her attention back to Gerald's journal. She was annoyed to find that the next entry did not talk about Shadow, as she'd expected, but was a critique of some 'new' paper by a renegade anthropologist, suggesting that the standard thinking was wrong and the Fourth Great Civilization - which Gerald and most historians, anthropologists and archaeologists linked to the Babylonians - might actually be a 'lost' branch of the echidna tribes. Rouge skipped most of the details, which were meaningless to her at any rate, and picked back up where the Professor was concluding that the young man raised good points, but did not, in Gerald's mind, actually prove them. Gerald considered his stone tablet, written in Babylonian cuneiform, to be proof enough that the Babylonians or their near neighbors were the Fourth Great Civilization. The monuments of the echidnas were impressive, but showed none of the technological mastery of the Gizoid, while excavations in the Babylonian lands had revealed unusual machinery. Growling in annoyance, she flipped the page to the next entry.
And grinned. Jackpot! Now, at last, Professor Gerald was telling how he had created Shadow: the specific manipulations made; the setup of the artificial womb, with space for the Gizoid and its Chaos Emerald to stand guard. Hah, I wonder if Shadow knows he was intended to be gold, like Super Sonic? Not to mention what Knuckles would do if he knew that Professor Gerald had stolen a Chaos Emerald from Angel Island, right under his predecessor's nose. The artificial womb was a variation of the stasis pods Rouge was familiar with, modified to grow an embryo from fertilization through birth-size and beyond, although the latter use was severely frowned upon by most people and religions. But it could be used, as in Shadow's case, to produce a fully matured, flash-trained individual. However, when Black Doom arrived to witness the transference of the embryo into the pod, the alien dumped a vial of glowing green goo that he claimed was his blood on top of it. Even in the journal, Gerald was practically spluttering with anger at that casual destruction, as it might have been, of all his work and dreams for Maria. But he had managed to retrieve the cell cluster and install it into the womb safely, and it appeared to still be alive and well, although it would be several days before he could safely remove a cell to see what damage the alien's blood might have wrought. The alien had also added a Black Arms-manufactured device to the unit, claiming that it would enhance growth of the embryo so that it would be matured in four months.
The next entry was written with a feel of relief; the carefully adjusted genes of the tiny hedgehog-to-be had not been damaged, although there were several cellular and chemical changes that concerned the scientist, as they seemed to control certain cellular functions without having an obvious source of that control. Gerald had theorized that the aliens might be telepathic, and feared that either telepathy or Chaos energy might permit Black Doom to take control of Project: Shadow against the hedgehog's own will. He was already taking steps to counter those changes, although he would leave a remnant, to allow just enough control that the alien would not be suspicious, but it would be a control that Shadow would be able to break. Rouge shivered as she deciphered that part of the text. I remember that all too well. I thought we were goners when the alien just took over Shadow like that - and then he broke free, just like he'd already broken free of the gas . . . . She glanced at the clock and put the book down regretfully. Time to go grab the Gizoid, and take him 'shopping'.