Discovery

Knuckles sat with his back against the outer wall of Tails' workshop. Tails was inside; he had been tinkering with his stuff ever since they came here around midnight. Sonic was sleeping on a couch – and Knuckles was glad he was. While Tails had been busy, Sonic didn't have anything to do. The hedgehog had tried convincing Knuckles to eat something, to talk to him… to… a lot of things Knuckles had not really felt up for, but he finally had agreed to do most, just to silence Sonic.

After the hedgehog eventually lay snoring on the couch, Knuckles had paced around the hangar and looked over Tails' shoulder. Until the fox had basically thrown him out of the room remarking he could work much better without having people standing behind him all the time and that Knuckles should get some sleep, he was looking like walking death.

The echidna hadn't bothered with a look into the mirror to check up on Tails' description. It didn't matter. Nothing really mattered until he found a way to stop whatever was happening to the Emeralds.

Knuckles sighed and ran a hand over his face. He felt like crap. Maybe Tails was right and he also looked it. His head hurt, the rest of his body was filled with a weird, heavy emptiness, his eyes burned as if he had some kind of irritant in them and his vision kept blurring.

The echidna blinked slowly. Dawn was a haze of gold and blue. It was starting to be so bright it hurt. Knuckles closed his eyes against the light, trying in vain to keep his thoughts from growing even more sluggish as they already were at this point.

… It was dark, but a small orange glimpse of light was glooming somewhere, not truly locatable, growing from the distance until he could guess the shapes of its outline, spinning around him, circling him, making a kind of noise he had never heard before. Another glow suddenly added to it, familiar, warm in spite of its color. Green melted into orange, getting closer to him and to the opposite color, the noise increasing to a bang and green pieces shattered and vanished into the endless darkness around. A pitch black cold billowed out of it, and only the orange remained glooming without any tint of warmth. A threat. Somehow… looking at him. Coming closer.

Knuckles twitched, mumbling and then wincing at the sound of his own voice. Hazy pictures of lights and darkness and colours faded quickly from his mind without becoming a clear memory. He struggled to manage a straight thought and realized confusedly that his eyes were shut and he was lying on the grass. The freezing cold was gone, instead, he felt warm all over. Still, his heart was beating a tad too fast and the sense of almost fear, at least of nervousness didn't fit his sleepiness at all, but the echidna failed to remember what had caused it.

He propped himself up on his elbows and found a pillow lying on the grass. A yawn came over him while he started wondering how the heck this pillow had found its way out. He had not brought it. Knuckles shrugged to himself as he sat up and stretched, yawning again. It couldn't be really important, considering that he did indeed feel much better now.

Almost like a living being again.

Before he could go on to think any further, a nagging pain growled in his belly, sharply reminding him just how hungry he was. Knuckles crawled to his feet, fetching the pillow, and returned inside.

The hangar was empty, filled with a just quiet hum of energy. Knuckles got upstairs and found Sonic sitting on the couch table in the living room, busily throwing the lids of coke bottles at a small box standing at the wall the other side of the room. The admirable precision he performed these ballistic experiments with suggested he wasn't doing it only for a minute.

"Uhhm," Knuckles started.

Sonic's last lid missed by an inch. "You ruined my record," he said, then hopped off the low table, turned to Knuckles and grinned. "Well, you're feeling better now?"

"Hmm," the echidna nodded. "Oh, before I forget: Good morning."

Sonic's grin broadened. "Is that what you call morning, ey? The clock over there says it's five in the afternoon." The hedgehog pointed to the wall behind Knuckles.

"Oh."

"You know, sensible people sleep during the night. But it looks as if I'm not surrounded by sensible people right now."

Knuckles smirked. "Then you fit in at least."

Sonic didn't flinch at the comment. "Tails is catching up on some sleep as well. The generator downstairs is building up power to work his Emerald detector without a Chaos Emerald. He said it's almost ready to give it a try."

Knuckles nodded. "Fine." His gaze fell on the pillow he still held. "Err... What do I do with this?"

Sonic shrugged, still smirking. "Throw it on the sofa. I took it from there this morning. Found you comatose on the grass when I went out for my morning run and thought you'd get a hell of a stiff neck sleeping like that."

"Uh, thanks, I guess." Knuckles tossed the pillow over onto the couch.

"You're welcome." Sonic grinned when Knuckles' stomach gave another growl. "Hehe, your stomach has more of a common sense than you. I guess we'll get some early dinner, huh? I'm sure Tails will like some food, too."

Knuckles nodded.

"Damnit!" Robotnik's angry curse forced Shadow to look up at where the scientist was standing on a small ladder in front of a big shelf, a metallic box in his hands. Seeing the tall human standing in that position made him seem even more abnormal than he already did otherwise. "I hate it if things don't go the way I planned them!"

Shadow pulled his full attention away from the numeric letterings aside of the doorway to the room they were in and skated closer to Robotnik who was less than elegantly climbing down the ladder. "What's wrong, Doctor?", the black and red hedgehog asked.

"It is broken!" The human held the box out at Shadow.

Looking in, Shadow glimpsed an amount of shards of thick glass. "Can you repair it?"

"No! No, it can't be repaired. We need to replace it." Robotnik put the box down onto a desk, heavily leaning with both of his hands onto the table. "And I don't have anything here we can use. We need to find something elsewhere." He sighed, but suddenly slammed his fist down onto the desk, the shards in the box tinkling. "I was so close!"

"Hm. If you tell me where I can find such a thing, I could go and get you something to replace this," Shadow offered. The human was helping him and giving him a roof above his head here, so he could as well help him out in return.

Robotnik looked back up at him, a smile forming on his lips. "Well, I need to investigate a little on where we can find another lens that is as good. And then you are going to bring it to me, my friend."

"Alright guys. Wish us luck." Tails' finger rested on top of the button to turn on the modified Emerald detector.

"Hope it works," Knuckles muttered. He was leaning against the big table that stood in the middle of the workshop, his eyes almost suspiciously fixed on the device it held.

"Don't worry, Tails rarely builds stuff that doesn't," Sonic remarked, casually standing at Tails' other side, arms folded on his chest.

A brief smile flickered over Tails' face. "Well, I based this device on the machine we used to track down Chaos Emeralds before. But since we are searching for something different, I can't guarantee that it'll work. You said it is something resembling the chaos energy, so the chances that it will be able to detect something are approximately-"

"Tails?", Sonic interrupted the fox' speech. "Switch it on and let's see what happens."

"Oh, err, of course..." Tails giggled, blushing slightly under the white fur on his muzzle, but he pressed the button.

The quiet hum that had filled the hangar before grew louder, the lights flickered when the small machine demanded all the energy the generator could master for its own, but the screen of the detector on the table blinked into life, the picture it showed almost black, just some colorful stripes erratically spread across the screen interrupting the dark default coloring.

"Okay, we need to enter a search pattern, something that defines what we are searching for," Tails explained without the others having needed to ask.

"Great," Knuckles groaned, "since we are searching for something we have never seen before, we won't be able to describe it so that this thing here can track it, right?"

"Tails?", Sonic asked. "Is Knux right?"

The fox looked at the red echidna with a thoughtful expression on his face, but he didn't really seem as if he'd been listening to the others. "It mainly interfered with the Master Emerald," he mumbled, "so it is likely that the similarity between the Master Emerald and this thing is bigger than with the Chaos Emeralds..." The two tailed fox chewed his lip, then suddenly whirled to the machine, his fingers rushing over the keypad. "I'll set it to the energetic pattern of the polar opposite of the Master Emerald."

Sonic and Knuckles exchanged a glance. "He's doing what?", the hedgehog whispered, but the echidna only shrugged back. Sonic turned back to Tails and his newest invention. "And? Working?"

Tails nodded excitedly. "Look here, I'm getting some sort of reading. Do you see that red line and this dot there?"

Knuckles leaned closer. "Yeah. That's this thing? Where is it then, Tails?"

Before the fox could reply, Sonic stretched out his arm and his index finger pointed at the screen. "What I find almost more interesting: Why is it moving, Tails?"

"It moves?", the fox and the echidna shouted in unison.

Sonic nodded. "Just barely. Look at it for a moment. It moves to the left a bit."

Tails narrowed his blue eyes. "You're right."

"This is all very interesting and stuff, but could we first find out where it is so we can go smash it or something?", Knuckles urged.

Tails nodded. "Just a second, Knuckles." His fingers were hastily typing data into the detector again. "Sonic? Get the computer on."

"Alright." The blue hedgehog zipped to the other side of the room to the desk.

"Knuckles? Paper and pencil, please," Tails ordered, not taking his eyes off the screen. He reached blindly when Knuckles held a small sheet of paper out at him and scribbled down a few numbers just as blindly.

Sonic returned and looked over his shoulder. "Eh, what does that tell us? What's these numbers?"

"Three-dimensional coordinates on vectorial basis to determine a fixed position in space," Tails replied distractedly, taking his note sheet and flying over to his desk where he dropped onto the chair.

"It is – what?", Knuckles asked while he and Sonic followed the fox.

Sonic shrugged. "Something like a landmark, I guess."

"Yes. More or less," Tails agreed and turned around to his friends while his computer loaded a program. "It's a bit like a map, but with three dimensions. That way we can find out quite exactly where that thing is."

"Nice." Sonic tipped his head aside in curiosity, leaning past Tails to get a good look at the computer screen.

The fox typed in the data the detector had given out and waited. For a moment the screen showed an increasing loading progress, then the result of the calculation appeared on the screen. Tails let out a gasp and leaned heavily against the backrest of his chair. "This is... impossible..."

"Tails? What's up?" Sonic's gaze flew between the computer and his fox friend.

"Bad news?" Knuckles' tone betrayed his concern. "Where is it?"

Tails took a deep breath. "It's not on Mobius," he said quietly.

Sonic frowned. "Then, where is it? Angel Island?"

Knuckles winced at the mentioning of his home, already expecting things to be even worse than he'd thought, but Tails shook his head.

"No, I mean it's really not on the planet," the fox said slowly. "It's a few hundred thousand kilometres in space."