Anti-Chaos

Sonic sneezed himself awake from a sound sleep and needed a few seconds to remember where he was. He sat up, rubbed his nose and stretched, taking a look around, then stood up silently and tiptoed to the door, trying not to wake Knuckles on the couch.

Once in the corridor, Sonic took the stairs up and stuck his head into the big lab. It was as quiet as the rest of the house and Sonic soon discovered why. Tails was asleep with his head on a desk, using one of his arms as a pillow. The professor hung snoring in another chair, his glasses slightly out of place. The computers seemed awake as ever, the screens showing a rushing amount of numbers, graphs and diagrams.

Sonic shrugged to himself as no-one else could see it anyway, and slowly went back downstairs, trying to remember where the others could have put his wet shoes yesterday when Knuckles had brought him here. After a few minutes of search, Sonic found them in the bathroom, tidily hung up aside of his socks and gloves, all of them dry again. Relieved to get rid of them, Sonic pulled off the funny socks and put on his own stuff, then decided to get outside and see if he could get some fresh bread for breakfast. Certainly the others would appreciate that too. Plus, there was nothing to do in a house full of sleeping people and an annoying sense of beginning boredom was already creeping up to him.

When the hedgehog opened the door, morning welcomed him with crisp air, the slightly salty smell of the nearby ocean and a bright blue sky. "Another day in paradi – at-choo!" Sonic shook himself at the second sneeze. "Man, I really should stay away from swimming pools..."

"The subject is apparently not fully healthy."

Sonic spun round at the sound of a robotic voice behind him, but froze in mid-movement. There was no one to see - but he'd heard someone talking? Sonic blinked and shook his head. "Maybe this is worse than a simple cold... I guess I'm hearing things."

A giggle from behind let the hedgehog whirl back once again, and this time he spotted a white-furred bat leaning leisurely against the wall of the building directly aside the door. "Don't worry, Sonic, it's not as bad as you think."

"Rouge!"

"Correct." She crossed her arms and lowered her head a bit, looking at him past her long eyelashes. "We came to ask you a few questions."

"WE?" Sonic looked around again, then stiffed at the typical sound of a metallic body moving. He knew that sound very well, and given all his experiences with Eggman and his hedgehog-hunting doomsday machines, it triggered the small button for his body's adrenaline supply.

Rouge laughed, clearly having sussed him out in no-time. "Oh, don't panic, there's no Eggman robot for you to smash right now. It's just Omega and he's with me."

Suspiciously Sonic scanned his surroundings once more. "Okay, is that a new trick or something? I can hear him but –"

"You can't see him, true," the white bat interrupted him with a nonchalant shrug of her shoulders. "Something weird happened with a Chaos Emerald. He's invisible since then."

Sonic's jaw dropped. "Omega is – what?"

"Invisible. I thought you'd know the word, Sonic." Rouge turned to fully face him.

"Invisibility," Omega's snarling voice put in from Sonic's left, "is a physical condition defined as the property of an object to neither reflect nor absorb electromagnetic waves or energy emitting quantums. The current state of this unit is not to be clearly classified as all physical laws imply perfect invisibility requires no electromagnetic signals to interact with the invisible object. The functionality of this unit's optical sensors obviates the possibility of the exact physical condition to be invisibility."

Rouge turned to where the robot had spoken from. "In my terms something is invisible when I can't see it. So, you are invisible."

"Invisible," Sonic echoed, staring at the seemingly empty space where the E-series robot stood. "And a Chaos Emerald did that? Maybe Tails would find that interesting to know; there's been some trouble with the Emeralds. They suddenly disappear, set things on fire, very weird stuff." The hedgehog decided not to tell Rouge about the Master Emerald. Knuckles would probably kill him if he found out he had as much as voiced the name of his precious gemstone in presence of the reknown treasure huntress who totally had a weakness for the thing. Instead, Sonic settled for a simple, much vaguer phrase. "Something's happening to the chaos energy."

"This is all very interesting," Rouge shook her head. "Really, if I had any time... But I don't. I'm coming to ask you about Shadow."

Sonic snorted. "You're fast. He was here yesterday. How did you find out?"

"Research in media databanks indicated definite traces of Project Shadow's specific combat activities." Although he knew he was there, the blue hedgehog almost jumped at the sound of Omega's movement again.

"We saw pictures of the dockyards here in the news," Rouge translated. "I know Shadow's chaos spears. That was him, and he was fighting somebody who gave him a challenge. I don't know many people who can do that." She shrugged. "So we came here, I asked around and found someone who had seen a blue hedgehog, a two tailed fox and a red echidna up here, so I figured where to find you and your pals." The bat stepped a little closer to Sonic and suddenly there was a pleading expression in her turquoise eyes. "Sonic, if you know something about Shadow tell me."

The hedgehog raised his eyebrows. "You don't know where he is? I mean, you two are best friends, aren't you?"

Rouge nodded almost hesitantly. "Shadow's been missing for almost a month now. He often leaves for a week or so, but usually he comes back. I'm worried that something happened to him."

"Well, he seemed okay yesterday. At least physically," Sonic started.

"What do you mean, physically?" Rouge's eyes widened a fragment.

"He didn't know me," Sonic said slowly. "I mean, really not. He didn't know my name, who I am, what I am capable of. He was even surprised of my speed." Sonic paused a moment. "You know, we've never been friends, allies if at all. But yesterday was... He threw me into the dock. If Knuckles hadn't come by more or less by chance, you wouldn't be able to speak to me now."

The bat gasped. "He... He really tried to... kill you? That's what throwing a non-swimmer into the water is..."

Sonic took a slow breath. "I wouldn't go that far. I did yesterday, sure, but once I thought it over..." The blue hedgehog looked into Rouge's eyes. "He didn't know me. He maybe also didn't know I can't swim."

Rouge lowered her head and sighed.

Very well seeing her discomfort, Sonic still couldn't keep his questions in. "Rouge? Do you have any idea what happened to him? He's with Eggman, doesn't know people, he -"

"He's with Eggman?" Rouge's head snapped back upright, a dangerous glow ighting in her eyes.

Sonic blinked at her expression. "Didn't I say so?"

"Eggman...", the bat mumbled, her voice slightly earning a darker undertone. Sonic didn't know her too well, but she was quite obviously mad now.

"I thought he'd learned his lesson by now and wouldn't work with Eggman again," the hedgehog noticed. "But on the other hand, if he doesn't remember..."

"Something terrible must have happened to him," Rouge muttered, completely ignoring Sonic's comments. "I'm sure Eggman's behind this." She suddenly looked at Sonic, decision written all over her face. "Thank you. I must go now."

"All inferior Eggman machines must be terminated," Omega shouted. It seemed slightly out of topic to Sonic, but probably that was Omega for you?

The blue hedgehog shrugged. "Give that Eggbreath and Shadow my regards, and be careful with any kind of chaos energy."

Distractedly Rouge inclined her head. "Bye, Sonic." She turned around and started flying down the road towards the fence. "Come on, Omega," she waved at the robot.

"Affirmative," the machine replied and stomped after her, his heavy steps clearly audible, although Sonic could see nothing of him besides the small clouds of dust his stomps whirled up from the ground.

The hedgehog stood for a minute looking after the strange pair. Tails would be quite surprised if he told him about the invisible robot, and what Rouge had told him about Shadow was also quite interesting. It didn't explain his behavior, but then again, this was about Shadow... and who could seriously claim to fully understand the black hedgehog's intentions? The two persons closest to achieving that near-miracle had just left, Sonic mused. He shrugged off his thoughts after a moment and jogged down the road to do what he'd originally planned. Get breakfast.

In a world more distant to Mobius than one could imagine without getting the mind into a state of strain, separated in both time and location, far enough to allow for calling it another universe, a lavender cat slowly walked through the entrance of one, if not the most, sacred and well-guarded places in her kingdom.

The sounds of her footsteps sending chilly echoes across the small room, Blaze went up to set the seven Sol Emeralds, forever in her responsibility to guard and protect, down onto the shrine close to the middle of the chamber. For a second or two her gaze rested on the gems, her mind recalling yet another chase after her nemesis Eggman Nega to retrieve the precious and powerful stones. A chase that had just ended.

A small smile lit on the cat's face as she stepped away from the shrine, moving over to the few candles that decorated the walls. She didn't need a lighter to get them back on after her time of absence; having been gifted with pyrokinetics by birth she allowed a small flame to grow on the tip of her index finger and let it relight the candles one by one.

Enjoying even the tiny warmth they generated, the lilac cat sat down on the floor where she was. Of course, she could leave to get some well deserved rest now, but it was the mood of the place that had caught her for now, and for a while she just planned to bathe in it.

Eyes having closed halfway, her gaze aimlessly wandered around the room, and it didn't take long for her mind to follow it smoothly; first it played around her just finished task again, then it slowly drifted to a more abstract field of thoughts. She glanced over to the dimly glowing Sol Emeralds again, remembering their counterparts from a world far away. Seven as well, but not warm in nature, to her they were just what their name made them: chaos.

Blaze wasn't sure if the number had any meaning, after knowing that in a second world another set of Emeralds with similar and yet so very different powers existed… She just wasn't sure. Her eyes opened all the way again as a new thought struck her, breaking into her half-minded pondering.

In Sonic's world…. There were eight Emeralds. She looked back to the shrine. If so many things in these two worlds are alike… Have the Sol Emeralds… ever had a Master? Sonic and his friends had claimed the Chaos Emeralds needed it. Didn't the Sol Emeralds need one? If they didn't… why didn't they? If they did… where was it? Was its power enough to keep them in check even over distances so big neither she nor any ancestors she knew of had never gotten any idea of its existence?

Blaze frowned. No one on her planet seemed to know of such a thing. No one had even told about it, but the purple feline was aware how much old wisdom had gotten lost already. Maybe she would find out one day. Or she was just not supposed to know?

"So, are you gonna tell me what you found out?" Knuckles folded his arms and looked between Tails, the professor and the big screen they stood in front of.

"Of course, Knuckles." Tails nodded at the raccoon and the scientist pressed a few buttons. The screen started to show a computer model of a glowing yellow ball, surrounded by circles that held smaller balls. "This," Tails pointed at the image, "is a picture of our solar system. This is the sun and here are the planets on their courses around the sun. And this is Mobius. See the moon?"

Sonic nodded. "So far I get it," he grinned. "Go on, Tails."

The fox turned back to the virtual picture and his finger pointed at an elliptic line that crossed all the others, neared the sun in the middle of the image and lost itself at the corners of the model, so that it showed only less than a third of the elliptic shape.

"This is the course of the mysterious thing we saw through the telescope yesterday," Tails explained, his finger ending up aside of a small orange dot. "Right now it is about here."

"So, what is it?" Knuckles frowned, this really wasn't the time for astronomy lessons.

"Firstly, in this context," Archibald took over, "it is a comet."

"A comet?", Sonic echoed. "You mean, one of these little things that return every few years?"

"It makes me more think of the Black Comet," Knuckles muttered.

Sonic turned to him for a moment, then back to the other two. "Don't tell me there are aliens aboard that want to conquer us. We had enough of that a while ago."

Tails shook his head. "No aliens. Quite certainly not. It is too small. It has only a radius of about two thirds of a meter at its thickest point."

Sonic tilted his head and shot Knuckles a sideways glance. "That means it's more or less as big as the Master Emerald."

The echidna grunted.

Tails took that moment to simply keep talking, knowing full well that there was no reason to let them press that topic any further right now. "We know thousands of comets. Some return every two or three years."

"Some also pass by our planet only once in a century, or only every thousands of years. That depends on how long their orbit is and how far it takes them." The professor stretched his hand out and his finger drew along the elliptic line the comet's orbit formed on the picture. "This one needs about 800 years for one circulation."

Sonic turned to Knuckles. "But you said your legend about this is a few thousand years old?"

The red echidna shrugged. "It's just some old legend, they are not exactly trustworthy, Sonic. You know, one person tells another and the thing is as big as a fist. This person tells someone else and it is already as big as a melon. Then as the Master Emerald. You see?"

Sonic nodded. "Like when you're playing Chinese Whispers."

"Possible," Tails admitted, "but there may be another reason for it. The last three times the comet came inside the inner regions of our solar system, Mobius was always on the other side of it. It never came that close. The effects it had should have been a lot smaller with the sun as a kind of shield between that thing and the planet."

"So, it just passed by?" Sonic quirked an eyebrow. "That explains why everything returned to normal after a while." He looked over at Knuckles and the echidna nodded.

"Then we can just wait and everything will be fine?"

Tails and Archibald exchanged a glance and both shook their heads. "I'm afraid that's not the case, Knuckles." Tails' ears drooped a little and he pointed at the screen. "See? This is where all the planets and other objects will be in three days."

The image changed, showing the planets move faster around the sun. Sonic followed the line that depicted the course of the comet. "It'll impact," he said, looking at where the miniature comet had just hit the miniature planet.

Tails nodded. "Yes."

Knuckles took a deep breath. "This can't be good."

This time it was the professor who shook his head at him. "No. You're very right; it is not good at all." He took off his glasses and started to clean them with the sleeve of his coat. "We analyzed the make-up of the object. It is made of some very solid, crystallize material. Very similar to a Chaos Emerald."

"To be precise, the readings it gives," Tails took over again, "are, as far as we can tell, very similar to the energetic outlet of the Master Emerald, but it is poled differently."

Sonic blinked. "What does that mean?"

"It is like… matter and anti-matter," Tails answered.

Knuckles rolled his eyes. "What is matter and anti-matter?"

"Matter is what this universe is made of," the raccoon said and put his glasses back on. "You know, normal atoms. Protons, electrons, neutrinos…"

Knuckles looked at Sonic. The hedgehog shrugged. "I'm as helpless as you are," he grinned sheepishly.

"Let me try." Tails waited until he had their both attention. "You could see those two things as complete opposites. Like ehhm… fire and ice, hot and cold, wet and dry. They can't exist together at the same place. That would cause a … logical paradox."

"Okay, I understood it until that point with that paradox." Sonic smiled with a shrug.

"That's enough I guess." Tails grinned briefly. "The main point is that you cannot have those two things in one place."

"What happens then?", Knuckles asked although he was afraid to already know the answer.

"For matter and anti-matter…" Archibald held his hands out at Knuckles, brought them together and jerked them loose again. "BANG!" He grinned as if that was a great thing. "The blast you could get out of an anti-matter bomb would be…"

Sonic shook his head. "We better don't tell Eggman about that."

"I'm sure he knows. It's a well-known thing. It's just hard to get anti-matter." Tails twirled his namesakes. "But back to the point. We could very well call that thing anti-chaos, 'cause it's the complete opposite of the chaos energy as we know it."

"Anti-chaos? So at least that thing's got a name now." Sonic rubbed his nose. It itched and felt kinda weird.

"So, we cannot let it stay here once it landed, can we?" Knuckles folded his arms on his chest.

Tails shook his head. "No. Something constantly unbalancing our chaos energy… that'd be horrible."

"Can we – atishoo!" Sonic's speech was interrupted by a sneeze. He wiped his nose and started again. "Can we destroy it?"

Tails and the professor simultaneously shook their heads. "No. It is that solid that it won't burn up during entering our atmosphere. And there is no way telling what would happen if we destroyed it and set all this energy free. It could blow up the planet or something."

"Then wha-" Another sneeze stopped Sonic's question in half.

Tails raised his eyebrows at him. "Bless you. You really snatched a cold there, didn't you?"

Sonic grunted. "What I was about to ask: what do we do?"

Tails shrugged helplessly. "I have no idea. We got three days to think of something."

Knuckles let out a desolate sigh. "Oh great."

Robotnik typed a numeric code into the panel aside of the door and it slid aside. He gestured inside and Shadow entered a brightly lit lab. The hedgehog's eyes travelled over the machinery, screens, consoles, keypads and a chair-like thing in the middle of the room. Shadow tilted his head.

"Take a seat." Robotnik pointed at the chair with an inviting gesture.

Shadow slowly moved over to the chair and sat in it. It was as uncomfortable as it looked. "What now?", he asked.

Robotnik walked over to one of the consoles and typed a sequence. "Now my friend... I'm one step closer to the Eggman Empire!"

Shadow opened his mouth to wonder about his comment, but stopped when metal restrains shot out of the sides of the chair too fast even for his reflexes to follow, closely locking around his legs and arms and body. "Hey, what's this about?", he growled.

"That," Robotnik laughed, "is my plan finally able to truly work." He walked over to Shadow.

The hedgehog struggled, in vain attempting to get out of the cold metal bonds all around him. "You... lied to me!" He angrily glared at the human. "You aren't my friend! You don't want to help me!"

Robotnik laughed again. "See how smart you are." He leaned down to face the hedgehog. "You disappoint me, Shadow. The Ultimate Lifeform should have been able to understand my doing."

His hands reached behind Shadow's head and he pulled a metal strip around his brow that disabled the hedgehog to move even his head.

The human leaned down closer to him, staring into his eyes. "You are a weapon, Shadow. A brilliant weapon, and the one who can use you in his war has already almost won." The scientist laughed. "There is only on problem about you. It's in here." He stuck his finger at Shadow's forehead. "You are held back by the personality your creator, my grandfather, gave you. I have tried hard to build a robot that would be able to hold that same powers as you do. I did not succeed. Therefore, I decided to make you the best of all robots."

Shadow growled lowly. "You won't get away with this," he snarled. "I will -"

"Nothing you will. You don't stand a change." He stood back upright and walked over to one of the numerous machines, pressing a few buttons.

Shadow's mind was racing. His blood was close too boiling with rage. Rage for being betrayed. Deceived. Used. The rest of him was confused. With Eggman's speech automatically little pictures had started to lick into his mind. Pictures of a blond girl, a space station, other people, that blue hedgehog and some that seemed to be the hedgehog's friends. Also of fights, robots and destruction. He knew all of this, and in the same time he didn't. He couldn't deal with all those random pieces of information right about now. He didn't even manage to think about trying a chaos teleport to get out of the most immediate trouble.

But he didn't get the chance to order his mind. Robotnik had turned around, in his right hand holding a grey, fist-sized gemstone, in his left a half-round, weird shaped – thing. The human pulled a piece of machinery closer to Shadow's involuntary seating place and plugged the stone into a small hole in an arm of the machine that held around Shadow, placing it in a way that the hedgehog could see nothing but the greyish light stinging his eyes.

"Look at it, Shadow. This is power." Robotnik laughed from where he stood beside Shadow.

The hedgehog stiffened when he felt cold metal on his head and he grunted in pain as it seemed to cling onto him. He tried to get a grip on the Emerald's power and felt it just as something strange, formless, uselessly slipping away from him in spite of his efforts. "What … is that?" He was starting to feel sacred, scared of being helpless, scared of being in the hands of someone who'd deceived him so easily, scared of not knowing what was going on and of being unable to influence what happened.

"This is also power. MY power."

Robotnik's laughter echoed in Shadow's ears while the Chaos Emerald started pulsing and glowing even brighter. A stinging pain drilled itself into his skull, tearing all conscious thoughts asunder. It was as if a vortex had built up inside his head, sucking in all the fear, the confusion, the hatred and everything else, even the pain.

Until he was no more.

…

…

…

…

"Report status."

A clear line of numbers fluxed at the sound of the Master's voice, building a second layer over the image of a brightly lit lab.

"All systems working," the black hedgehog answered flatly.

"Follow me for check-up."

"Affirmative."