21. Dreams in the Desert
Dr. Ivo Robotnik posed in front of his mirror, scrutinizing his appearance. His moustache was freshly washed and combed to a perfectly matched pair of rhombi, and his bald pate gleamed in the morning sun. "After the rain last night, everything seems fresh and new; a good omen, don't you think?" he said cheerily.
"Given that freshness is often a related to moisture content, one would expect a rain to make things fresh," opined Orbot, "but I do not see how it makes things any newer than they were last night; to the contrary, everything is several hours older than it was last night. And even it they weren't, omens are illogical superstitions."
Robotnik considered dropping out of his 'respectable' persona and thumping his didactic creation, but decided he was in too good a mood. "As opposed to logical superstitions, you mean? You really don't have to take everything I say so literally, you know."
"But when I ask you if you're being literal, you either say that you always are, or swat me and say that you always are," countered Orbot. A thump from the door interrupted the robot and made both of them turn toward it. A second thump, like something hitting the floor, followed.
After a moment the door swung open and the black, cuboid robot drifted in on its hoverboard. "Fell off again, did you?" asked the spherical one.
"It's not easy to open a door while riding a hoverboard."
"It is if you stop the hoverboard first."
"Are we ready to go?" interjected the human. Orbot and Cubot would bicker for hours if he let them. It was often amusing, but now was not the time. "The Rogues know the plan; Sonic and his friends have won their places in this race. All we need to do now is head for the desert and wait for race time."
"There's an awful lot of sand in the desert," protested Cubot. "It'll get in my gears - and I'll melt in this black coating."
"You should have thought of that before you asked to be painted black," said Orbot primly.
"Bikers always wear black leather. So I need to, too."
"You're not a biker, you're a hoverboard rider. Only you aren't really; it's just for this scheme."
"But I'll still melt. All the boss'll have left is a puddle of gritty black goo and stuck gears."
"Pick a color, and I'll repaint you on the way," said Robotnik genially. (Geniality was useful; pretend to be Santa Claus and people like you, even when they suspect the truth.) He picked up the last carryall and popped Orbot into it. "Do I look suitably respectable? I don't want anyone thinking the EX Grand Prix isn't on the level."
"You look fine from here. Although I still don't see why we can't just take the Emeralds we have and run."
Robotnik sighed. "Because I still need the key, to get the treasure buried in Babylon Gardens. The legends speak of all sorts of weapons and surveillance systems; exactly the things I need to create Robotnikland." He zipped the case shut and caught the nose of Cubot's board with his free hand, towing it towards the door. "Now let's go."
Dr. Robotnik, head of Robotnik Industries, maker of home and industrial robots as well as military and government mechanicals, as well as hoverboards and similar recreational gadgets, nodded graciously to people as he left the hotel, thanked the doorman for flagging down a taxi, and generously tipped the driver of said taxi when they reached the private airport. Dr. Ivo Robotnik walked suavely up the steps of the Robotnik Inc. Jet sitting in the field and gave directions to the robot pilot to take the plane halfway around the planet for the final race of the Grand Prix. Then Dr. Eggman sat back, rumpled his mustache, and chortled at the proximity of his success. He did enjoy pretending to be a respectable businessman. Removing Orbot from the carryall, he placed the white sphere in a fitted socket on the cabin's desk, then snagged Cubot's hoverboard and shut it down, placing it in the bag. Humming to himself, Eggman waited for the plane to take off, then rummaged in one of the storage lockers for a couple of jars. Pulling out the first, which contained a proprietary 'paint' stripper he glanced over at Cubot. "Did you decide what color you wanted?"
Cubot, now on the desk next to Orbot, hopped his square base from side to side while his companion pointedly ignored him. Neither robot had legs, both closing up and rolling as their primary mode of travel. "Yellow," he decided. "Yellow like the sun and bananas."
"Bananas?" repeated the human and Orbot in chorus. They shared a glance then both looked at Cubot, still dancing on the desktop.
"I like bananas."
Eggman shrugged. "Well, I have a can of yellow." He extracted it from the shelf and set it next to the stripper. "Get over here, then." Cubot stretched over, grabbed the edge of the work table and hitched himself across. Then he collapse down into his namesake cube.
"If you aren't going to need me, boss, I'll shut down for a recharge," said Orbot. The hemispherical socket on the desk provided an energy source as well as a secure seat. He hated rolling accidently, but had refused to let Eggman add even retractable stabilizers to his base. Thus every room he routinely inhabited had at least one such socket in it.
Eggman nodded absently, pulling down his goggles, donning gloves, and flipping a switch that dropped and activated a fume hood. The coating on his robots wasn't actually paint, and the chemicals needed to remove it were neither pleasant nor safe to breathe. Most such work was done by other robots in his various factories, legal or non, but he did a lot a scale-models or smaller robots personally. Quickly he stripped the cuboid robot down to bare metal, paused a moment to fix a damaged hinge pin, then began to paint the yellow coating across the smooth faces of the cube. He did three adjacent faces, then sprayed them liberally with purple fluid from a small squirt bottle and slid the unit under a special lamp. As the fluid turned clear it reacted with the coating, binding it to the metal and itself, creating a finish that repelled water and most solvents except his own formulation of stripper, was scratch-proof, dirt-proof, laser-proof, fingerprint-proof, and insect resistant. (Nothing he'd ever found was bug-gut-proof.) In fact the only thing that could really damage it was a certain couple of hedgehogs, who would remain nameless. Once those sides were dry, he repeated the process with the other three, leaving Cubot upside down under the light while he washed his hands and stuck a sandwich into the microwave to warm. I should probably change Orbot's color as well, he mused, since a lot of people have seen both of them recently. Then again, no one can really be so stupid as not to know who I am, surely? We do the little dance, I pay my lawyers well, and GUN grits their teeth and can't come after me because of several legal idiocies that they can't simply ignore. He ate the sandwich and settled back for a nap.
While Eggman dozed, the plane arrived at Mazastan, a fairly large city on the edge of the desert that had once been ruled by Babylon. A large, ancient amphitheater was set out about 15 miles from the edge of the city, in an area rather unimaginatively called 'Sand Ruins'. The amphitheater itself was not a ruin, having been sporadically maintained and occasionally restored over its lifetime, although care had been taken recently to return it to an 'ancient' feel and appearance. It sat amid a ruined city, much of which had been swallowed by the desert, and some of which Eggman himself (or rather, his robots) had discovered while plotting the race course. The Doctor's planned track started and ended at the amphitheater, but circled around or through a number of nearby structures, some of which he had enhanced with modern machinery - and some of which had their own, ancient enhancements that he had merely repaired. The general area had reminded Eggman fondly of his pyramid base, from which he had taken over the ARK. The ancient technology down below had been a delightful bonus. The plane flew over the city to land beside an apparently ruined building near the amphitheater. Inside, it was anything but ruined; despite its ancient looks it had been built by Eggman less than three months prior.
Eggman snorted slightly, shifting in his chair as the plane landed, but didn't wake up until he heard a loud, slow hiss. He opened one eye, saw a huge snake rearing up to face level, and closed his eye again. Then popped both eyes open when his brain processed what it had just seen and hollered at him. Clutching at the arms of his chair and trying not to breathe too noticeably, he stared at the creature before him. The serpent, marked along its spine with bright triangles of red and yellow along a black central stripe had its back to him, the head held nearly six feet off the ground as it surveyed the cabin. What little the man could see of the snake's head had a strange, pale color to it, and looked more like bare skin than scales. A faint wheeze from behind Eggman made him wonder if there were additional snakes before he recognized it as the sound of either Orbot or Cubot opening up. Oh no. No, please be quiet, don't say–
"BOSS! There's a snake on the plane! A huge snake!" Eggman flinched in spite of himself; he hadn't realized the little robots could achieve such volume. He'd have to fix that if he survived the - what was that thing?
The brilliantly colored serpent had whipped around at the robot's bellow, unfurling a hood - no, not a hood, a . . . a . . . a moustache? Eggman blinked, blinked again and wished very much he dared rub his eyes, because he was being confronted by a serpent wearing his own head, bald pate, dark glasses, red moustache and all. The forked tongue was not his though, he was pretty certain of that. The head shifted slightly, suggesting the obscured eyes were looking over the Doctor's head at the robot. The lower jaw dropped open and a pair of steely fangs hinged down from the upper jaw. With a sudden dart of its head, the serpent sprayed a black fluid over Eggman's head. The robot's case could be heard closing with a snap; the Doctor didn't know if it had been hit or not. The serpent turned its head slightly left, then right, like a lizard evaluating the distance to a possible meal. It sank down, below Eggman's range of vision (reclining as he was, his own stomach and legs prevented him from seeing the floor, and he didn't want to risk provoking the thing by moving) and he heard it slithering around the cabin of the aircraft. Somewhere to his left, it went silent, leaving his half-strangled breathing the only sound in the cabin.
The silence was even more alarming than the slither. Eggman rolled his eyes as far left as he could, then slowly - very slowly - turned his head. As he had feared, the serpent was sitting up next to him, silent as the grave (he really wished he hadn't thought that), staring through its spectacles at him. He froze again as soon as he had it in sight and for an unbearable eternity, it seemed, neither moved. Suddenly the serpent's moustache curled up on both sides, the tendrils bending like tiny fingers, and raised the dark glasses to the top of its head. Instead of Eggman's pale blue eyes looking out of the replica face, each socket held a tiny, metallic head. Two pairs of Metal Sonic's eyes glowed out from behind the serpent's eyelids.
Enough was enough. Eggman yanked hard on the arms of his chair, propelling his rotund body up and forward as fast as he could, and bolted for the open door. He nearly fell down the steps but that hardly mattered, he wanted to get out of range . . . of . . . the . . . oh, dear. A four-foot-high wall marked with red and yellow triangles beneath a black band surrounded the plane like a circus ring. Standing on the wall, which was rather cylindrical in appearance - do NOT look behind, I do NOT want to see the giant serpent leering down over the top of the jet - was a rotund humanoid figure, a clear caricature of the Doctor himself, beaming like a madman. The suit it wore was one he had worn early in his 'career', before deciding that it looked too clown-like to be taken seriously. Again, the eyes were concealed behind dark glasses.
Up to his ankles in sand, the Doctor placed a hand on the stair rail to steady himself. He knew what was going on; he'd read about the 'waking nightmares' that some people had been having, and scoffed along with the newscasters at what some people would believe. He took faint hope from the fact that no one had died from these things yet, although there did seem to be a faint sapping of his energy going on - or perhaps that was from standing bare-headed in the desert sun. Squaring himself up, he addressed his cartoonish doppelgänger. "What do you want?"
The question returned, not quite an echo, "What do you want?" A shift in inflection, slight but noticeable.
"I want to know what you want. Why are you bothering me?" Eggman stayed cautious, kept his tone of voice polite. For once he was truly uncertain about what to do. In the past he had made wrong choices, but he rarely had problems making the decision itself. He heard a faint slithery noise above him and steeled himself not to move as the Eggman-headed serpent eeled out of the plane and down the steps. Without looking at him, it trekked like a sidewinder across the hot sands and then wove up the 'wall' - which was quite impossible - and settled in a coil beside the caricature.
"You seek after power." The bass voice didn't come from the creatures in front of him, but seemed to rumble from the ground and air. The railing he still grasped vibrated in sympathy. I don't believe it, declared a tiny portion of Eggman's mind. I bet it's the giant snake thing, serving as a speaker somehow. It was still impressive. "All power is mine."
"And you are? I don't believe we've been introduced." A bit more polite, but not conciliatory. Eggman wasn't about to give up his own goals on the say-so of an unseen unknown. His free hand rose to fiddle with one of his coat brasses in nervous fashion
A quartet of giant, disembodied hands suddenly appeared, one taking station above the faux Eggman while the others spaced equally around the ring. Horizontal lines across the palms opened to reveal eyes: green in front, brown to the left, an inhuman gold to the right, all slit-pupilled in the desert sun. (Eggman didn't turn to look at the one behind him, but he could feel its gaze like an icicle dripping on the back of his neck.) "I am Wizeman, ruler of all Nightmare, conqueror of Nightopia and this world."
"Really?" The human raised his eyebrows high above his dark glasses. "I wasn't aware that we'd been conquered. And I do pride myself on being the sort of person to notice things like that. You'd best beware of the Hedgehogs."
The eyes blinked closed, then opened again, but this time instead of eyes behind the lids, there were tunnel mouths colored spheres rolled out of them, resolving into spiky balls as they hit the sand, and uncurling into three - six - nine - dozens of dokan hedgehogs. Most were as improbably colored as Sonic himself, although some were dark like Shadow with various brilliant accent colors. The uncurled hedgehogs stepped or skated towards Doctor Eggman with slow menace. "You'd best beware of the hedgehogs," echoed the clown in front of him.
No, said Eggman's mind, these are not real. Relatively few dokan can curl like Sonic can, and these are all Sonic or Shadow; the faces are all the same, only the colors vary. This Wizeman is reading my thoughts or something; I offered him a crack and he crept in. He clenched his hand tightly around his coat brass. Simultaneously, the sharp edges sliced into his palm, and an electric pulse dilated from the tiny unit. As it washed across the creatures and figures surrounding him they faded like mirages into the desert sunlight.
Clutching his bleeding palm, Eggman looked around. "Cubot, Orbot, are you there? Answer me!" The initial fiddling with his brass should have sent them a warning to close up; their shells could protect them from the pulse. The pilot and the plane's computer would have to be reinitialized later by hand. "Cubot!"
"Here, boss. What were those things?"
"I'm not certain. I thought they were dreams, but you could see them, couldn't you?" One of them had certainly seen the snake, he remembered. "Pull out the first-aid kit. I've cut my hand." He started up the steps, wondering if it was the pulse or the pain that had dismissed the strange things, or both together?