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Chapter 8

On the Other Side

Mobius

Cream the Rabbit was skipping happily towards Freedom HQ with her Chao Cheese flying beside her, followed closely by Bunny, Sally, Rotor, and Antoine. "Wasn't that fun, Ms. Sally?" the rabbit asked sweetly.

The chipmunk looked at her wearily, and said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster, "Oh yes! The carnival was great fun! I can't wait till next year!" Then, turning to an equally exhausted Bunny Rabbot, muttered with far less enthusiasm, "Who knew such a sweet little kid would go so crazy at an amusement park?"

Bunny nodded her agreement. "Ah ain't never seen a child git so excited. Ah can see now why Vanilla wanted all four a' us to watch her young'un."

"Alas! I now see why Ms. Vanille has been calling zis a mission," the French coyote added dramatically.

"Look on the bright side," Rotor said happily, being the only one not totally wiped out. "We just made the day of a six year old rabbit and her mother. And…"—he paused for dramatic effect as Cream skipped through the door to their headquarters—"Nothing horrible has happened all day," he finished proudly.

"AAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!"

The high-pitched scream of horror sounded from the stone building, where the young rabbit had just entered.

"CREAM!" the four adults cried at the same time, immediately forgetting their weariness and taking off at top speed towards her cry.

They reached the door as a unit, ready to fight off whatever was attacking their charge. However, what they found was far from what they expected.

Instead of finding robots or inter-dimensional travellers or any kind of danger at all, the four Freedom Fighters were very surprised to find their headquarters in shambles. Furniture was knocked over; plaster and chips of stone were falling out of large cracks in the walls; the display of the fake Emeralds was shattered, with the gems scattered all over the room; and all equipment in that area of their fortress had been destroyed. But worst of all was the fact that Sonic, Tails, Amy, Knuckles, and Rouge were nowhere to be found.

"What—What happened here?" the Mobian princess managed to choke out, gaping at the devastation around her.

"Ah dunno," Bunny replied angrily, "but ah'm willin' ta bet that Eggman's got sumthin ta do with it!"

"Zis…Zis is horrible!" Antoine declared. "Where are zee oders?"

Rotor rushed off to check the other rooms for any sign of their friends, and was soon followed by an anxious group of Freedom Fighters. All six-year-old Cream could do, however, was stare at the condition of this room with a horror-stricken expression. Even her Chao could not draw her attention away from the scene. That is, not until it flew in front of her face and pointed frantically to the ground at her feet.

"Chao Chao!" it said in its annoyingly high-pitched voice, finally getting its owner's attention.

Snapped back to reality, Cream followed the gaze of her Chao to a golden glittering object barely visible through the rubble on the floor. "What's this?" she asked her pet, bending down to pick it up. When she did, she realized that it was a shard of gold-coloured metal. Another glint caught her eye underneath some more debris and she brushed away some of the dirt and glass to find another metal splinter, and another, and another, and more after that.

Now she was on her knees, gently sweeping away dust and rock and glass with one hand, while gathering all the shards of gold metal in the other and holding them close. Cheese had joined her, and was doing all that it could to help with its stubby little hands.

"What have you got there, Cream?"

The rabbit looked up to see Sally Acorn watching her curiously, though her worried expression had not disappeared. "Cheese found these," she explained, holding the shards of metal up for Sally to see.

The princess carefully took the pieces from her charge and examined them closely as Rotor entered the room from the Lab. "No sign of Tails in there, or anyone else for that matter. It's like they just disappeared into thin—" He cut himself off when he saw the metal in Sally's hands. "What's that?"

Sally held her hand out to him as Bunny and Antoine joined the group. Rotor took the metal, eyeing it curiously.

"What iz zat?" the coyote asked.

Rotor muttered something inaudible and turned towards the Lab, taking Cheese's find with him. The other Freedom Fighters exchanged curious glances before following, with Cream close behind. The walrus sat down at a desk with some sort of black oval scanning device. He placed the metal mass inside the scanner and turned it on. Instantly, scientific and mathematical gibberish filled the computer screen the device was hooked up to, and Rotor spent the next minute staring at the screen, muttering phrases like "Interesting" and "Impossible…"

Finally, Antoine snapped under the suspense. "What IZ it, already?"

Rotor leaned back in his swivel chair and sighed. "If I didn't know any better," he said slowly, "I'd say that these pieces of metal are the remnants of Inhibitor Rings."

As if on cue, the scanning device beeped and a feminine robotic voice sounded from the computer. "ITEM IDENTIFIED: CHAOS ENERGY PRESENT; INHIBITOR RINGS CONFIRMED."

All eyes turned to the shattered Rings.

"But…But that means…" Cream stuttered, looking horrified.

Rotor nodded. "Shadow was here too. And something must have been seriously wrong for his Inhibitor Rings to shatter. There had to have been an impossible amount of energy used—maybe in Chaos Blast. But that outburst of energy…" He cleared his throat and finished quietly, "That outburst of energy might have destroyed them all."

A tense silence fell over the group, broken only by Cream's quiet sobs.

"No," Bunny finally said, her southern voice strong. "Sugah Hog's a fighter, an' so ain't all them others. They're Freedom Fighters! A little Chaos energy ain't gonna kill any of `em. Y'all have gotta find another option."

Obligingly, Rotor turned back to the computer screen and scrolled through the garbled information. After what seemed like an eternity, he stopped at one particular section of scientific nonsense and poured over it, looking for any other possibility. "Strange…" he muttered, then leaned back so he could face the four eager Mobians.

"Apparently," he started, "there was a code programmed into these Rings that could only be broken by Shadow's genetic makeup. In other words, only he could use the Rings."

"What iz your point?" Antoine asked impatiently.

"I'm getting there," Rotor replied, half glaring at the coyote. "As I was saying before being so rudely interrupted: There was also another code programmed into them; a kind of homing signal, it seems. But this kind of technology is modern, which doesn't make sense because Shadow's Inhibitor Rings should be over fifty years old. Stuff like this didn't exist back then, which can only mean one thing…"

"These Rings weren't the original ones," Sally deduced wonderingly.

Rotor nodded. "Exactly."

"So can you tell what happened to our friends, Mr. Rotor?" Cream asked politely.

"Well, let's see here…" Rotor clicked a few keys on the keyboard and another window popped up, with even more scientific and mathematical nonsense. "It's hard to tell, since the Rings are no longer intact. But according to my calculations, the energy released by Shadow would have to equal the amount he released in his Super form when he performed Chaos…Control…" His voice trailed off as the realization hit him, and he turned with wide eyes to face the rest of the group.

"I think I know what happened," he announced quickly. Without explaining further, he turned back to the computer and typed something into it. A small window flashed on the screen and a little bar on it began quickly filling with green as it loaded the command Rotor put in. "Remember that homing signal I told you about? I'm tracking it now."

After a moment, the voice from the computer sounded again. "ORIGIN LOCATED: ROBOTROPOLIS."

"Ah knew it!" Bunny declared. "That no good fer `nuthin swine!"

"So from the looks of it," Rotor said tensely, "Eggman was controlling the power of the Rings. It's my guess that he tricked Shadow into putting them all, and then forced Chaos Control upon him. Judging by the destruction here, I'd say Shadow was here when it happened. Which means that whoever was around was probably caught in it. The only problem is that I can't tell where they were sent."

"Humph!" The angry grunt, surprisingly, sounded from the meek little rabbit girl. The four adults turned to face her, after nearly forgetting she was even there with them. "Well then I think we should pay Eggman a visit and make him tell us where our friends are!" she said sternly.

The Freedom Fighters agreed with a nod, surprised at her amount of anger. Cream may have been a helpless child in some people's eyes, but when it comes down to helping her friends, she was all business. She was normally easy going, but if you made her angry, she could easily overpower nearly any one of the Freedom Fighters.

And Eggman had made her angry.