Steps Ahead

Amy leaned past the railing to watch the robot being lowered down to the beach of Flickies Island. Its feet touched the sand and Tails walked up to it to free the machine's torso off the rope they'd used to let it down. Then the small fox reset the last circuit breaker and quickly jumped away from the rebooting machine, flying up to join Amy on the ship's deck.

"Everything ready, young mate?", Captain Plunder asked the fox, pointing down on the robot.

Tails nodded. "Now all we need is our Drakon friends to find it."

Amy smiled. "Flickies Island isn't too big; shouldn't be a problem."

"So we are ready to heave out, Milady?", Plunder asked the pink hedgehog; he still hadn't forgotten her hammer rampage.

The girl grinned. "Yes, Captain! Everything ready to go! Next stop: Ice Cap!"

"What do you want?", the Drakon Emperor snapped at his underling who'd had the nerve to interrupt his dinner.

"Excuse my disturbance, but an urgent notice from our secret advance party on Mobius reached us," the servant apologized, shuffling into a submissive stance.

Luckily for him, his ruler's rage was short-lived. Interest caught, the Emperor dropped his anger. "What is it?"

"They have captured one of Robotnik's walking devices and analyzed the data in it. It appears our alliance is crumbling. The human is purposely delaying the construction of the dimension portal to finish his own fleet of battleships first that should give him an edge over our troops after the defeat of the Mobian population."

The Emperor snickered. "So, planning to deceive us? Us? The mighty Drakon Empire? How dare that fool?" His look snapped back to his underling. "Does he know anything about our secret party sent to his planet already?"

"As far as the data allows judgement, he does not, Master."

"Good." The Drakon leader relaxed. "Tell our fellow warriors on this island to keep their heads low and eyes open. We'll let Robotnik do his thing without interference. Once he has finished his portal and let us into his universe, our army will be upon him before his traitorous soul has understood the dimension of his failure."

The small piece of crystal in his hands was a tangle of weirdness. Sonic frowned, closed eyelids twitching in strain as his mind tried its hardest to follow the invisible lines inside the Emerald, but everything seemed a mess, a complex network of energy and each of the different pulses called to lead him astray, each in a different direction without a way for him to tell which one was the right to choose.

"You still think too much," Knuckles remarked in a quiet voice.

Sonic's eyes flew open again to look at the echidna. Knuckles was sitting across of him on a small kind of carpet, a bandage still around his head, but aside of that nothing indicated the trouble of by now five days ago. The guardian's Master Emerald healing seemed to work well enough even passively.

The torches lighting the room flickered, slightly hiding Sonic's grimace under a dance of shadows across the hedgehog's face. "It's easy for you saying so, Knux," he complained. "You're a pro at this. I am not."

"You have been doing fine the last days," Knuckles noticed with a small shake of his head.

It were the first words of real praise Sonic heard out of the stoic guardian's mouth and a smile flashed on the hedgehog's face. "Well, the stuff we did before was easier than that."

The red echidna inclined his head, two of his dreads half falling into his face. "I know. You don't only need to know and recognize the differences between them or use two of the seven. You'll be confronted with all of them, so you have to know all of them. Healing is one of the easiest powers and speed is most likely your main natural talent." Knuckles slightly shifted his weight while keeping his eyes calmly on Sonic. "I doubt that you'll be able to use all of them. Not directly and not without assistance of another power they can interact with. Most of them add together and are only really strong when unified. I know some can be used alone. You know two. This is the third." He pointed at the red gemstone Sonic held.

The hedgehog briefly looked down on it. "I just don't get it. How am I supposed to get it to tell me the truth? I always thought…"

"What did you think?", Knuckles asked when Sonic stopped.

"I thought 'truth' was something clear. Something… straight. But this is…" He looked down into the ruby glow again. "It's as if there was… a knot. Like a… labyrinth, with thousands of ways to take."

Knuckles smiled at Sonic's struggle to find the words for what he felt. "Truth is not what you might think it is. You think it like something as a fact, something fixed, something solid and determined, right?"

One of Sonic's triangular ears flicked backwards slightly and the hedgehog nodded hesitantly. "I guess something like this, yes."

"This is not what the name of truth in case of the Emeralds means. The Emeralds are chaos, and chaos is the only stable thing they know. The Emeralds cannot tell the truth. Not in that complete sense you thought it to do. The only thing that is true to the Emerald is that it is chaos."

Sonic's frown had deepened considerably during Knuckles' speech. "I don't get it," he admitted, looking as helpless as he felt.

"I know." The guardian nodded, smirk well hidden in the flickering light filling the cave. "I'll give you an example. When you and Tails first landed here, Robotnik had already come and told me you were after the Master Emerald. For me, it was true that you were the enemies, for I as a living being believed it. In my version of the truth you were evil enemies I had to fight."

Sonic nodded to signal he'd followed so far, interest caught enough by the matter itself to attract his mind away from giving a joking comment on the echidna's naivety back then.

"In your version of truth you were the good guys and I was interfering with your fight against Robotnik," Knuckles continued. "So, it was true to one of us you were evil and to another one you were good. Both at the same time."

Sonic shook his head. "Your truth was untrue then."

Knuckles let out a short chuckle. "No. To me it was true. To you it was untrue. Both of our ideas of the other one were true at that time, in the chaos sort of way. But neither of them actually described reality. Truth depends on the individual. Reality is how the world really is. But as we are all individuals we can only ever know what is true, not what is real. The Emerald can show your truth, or mine, or someone else's, but if you search for something beyond that you'll keep trying forever."

Sonic stared down on the red stone, then back at Knuckles. "So… what does it tell me then?"

"If you want a real answer I'd say it tells you things about yourself more than things about what is around you. It teaches a look inside, as inside your heart and your soul is the only thing that can truly interact with the Emeralds. No understanding of yourself and no understanding of the power leads to no bond being able to build and no control being achieved. If there is no interaction, no bond to develop… things like Super Sonic happen."

With the last of Knuckles' words it became so silent in the small cave hedgehog and echidna sat in you could have sworn both had stopped breathing. In spite of sitting stiller than he maybe ever had before in his life, Sonic's thoughts were racing through his head, turning the echidna's words over and over, trying to link them to things he already knew or at least could guess, to memories, questions and ideas as much as to some of his vaguer feelings.

It needed long until he looked up at Knuckles again. "I don't know how I'm gonna go about this 'tapping into the power thing' you want me to try," he confessed. "Can't you help me somehow? Like with… where to start?"

Knuckles looked into his eyes for a moment and nodded then. "Alright. Try to open your knot, Sonic. Tell me when you're ready and I'll ask you a few questions. You don't need to answer me. Just answer silently to yourself and try to find what is true to you."

"Okay, sounds freaky, but we'll try that." Sonic lowered his gaze down onto the crimson gemstone again, for a few seconds letting it trail deeply into the glow before slowly closing his eyes. Taking deep breaths like Knuckles had taught him before, Sonic reached for the tangle of twisted energy strings he had felt before until it was as if he could almost really see the knot they formed.

Letting instinct decide Sonic followed one of them until the idea of the others' existence started blurring away, then he slightly nodded his head to tell Knuckles he was ready, fearing a word by himself would break his grip on the small string of Emerald power.

"Do you love running?" Knuckles' voice asking that ridiculously trivial question appeared to come from a long way off.

Yes, Sonic thought immediately, and his mental 'word' seemed to echo from inside the crystal in his hands.

"Do you think Porker is weak for always being afraid of things?" Another pretty strange, random question, but a lot more personal already.

No, he's not. Everybody's afraid of something, and he's always been there if I needed him in spite of his fears, Sonic's thought answered from inside his head and in the same time again from inside the Emerald.

"Do you trust me?"

Yes, the echo had answered before Sonic could convince himself to do it, but the second the unthought thought floated through his mind he knew it was true anyway.

"Are you afraid of the Chaos Emeralds?"

A little, Sonic answered, now again faster than the echo. But not that much any more. Water's worse. It was a good thing Sonic knew Knuckles couldn't hear his answers, knew no-one besides himself – and the weird echoing voice of himself from inside the Chaos Emerald – would hear his confessions, and somehow saying things, admitting things without actually doing so felt like… a relief?

"Do you hate Robotnik?", Knuckles' voice interrupted the hedgehog's musing just in time to keep it from distracting him too much from the Chaos Emerald energy he held.

Yes, the two of his thoughts shouted in unison even before the last tone had left Knuckles' lips.

"Would you kill Robotnik if you had the chance?"

Yes, Sonic thought immediately, and felt as if he'd just gotten smacked across the face the moment he did. Wrong! the echo called at him, and Sonic's face crunched up at noticing it was right. Robotnik after all still contained something that had once been part of his friend Kintobor, he was alive even though he was just evil anymore and nothing of what he'd been actually remained, but Sonic knew he couldn't destroy a life, no matter who the person was. Not directly with his own hands. Maybe in a fight for survival he'd be able to kill someone to save his friends or his own life, but he could never murder… Okay, I got it, shut up already and don't do that again! That was harsh! the hedgehog silently told the Emerald echo, taking a slow breath to calm himself down again.

There was a moment of silence before Knuckles brought up the next question. "Do you think you have a chance against Robotnik's forces?"

I'll kick his fat butt. I always do, Sonic replied and somehow felt that if the echo had a face, it would have nodded and grinned.

"If we lose, what'd you do?"

Go on like before. The Freedom Fighters have fallen before, but we never stay down for long. Sonic could feel a small smile of confidence slip onto his face in spite of the concentration.

"If we win, what'd you do?", Knuckles asked for the second possible outcome.

Have a party and then go on a looooooooooooong run and see everything I want to without getting chased by robots. Sonic's smile grew to a grin.

"Do you think that was enough questions now?"

"You bet," Sonic said aloud, opening his eyes and instantly the little echo vanished back into the crimson mess of oblivion it had come from. "I'll feel like a crazy patient at the psychologist if you keep asking that stuff."

"We don't want that." Now the echidna grinned, too. "So, how did it work?"

Sonic shrugged, glancing down on the red gemstone briefly. "It was… weird. As if there was someone talking in my thoughts whose voice came out of the Emerald. It knew everything… and… " He shook his head, running a hand through his spines. "Just strange… You feel odd talking to someone in your head, you know? Do I need to do that again?"

Much to Sonic's delight, Knuckles shook his head. "I don't think so. You know how it works now. That's all I intended. I'd leave it at that unless you're really fond of another attempt."

"No thanks." The blue hedgehog tossed the red gem over to the echidna. "You can play with it now." He hopped up to his feet, suddenly feeling highly stir-crazy. "I'll take a break from your Emerald stuff now. This hedgehog needs a good run."

Knuckles smiled. "I expected that. It'll be slippery outside, so don't fall into any traps again."

Sonic stuck out his tongue. "No way!"

"What? How dare these fools betraying me," Robotnik fumed faced with the newest updated information one of his automatic surveillance systems had just brought to him about a message between his 'allies' it had caught. "They sent a small army here already? They want me to finish this portal and then destroy me? ME? The ruler of this planet?"

Grimer ducked, trying to look unsuspicious, trying to become invisible at its best. An enraged Robotnik was unpredictable. So he better didn't remind his boss that 'ruler of this planet' was merely a memory of a better past the most hated blue pest on the entire planet had very successfully put an end to; neither dared he to notice Robotnik's intentions with his allies were of no other nature than using their help and then get them out of the way. No, Grimer had made a lot of mistakes during his life, he would not add another one. This one would surely be fatal.

Luckily for the green skinned assistant, Robotnik was busy imagining what he would do with the traitorous fish once he got the chance.

It took almost ten minutes until Grimer dared to move again when Robotnik heavily dropped into his chair, having exhausted himself and running out of insults and cruelties to shout about. "Doctor Robotnik, Sir? Do you want me to prepare one of our battleships to wipe the intruders off Flickies Island, Sir?"

"NO!" Robotnik half jumped up again. "No! You idiot haven't understood my genius plan yet!"

"Sir, I would be grateful to be enlightened..." Grimer bowed.

"We leave them alone. All robot patrols from now on don't set a foot on that island!"

"But.. Sir?"

"Enhance the weapons on our fleet! Built bigger ships! Mightier ships! They will get to know what it means upsetting Ivo Robotnik! I will be prepared! Hohahahaha!" The former dictator cracked with laughter.

"Alright, Sir," Grimer hurriedly assured him, spinning on his heels to leave his boss' office. If he wasn't mistaken, war was about to break lose.