Shrouded Blue

"AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH – Oomph!" Sonic's scream stopped only because he dropped onto something and it totally startled him that suddenly there was floor again. It was tilted rather steeply and with the momentum of the fall, Sonic slithered down like you would move down a slide. When he finally came to a stop, he flopped onto his back, arms and legs spread out, closed his eyes and decided to wait until he figured out if he was still in one piece.

Right now, he was more dizzy than he remembered being in his whole life. Usually, it was very hard to get Sonic dizzy. After all, he took spindashes and all sorts of quick and sharp turns in stride. But falling upwards for who knows how far was enough in its utter surreality on its own, and then this tumble head over heels and sliding down something at high speed had done it.

Now that he lay still though, with a firm, securing pull of gravity keeping him on the cool, smooth floor, his head stopped spinning rather quickly enough. Seemed at least his head was still pretty intact all things considered. Smoothing a hand through his quills and wondering again why he hadn't broken a thing, Sonic sat up. He was, admittedly, quite talented at surviving falls even sane person would think lethal or at least very dangerous, but that didn't keep common sense from telling him he should be dead, or at least hurt somewhere. He didn't.

The first thing after recovering was the natural look upwards, just to see how far he had fallen. But above him was a ceiling of sorts.

Still sitting in the ground, the hedgehog stared around. He was in some kind of tube, a really big, round tunnel. The ceiling was probably seven or eight meters high. Well, technically it wasn't a ceiling but part of the perfectly round wall of the tunnel tube thing.

And everything was colorful. The wall, floor, the whole tube appeared to be made of glass. About half a meter below it (or above it, depending on what part of the tube wall you looked at) something bluish green was shifting and rolling in what appeared to be waves.

Sonic turned around, finding he'd been sliding down this same tunnel. It was impossible to say where he had actually come from before without trying to go back up the tunnel, and he didn't really see a reason or feel a strong enough wish to return to where he'd come from. From here, he could only see how the tunnel was winding in wide turns and wherever he had fallen from was behind the next few turns.

The hedgehog looked back down the slope. As far as he could see, the tunnel stayed the same width, the floor gently tilting downhill. At the beginning of the next lazy turn to the left, two lines of colorful balls floated slightly above the ground.

Finally picking himself up, Sonic began jogging towards them. He stopped when he came close. He'd seen this before, the long tunnels with the waving stuff around and the colorful balls everywhere. It was also a sort of Special Zone, the same sort he'd been to with Knuckles and Tails. It was one of the more simple ones. Blast down the tube, collect a lot of the balls and you'd either find an exit or a Chaos Emerald and an exit. Sonic didn't really care which one he found. Exit alone would be perfectly fine. He wanted out of this crazy place.

Still, he could enjoy himself while he was here, right? An almost endless space to run on wasn't something he encountered often after all. With a grin on his face he started running, blazed into the first of the balls and followed their lines down the tunnel, going as fast as he could. At first, it was really fun and he collected felt thousands of balls, but then they became less and instead explosive mines appeared on the track.

Sonic remembered those too. Tails had run into on the first time they'd encountered them and from then on been a little scared to repeat the mistake and delay them too much. Sonic had told him to jump over them or fly and it had helped in the end. Knuckles mockingly joked Sonic would make a good motivation trainer.

The hedgehog dodged a mine field and launched himself at another long row of balls that followed it at, still going at high speed. This place sure brought back memories… and while it is fun running here, it was a lot more fun with the others. Sonic frowned. He wasn't gone near long enough to actually miss his friends, but he was worried about them.

The last thing he remembered before landing in this crazy Special Zone place was being in that underwater base, searching for the Master Emerald. He didn't know how he'd gotten here. Had Knuckles found his Emerald alright? Did they catch the thief? Or did they land in this crazy place too and were just like he was trying to find their way out? Where they still together? Sonic wouldn't want Tails to be alone in a weird place like this. What if they still were in that base searching for him because he'd disappeared? He didn't want them to be worried.

His thoughts were interrupted by another, particularly big field of mines in his way, but he didn't let it become an obstacle. Speeding up, Sonic used his momentum to run up the wall until he was running upside-down on the ceiling. He stayed there just long enough to clear the mines, then jumped, flipped around in mid-air and came down running on the ground again.

Well, I just have to find the end of this thing and get back, he thought.

A few hours later, he knew that this was easier thought than done. The tunnel seemed endless. He'd been running for hours, yet it never changed, it still sloped gently downwards, still spouted balls and the occasional bomb. Day and night didn't exist in here and Sonic lost track of how long he'd been here already, how long he'd been running.

In the end, he grew increasingly tired and slowed down to a walk again. He kept walking for some time, without reaching anything that would indicate he was coming closer to the exit, then he stopped and sat down on the ground. It wasn't that there was anything more suited to sit on nearby.

Numbly he watched the waving stuff through the glassy floor for a while, then pulled his gaze away. Staring at it for longer when you weren't moving yourself made you sea sick…

The hedgehog sighed. He'd run so much, so long and far that he was exhausted. That didn't happen too often. And usually when he stopped for tiredness he'd reached the place he wanted to go to.

He wasn't even near that now.

But he was too tired to go on, so he curled up to sleep right where he was. When he woke up again he had dreamed some really random, bizarre stuff, but felt rested and refreshed. He had no idea how long he'd slept since there was no change of daylight or anything like it in this place, but it felt like a good night's sleep. With new energy, he continued down the tube. He'd find the way out of here today.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.


Tails yawned, blinking at the beams of early daylight that fell through the window. It was only half an hour after sunrise, but he felt wide awake…. What was maybe because he'd gone to bed really early. Sonic had not come out of his room again and everything had been quiet, but with his only company snoozing away, there had been not much to do for Tails. Watching movies alone wasn't fun. If the fox was honest, he didn't like watching movies without his brother around. They were not even half as much fun without someone around to joke about the movie or to share snacks with.

Throwing back his covers, Tails crawled out of bed and made for the kitchen. He stopped briefly on the way there, tuning his ears in the direction of Sonic's door, but nothing seemed to stir there. Tails shrugged to himself and continued to the kitchen. He knew Sonic was really good at sleeping in, and if the combination of Knuckles' punches and the fights with the robots at that base had maybe dealt him a minor concussion or something, sleep would do him only good. Tails had seen Sonic shrug off a lot worse injury, and for the time being he was mildly concerned, but not near ready to panic over it. If Sonic wasn't better by the evening, well, then he'd probably start panicking.

For a while Tails considered waiting for the hedgehog to get up so they could have breakfast together, but he knew it could take until noon before Sonic showed up and in the end his hungry stomach outruled the desire to eat not alone. The fox quickly put down his breakfast and then quietly went downstairs.

He threw a short look at the clock on one of the walls. Eight o'clock. Rouge should be up by now. And if not… well, she was enough trouble usually he thought he could bother her early. Tails grinned and picked up the phone. The line beeped a couple of times, then his call was answered by a female secretary.

"GUN operations center, what can I do for you?" Hearing the flat voice immediately let the image of a boring office pop up in Tails' head and he grinned again.

"Good morning, my name is Tai-, uh, Miles Prower. I would like to talk to Rouge," he said.

"One moment, I will connect you."

"Thank you for –", Tails started, but the woman had already hung up on him and instead of her boring voice, a dissonant melody chirped through the loudspeaker. Tails listened to it for a few seconds and came to the conclusion it was a piece of sound brainwashing, then thankfully Rouge took his call.

"Hello?"

"Rouge, this is Tails. Good morning."

"Hi, cutie." The bat sounded a little tired. "What's up?"

"Sorry if I'm early or something, it's nothing urgent," Tails apologized, more out of habit being friendly to anyone than out of the actual feeling an apology was required or even expected of him.

"I'm a bat, sweetheart. I like the nightlife. Everything before 12 o'clock is sleep time for me."

"Oh. I didn't know that…" Tails twirled his double namesakes, a gesture that Rouge couldn't see of course.

"It doesn't matter much. What do you want? Make it short, I need to get myself a coffee."

Tails grinned broadly into the phone at this statement. "Knuckles, Sonic and me tracked down the Master Emerald yesterday. We found it in some sort of underwater base, near a city called Soleanna."

"Did you get a hand on the person who stole it?" Suddenly the bat sounded awake.

"No, we didn't. We ran into a few robots, but no people were around," Tails reported. "Knuckles found the Emerald hooked to some sort of machine. You know him, he didn't bother finding out what it does. He took the Emerald and we got out of there."

"I have no trouble imagining that..." Rouge giggled. "Where are you now?"

"Sonic and I, we're at my place. We brought Knuckles back to the island yesterday evening. He should have it well up in the air and above the ocean as we speak." For an instant, Tails wondered if he should be telling Rouge where Knuckles and the Emerald were. His echidna friend surely wouldn't be pleased...

Rouge's question interrupted the train of thought. "And you saw no-one? Nothing to tell you who's behind this?"

"Nope. Because of the robots and technology around the place where we found the Emerald, we considered Dr Eggman, but we're not sure at all." Tails sighed. "I was hoping you found out something."

"Sorry to disappoint you, cutie. The agency is as clueless as before, if you know what I mean. But thank you for the information."

"You're welcome. Enjoy your coffee." Tails smiled.

"You bet I will." The line clicked as Rouge hung up.

Tails put the phone down. Nothing new then… He sighed. But maybe it was a little too early to expect something to happen. After all, they just got the Master Emerald back to the island. Knuckles had said it had been connected to a machine. From the echidna's not exactly detailed report Tails wasn't able to guess what the machine's purpose had been and if it used to Emerald as a power source or something else, but whoever built the machine and stole the Emerald, they'd most likely been interrupted at whatever they had been doing. Tails guessed they could expect some sort of reaction. He hoped Knuckles would be on his guard, as well. He didn't always like the idea of their friend facing everything that came his way on his own, but he'd also made the experience that it was not often successful to try forcing your help on Knuckles, and they had already succeeded in pursuading him to not go after the thief alone. It was a start, and for now, Tails intended for him and Sonic to keep their eye open down here and be Knuckles' ground support in case the thief made another attempt at the Master Emerald.

Not wanting to miss anything, the fox turned on his computer and started a few programs to scan news reports and other data streams for mentioning of Dr Eggman, any robot sightings, the Chaos Emeralds, GUN and ultimately Sonic. After all, if the doppelganger was still there, he had to turn up somewhere sooner or later.

Satisfied with his set-up, Tails put the computer to stand-by and made his way over to the parked Tornado. He opened the cargo compartment and got the metallic floating ball out of it. After a short on-sight examination of the mysterious object Tails was assured it hadn't suffered at all from being taken out of the base and spending the night inside the Tornado. He smiled. There was a lot about this thing to find out, and unless Knuckles called because someone had returned to the Floating Island for the Emerald or he heard something about the Sonic imposter, he would have to wait and keep himself busy.

An hour later the fox had discovered the ball held a slight magnetic force of some kind. If brought close enough to some of his metallic tools, it pulled them closer until they clung to its surface. The other way around, when Tails activated an electromagnet he sometimes used to help work on the Tornado, especially the heavier parts, the magnetic field of the coil easily sucked in the floating ball and it stuck to the magnet as if glued to it. Tails had to turn off the magnet completely to get it loose again.

Now the mysterious ball bubbled softly above the workbench and Tails wondered what tests to try next on it. He'd really like to know what caused the magnetic force, and how the ball was able to float, and –

Tails' pondering was interrupted by the sounds of footsteps on the stairs behind him. Turning around, Tails found Sonic walking down the stairs and smiled. "Good morning, Sonic! Are you feeling better?"

The hedgehog nodded. "Yes, thank you, Tails."

"Do you want breakfast?"

"I… already had something." Sonic walked up to him slowly. "What are you doing?"

Tails smiled. He loved it when his elder brother showed interest in what he did, even though it usually was short-lived and Sonic didn't understand all theories and ideas Tails came up with. But he knew that Sonic cared and when he got the chance to show his work to the hedgehog he was always eager to do so. He pointed at the floating ball. "You know, I took one of those mysterious ball objects from the base. At first, I thought I'd take one for you, 'cause you seemed to like them so much." Tails smiled timidly. "And then I thought maybe we can both do something with it. You can have it to play and I can do research on it."

"Cool." Sonic smiled. "What are you researching?"

Sonic was asking about the details? This must be his lucky day. Tails grinned happily. "Oh, I want to find out as much as I can about its properties, for example how it can float and then there's this magnetic force it has I haven't understood yet. Maybe the two effects are connected."

The hedgehog studied the ball. "Can I watch?"

"Of course!" Tails' felt his tails wag blissfully. "You can always watch. Maybe you can help me."

"Sure. What help do you require?"

Tails blinked. Sonic trying to use vocabulary he maybe thought was fitting a scientific context was weird, but a welcome joke after yesterday's quietness. It remined him of the talk-like-a-robot day they'd held for fun a while ago. "Uh, you remember how you could home attack the balls, but your aim was somewhat off? I want to do a test if your homing attacks get disturbed by the ball's mysterious force."

"Okay. What do you want me to do?" Sonic looked between the ball and Tails.

The twin-tailed fox shoved the round object into the hedgehog's direction. "Here, take it outside. I'll bring a few balloons."

Sonic nodded. "Alright."

Tails already crawled into a cupboard. He knew he had balloons somewhere… Sonic would like this experiment, he was sure. Tails beamed and finally discovered the packet of balloons. He quickly inflated a couple of them and followed Sonic outside.

He found the hedgehog waiting surprisingly patiently just in front of the hangar. Odd, Tails mused. He would have expected his friend to be chasing down the ball by now…

"Okay, Sonic, here we are." Tails began to distribute the balloons across the runway on the cliff in front of his house. "We'll do it like this," he explained while he was at it. "You'll home attack the balloons. I'll be bringing the ball near to you sometimes to see if your home attacks really are affected by it, understood?"

Sonic nodded firmly. "Yes."

"Great." Tails smiled and took the ball from him. "Then we start."

Sonic nodded again before jumping up into the air and launching himself as a spiked ball at the first best balloon. It popped with a loud bang as soon as it got into contact with the sharp quills.

Tails watched two attacks on the balloons, then he pushed the floaty ball towards Sonic's next goal. The hedgehog jumped, began zooming through the air towards the balloon he'd aimed for, but halfway to it he got near to the floating metal ball and his homing attack did a rapid curve towards it. The ball bounced away when Sonic slammed into it and Tails hurriedly flew to catch it before it went down the side of the cliff.
Landing back on the ground and still holding the ball, the fox smiled at the hedgehog. "Did you do that on purpose?"

"No. It appears I was accelerated towards this ball when I neared it," the hedgehog replied.

"Fascinating, isn't it?" Tails was still smiling.

Sonic nodded. "Very fascinating indeed."

"Let's try it again. If it's a real physical effect this ball has, we should be able to reproduce it."

They went through three more attempts, always with the same result, before they had to stop due to Sonic having shredded all balloons. Tails picked up the metallic ball and they retired to the workshop again.

Hopping to sit on the table, Tails watched the ball bob up and down gently in front of him. "It's amazing. We've never before encountered an object that could as easily interfere with your homing attacks. Before things like that only happened when there were a lot of robots around or something."

"Various possible targets can easily confuse a homing attack," Sonic confirmed. He stood with his arms folded, watching Tails. "What do we research next?"

"We… have to think a little about it first, you know?" Tails smiled. Sonic really was still interested. He couldn't believe it. "We found out so far that the ball is magnetic and that it attracts you when you do a homing attack. Either there is a connection between these things, or we're looking at two independent, but similar effects. Which is, from a scientific point of view, unlikely. When coming up with a theory explaining an effect you observed, you usually try for the explanation that requires a minimum of assumptions."

"Understood." Sonic gave a thumbs-up.

"So, the ball pulls in magnetic things, like my screwdrivers for example. It's possible this magnetic force is just a result of the ball consisting of some sort of metal. Most metals related to iron can be magnetized," Tails went on explaining, building his theories as he spoke. "But unless put into a strong magnetic field that works in the other direction as gravity, magnetic things don't float. For all we know, floating objects that don't contain something like an engine to outbalance the influence of gravity usually contain chaos energy. We should be able to detect it."

"Go ahead then," Sonic encouraged him.

Tails smiled. Sonic seemed to feel much better today than yesterday. He didn't need to worry anymore... and he loved the attention he was getting right now. He didn't get it often, and he was planning to make the best of it.


Metal Sonic stood quietly, observing the fox' work. So far, the only organic he'd seen conducting research of some sort was his creator and there were various differences between the ways they worked to be discovered. Satisfaction was slowly flowing through Metal's circuits. He had already gotten a hold of all of his creator's data he considered useful for his plans, and the more he watched the fox the more he knew he would get every other amount of knowledge he needed out of this young organic.

There was of course a thing 'Tails' and Dr Robotnik had in common. A useful trait for Metal's purposes, even… They both talked a lot about their work.

"It's possible that it influences your homing attack because of that. I think, just like the ring dash, it is a move at least party chaos based. That'd explain how it can affect you. After all, you're not made of metal."

Had there been any connection between Metal Sonic's mood and the hologram displaying his biological counterpart's face, the fox unit had been able to see a grin at that point. Oh, how wrong he was with that assumption.

Metal Sonic himself had already come to the conclusion the metallic compounds that formed his body had reacted to the same magnetic effect as everything else metallic the fox had tried. It was a simple magnetic force, his sensory was even able to record and analyze it. The interesting thing, the second reason aside of learning more about the way the fox thought and worked, was not how the ball effected him, but how it was able to affect the biological hedgehog. After all, in that point 'Tails' was right – he was not made out of metal, and discovering the cause of the influence could be useful for battles with future foes with similar fighting techniques and physical make-up. Like the black hedgehog clone Shadow for example.

By now 'Tails' had activated a device scanning for chaos energy and used it on the mysterious ball. "We were right," he announced. "It contains about the equivalent of ten to twenty rings in chaos energy."

"That is not very much for the impact it has," Metal Sonic noticed. He had to keep a conversation going. He wanted to know more about the fox unit until he revealed himself. From experience he knew that most organics were easy to see through after a short time of observing their behavior. As long as the fox thought he was the friend he knew, he would behave naturally, giving Metal Sonic plenty of data on his default behavior. When he soon took the fox under his control to force him to help his plans, it would be easy to see if he was being honest about the information he gave him. The fox was known to be intelligent and might try to trick him even if frightened.

On the other hand, Metal Sonic didn't worry much about 'Tails' not talking. He knew the fox would tell him everything he wanted sooner or later. Organic creatures were weak and pathetic. Unlike a robot, their fragile bodies responded to malfunctions and destroyed parts with a thing called pain. Metal Sonic, naturally, had never experienced any pain. But he knew its effects on living creatures, how much it impaired their operation… and how much they dreaded it.

Pain had to be something horrible. A few of the test subjects of his creator's had actually begged be killed instead of being inflicted any pains. Apparently the termination of their lousy existence was not as bad to them as pain. Metal Sonic found the concept fascinating. What could be worse than ending your existence?

But it didn't matter. He knew the fox would talk like a waterfall when he wanted him to. All he had to do was threaten to make him feel pain. Or to terminate his existence. Or both.