Chapter 19: Too Real

Sonic stood with his arms folded on his chest, green eyes firmly set on the infinite wall. He'd ran around a bit rather aimlessly, burned off some frustration. It was a personal rule he'd finally remembered. If you had time to worry, then run.

He'd ran a lot, and like often when he did this kind of thing, after a few minutes with his feet pounding the ground, things didn't feel so bad anymore. It was a little as if his problems stayed behind at the sound barrier. Maybe problems were slow and couldn't keep up with the fastest thing alive for long.

Sonic involuntarily grinned at the thought. In an odd sort of way, it made sense. More than most things he'd encountered during the past days.

But after clearing his head with a good run, the hedgehog had made a decision. He wasn't going to let this stupid wall get him down anymore, neither this whole weird place. He'd been stuck in a story book before, he'd traveled to the past and future… and wherever he was now, he'd get out of here.

Deal with it, wall. Sonic's eyes bore their gaze into the crystalline barrier in what was almost developing into an odd staring contest. So far, somewhat reassuringly, the wall wasn't actually staring back. What didn't mean it couldn't.

The blue hedgehog stood still for another minute, hoping he could get the wall to react through simple persistence. If you kept staring at people they usually reacted rather quickly. Would the wall get mad at him?

When the plain green actually stirred finally and began to reveal an image Sonic was almost startled by it. He frowned and narrowed his eyes, squinting to make something of the blurry shapes just beginning to outline. A few seconds later, he knew what the wall was picturing.

"The Master Emerald…"

This wasn't like the other stuff the wall had shown. The images were so clear, like he could stretch out a hand and snatch the Master Emerald out of the air.

Knuckles would be so mad at him for snatching it, though. Sonic grinned.

The image of the Master Emerald fit better with the wall than any other picture he'd seen in it. It was almost the same color, just that it appeared brighter due to the glow.

Sonic wasn't through with his observations yet when the Master Emerald's image flared in a blinding flash of light. There was a loud, cracking noise that shook the floor he stood on and the wall crumbled into a million pieces.

Unfortunately, Sonic barely had a chance to be glad the obstacle was gone. The falling crystal debris was raining down on him, he felt a sharp pang of pain, and the world was gone.


Breaking an Emerald is not really a matter of force. Force is a part in it, as it is in most things one can set out to accomplish, but it is in no way the most significant.

There is the matter of how you break it, too. If you go about it the wrong way, either nothing will happen, or disaster is upon you. The same can be said about the force you need, really. Either nothing happens, or the worst. There is a very fine line between the two, a very fine balance, and everything lies in getting it right in the one attempt you have.

If you take a hammer and chisel and set out to break apart a large rock to make a sculpture, if you keep hacking away at it, chances are you will dent or scratch it a little on the surface, chances also are high you will tire yourself out before you get anywhere. If you use enough brute force, you will probably succeed in breaking the rock, but into random tiny chunks, not in any way you can use. There is a difference between breaking and destroying. Only if you use the right, careful amount of force in the right manner, you can get what you need.

Rumours say the Master Emerald pieces scatter whenever it breaks. Knuckles knew differently. They scatter when it is broken in the wrong way under too much force, be it internal or external. If you knew that, you could use it on purpose. Knuckles had done so before.

His main problem at the moment was that is a lot easier to slightly step past a line if you know where it is than to elegantly dance exactly across it and never take a wrong step in either direction.

Sometimes he'd mused if the sort of breaking he aimed for shouldn't be referred to as 'taking apart', because the goal was to be able to quickly put it back together, but a term as tame-sounding as that in no way described the cruelty of the act itself.

The sound of a breaking Master Emerald was a sound like no other. It wasn't exactly loud. Any exploding Eggman robot, any shouting person he knew was louder than that sound the Master Emerald made when splintering into little pieces of itself. And yet, there wasn't any sound that hurt more in Knuckles' ears than this one.

Actually, it didn't only hurt in his ears. It hurt in his whole body, as if he himself was being splintered along with the Emerald. As if a not insignificant part of his very soul shattered, and he could hear and feel the creaks slowly, creepily working themselves through the powerful gemstone and his mind alike, crack after crack breaking it open. One crack became two, two became ten that frayed again and again until there were hundreds of them, until the Emerald fell apart.

The second it did, the noise stopped and the silence that lingered for a brief instant in the aftermath of what had just happened was almost as painful as the cracking sounds tearing through his skull. However, the silence was there for just a short moment, a tiny breather.

Until he could hear the shards.

It was as if every one of them was screaming without making a sound, but 'scream' was the only word Knuckles could ever find that was somewhat suited to describe it. They needed to be brought back together. He needed to bring them back together. It was a feeling like thirst for someone about to die of dehydration. He really needed it. So close to all those screaming shards, so close to their powerful calls to just put them back together and restore the Master, it was hard work to think anything else than following their command and Knuckles had to put in all his willpower to resist it.

His hand was still curled into a hard fist and now the guardian finally opened his eyes again. The brightness was gone, had left behind just a soft, fading glow of green coming from the heap of shards.

And on top of this heap lay, face buried into them, the spiky shape of Sonic. It had worked, and Knuckles almost didn't believe it.

But he didn't have the time to consider what he did or did not believe. The Emerald was broken, and the island was falling. You wouldn't have needed to be the guardian to feel it, the nauseating lightness in the stomach. Angel Island was a giant piece of rock on a six kilometers free fall.

Knuckles didn't exactly know how long it took for the island to reach the surface. He had never counted the seconds when it happened. He just knew that it fell fast.

Hastily the red echidna covered the one meter he'd been standing away from the heap of Master Emerald pieces and leaned down to the hedgehog on top of them. Sonic stirred when he touched his arm, but he didn't seem to understand what was going on, and Knuckles didn't have the time to allow him to catch up. He slipped his hands under the blue hedgehog's armpits, lifted him up and set him down two meters from the glowing remains of the giant Emerald, then he quickly returned to the gem.

How much time had passed since the Master had broken? Five seconds? Ten? Knuckles didn't know. He could only hope he was being fast enough.

Drawing a shaky breath and closing his eyes again, the echidna finally allowed himself to follow the shards' cries. Just like he hardly consciously knew how to break the Emerald, he wasn't quite able to say how to fuse it back together. It just worked, in some way that was based on nothing much more than instinct. It was like trying to think about how you make your heart beat. It just happened.

Just like breaking it, restoring the Master Emerald wasn't something to happen in silence. Each of the dozens of pieces made a kind of clicking sound when they were fitted back together, but it was nothing in comparison to what sounded out of the Emerald once it was fully back in one piece.

It was singing. Like the ringing of a thousand tiny bells from inside of it. It wasn't loud; it was a soft, gentle melody. The most lovely and beautiful sound Knuckles knew. It levitated through the very air around him, slowly rolled in waves into the ground beneath his feet as the island started rising again, and caused his body to tingle all over. He could have spent forever just standing and bathing in it.

There was just one thing that kept him from doing it. A nagging mixture of curiosity and worry.

Knuckles' eyes flew open and he turned around again, searching Sonic. The hedgehog hadn't moved away from where Knuckles had more dropped him than anything else. He'd picked himself up onto his hands and knees, face held down and slowly shaking his head. "Sonic?"

The blue hedgehog slowly lifted his head and turned it to him, squinting up at the guardian, but it took almost five seconds until something lit up in the green eyes. "Hey, buddy! You…" Sonic giggled suddenly. "Man, stop… spinning… will ya?" He had lifted his right hand trying to wave at Knuckles in comical greeting, but the movement upset his balance and he flopped forwards and to the side.

"Hey, are you okay? Sonic!" Knuckles knelt at his side. He totally didn't know if being sealed into the Master Emerald did you any harm. And if it did, he had no idea how to deal with it. "Sonic, look at me."

Sonic was trying to sit back up, but wasn't really successful with it. The emerald eyes were glazed and strangely out of focus when he looked at Knuckles again. "I'm tryin'… but there's two of you kinda… Looks odd, heh."

If he wouldn't know better, Knuckles would have said Sonic was drunk or something. His voice was slurred, his coordination was totally screwed and apparently his eyes didn't work so well either. "Uh-huh… Just hold still for a moment."

"… Okay." The hedgehog chuckled a little as if Knuckles had said something funny, but he lay back on the ground, looking up at the clouds.

Knuckles himself decided to try and check if there was anything external, something you could see, that would explain what was wrong with his blue friend. He started at the head, since there was quite obviously something wrong with it…

But from what he could see, there were no signs of injury or anything abnormal. The echidna extended a hand to feel over his head for possible bumps or something, but there was nothing. When he withdrew his hand however, he spotted red stains of blood on his white glove. For a moment he stared at it, rubbing over the stains. It was still wet… but it wasn't from his head.

Remembering where else he had touched the hedgehog, Knuckles switched his attention to Sonic's shoulder and this time he did find something. On various spots on the left shoulder and halfway down his side, there were small cuts and deeper looking gashes oozing blood into his blue fur. It was pretty clear where they came from, in most of them sharp pieces of metal were still sticking.

"How'd you get that?"

"Huh?" Sonic tilted his head so he could look at him, one eyelid drooping lower than the other one. "Get what?"

"That metal wreckage stuck in your pelt? Doesn't it hurt?" Knuckles frowned. It totally should hurt…

"Uh… what hurts?" Sonic blinked, looking even more confused now.

"Forget it for now." Knuckles shook his head to himself. It would help a lot if Sonic was sane – or at least as close as he usually got to that condition - and could answer his questions… He'd have to figure things out by himself as it seemed. Could someone get hurt like that while locked inside the Master Emerald? Uh … No idea? Knuckles audibly sighed to himself.

"What's wrong, Knux? You in trouble?", Sonic asked drowsily, but there was something like honest care in his tone.

"You're my trouble, as usually…", the echidna mumbled absent-mindedly.

Sonic's ears went flat. "What'd I do wrong…?", he trailed sadly.

Oops. Knuckles blinked, he wouldn't have thought Sonic would get what he was saying, or take anything of it personally. Sonic never took things personally… But probably the current circumstances were just different. "Nothing," he said hurriedly. "Really, I didn't mean it. Okay?"

"Hmm." Sonic nodded eagerly, the triangular ears tipping back upright and he smiled stupidly.

Good. The patient's happiness restored for now. That left finding out what had caused his lousy mental condition. And where those cuts came from.

Knuckles shifted a hand under Sonic's shoulder to lift and turn him a little so he could look at his back. The wounds extended to there, also with the same small pieces of metal stuck in some of them. Directly below his short neck, Knuckles spotted something else though and carefully pulled it out.

"That's… like… an arrow? A dart?" The echidna frowned at the thing. It was short, about the length of his thumb, with three small feathers at its end and a hollow needle at the tip. The body consisted of some kind of tiny tube. Droplets of a transparent liquid clung to the tube's walls.

For a few seconds Knuckles just stared at the syringe arrow thing. Then he looked at Sonic, gazing up at the blue sky with a blissful, but tired grin, and back at the syringe. Poison. Or drugs, rather. That explained why he was so out of it. It didn't quite explain what happened overall, though. How do you get dozens of pieces of metal stuck in your side? It looked as if someone had shot them at him.

Shot.

Flying around stuff.

Explosion.

The pieces of the puzzle fit together slowly. Sonic really had been in the explosion, back in that underwater base. It was barely a week ago but it felt like so long.

Again Knuckles gazed at the syringe. He'd seen Sonic lying unmoving, in front of the Emerald, in that base. In his dream. Like he'd seen him at the other side of the gem's surface, or whatever. How much of that was dreams? How much of it was actually real?

Knuckles suppressed a groan. One thing was for sure at least. No matter what had happened, Sonic still had those wounds he'd obtained in an explosion Knuckles thought he'd been in about a week ago. And they were looking like they were fresh, just a couple minutes old. Did time pass inside the Master Emerald? Again, Knuckles didn't know, but Sonic was still bleeding, not much, though, but he should better patch up the hedgehog first and then torment his brains some more.

Having made this decision, the guardian noticed he could have been faster about it. He was sitting here, staring at Sonic bleeding instead of doing something about it since the hedgehog clearly wasn't in any shape to do it himself.

"Hey Sonic?" The echidna carefully nudged his friend. Right now Sonic looked about to fall asleep.

"Yeah…?"

"What do you say we head over to my place now and I'll take care of your shoulder?" He tried a smile.

Sonic frowned. "What wrong withit?"

Knuckles shrugged. He'd established by now Sonic was totally out of it; he couldn't quite expect him to remember a statement that had been made something like a minute ago. "There are some nasty little pieces of stuff stuck in it, you know."

"Oh." Sonic blinked slowly. "O…okay."

Knuckles nodded, eying the blue hedgehog. If he couldn't even properly sit on his own, walking without help was out of question. "Fine. Then come on, we'll take a nice little walk across my nice little floating island, okay?"

"Yup." Sonic grinned, not seeming to mind when Knuckles got a good grip on him and put him on his feet. The guardian had to quickly loop the hedgehog's arm around his shoulders to keep him from falling down again. "Ah sink ah can fly, Knux…"

"I'm sure you can. Do you mind if we try it some other time?" Knuckles slowly and carefully started walking them down the stairs. He was glad when they reached the end of them… maybe he should better take the quick way out and sling Sonic over his shoulder like the dead weight he was...

"Hey, Knux?"

"Yes?"

"Ah've been meanin' ta tell ya somethin'…" Sonic was visibly straining himself to look at him.

"Just go ahead." The echidna wasn't quite sure what great revelation he was in for, but he was more intent on getting them over to his houseroom than hearing it. Anyway, it didn't actually hurt letting the hedgehog spout nonsense. It wasn't exactly his fault for once.

What Sonic did spout however wasn't quite the kind of nonsense Knuckles would have expected. "Ya knoww, directly next ta Tails, you're like ma favorite person," Sonic said slowly. "Really, if I had just one piece of chili dog in the world, ah'd share it with you'n Tails. Even if ah was hungry…"

Knuckles blinked. While it was clearly a statement he'd only made because he was totally intoxicated, that also made it quite an honest statement. And no matter the weird way he had put it, something about those slurred, jumbled words made Knuckles feel strangely warm. "Uh, thanks, I guess."

"Heh." Sonic giggled a little. "Yo, Knux?"

"What's it?"

The hedgehog pointed his free hand at the sky. "This cloud looks like Eggman, huh?"

Knuckles tilted his head upwards, but neither of the clouds above their heads bore anything like even a distant resemblance to the crazed scientist. Yet, an indulgent smirk played around his lips and he replied softly. "Yeah, it totally does."


Thousands of bubbles were rising up from the center of the tank filled with the liquid chaos energy. There were seven tanks in total in the large laboratory and every one of them was glowing brightly enough to light a room much larger even than this one. Tails would have loved to have sunglasses to protect his eyes from the glare. As it were, he didn't have any and didn't see much more but blinding brightness when he looked at the tank. Something about it still acted like a magnet to his eyes and he kept staring back at the glow, the bubbles and tried to catch a glimpse of the growing crystal in the middle of the tank.

With a shake of his head, the two-tailed fox forced his attention back to the computer screens in front of him. Unlike his blinded eyes, the sensors monitoring the tanks could see well behind what was going on. A highly sensitive voltmeter measured the high voltage current that was flowing from an anode at the top of the tank through the chaos liquid to a cathode at the tank's bottom. The screen next to it showed a frequently updated image of the magnetic and electric field induced by this current.

Had the bright light in the beginning of the process mostly come from the electricity used and it's reaction to the liquid chaos energy, now most of it was caused by the increasingly strong chaos field of the artificial Master Emerald that was growing inside the tank, held in place by the magnetic field and with every second passing growing bigger as the liquefied chaos energy crystallized.

The building Emerald's chaos field was shown on another screen, a wild, confusing mess of streamlines that appeared and vanished apparently at random, sometimes pulsing up and drawing shapes reminding Tails of a sun's protuberances on the screen. He yet failed to detect a pattern in the chaos… but truth be told, he had never found one in his fake Chaos Emerald's field either. He supposed the Emeralds were named 'chaos' for a reason. He'd just thought the Master Emerald would be different.

Well, maybe it was. To be fair, Tails had no idea if he was doing it right, if what he was building would really turn out to be fake Master Emeralds. He was feeding them with currents of the frequency he'd calculated based on the data Metal Sonic had scanned from the real Master Emerald, but he wasn't sure if that would be enough. Perhaps he really hoped an actual Master Emerald was more than the sum of its parts, more than a great amount of chaos energy crystals aligned in the correct way. But maybe he was clutching at straws there.

Still, the fake Chaos Emerald he'd built before had, while getting considerably close to the real ones, lacked in various ways. Tails hoped his Master Emeralds would also lack here and there and wouldn't give Metal Sonic what he wanted. Tails didn't want to be responsible for giving a totally insane robot the ultimate tool to destroy the world.

Thoughtfully the fox flicked a switch, slightly altering the phase of the inducing current. While he wished very much for his work to fail, he didn't want to risk letting it get out of control. With the amounts of energy involved, unstable chaos energy to be precise, it was dangerous leaving it alone. But the Emeralds were growing at a constant rate and in every tank the same processes took place, processes that seemed familiar to him, closely resembling those of when he'd grown his Chaos Emerald copy.

Tails frowned, once again glimpsing up at the tank. Maybe he was just building seven giant, slightly out of the usual energy pattern Chaos Emeralds? Chaos Emeralds with Master Emerald properties? Some weird chimera? He didn't know, and not knowing was just increasing his concern.

But nothing in these large, glowing tanks could match his concern about the blue armored robot standing in front of the tanks, staring into the glow as if he'd love to get even closer to insane amounts of unstable energy being compressed and altered. Tails grimaced. Dr. Eggman was insane, yes. But somehow Tails found Metal Sonic a lot more insane.

And if his experiment worked, this insane robot would in a few days have a hold of more energy and power than anyone had ever had, during all of Mobius', heck during all of the entire universe's history. If things turned out the way Metal Sonic wanted, the world was doomed…

Tails gulped. He had to do something. He had to escape. Otherwise… he didn't know if anyone would live to tell about Metal Sonic's fake Master Emeralds.


With a small clanking sound, another sharp-edged piece of metal dropped into a clay bowl on the floor next to Knuckles' bed, joining a fair amount of others. Knuckles paid little attention to it, directly returning to his work.

His fingers were red with blood. For the sake of greater sensitiveness and flexibility, the echidna had for once taken off his boxing gloves. He felt his fingertips around the wound he'd just retrieved the metal piece from to make sure he had not missed on another one, then continued for the next cut.

Sonic lay on his right side, slightly curled up, facing Knuckles but not really looking at him. The hedgehog's eyes were half closed and he seemed more asleep than awake to Knuckles at the moment. While the guardian still had no real idea what exactly Sonic had been dosed with, it sure appeared to be a great painkiller. Since Knuckles had started tending to his injuries, Sonic had never seemed to notice much of the procedure.

The red echidna's thumb and index finger took hold of the end of another erratically shaped metal piece. He carefully tried if it moved, then with a quick motion pulled it out of Sonic's shoulder.

The force of the jolt was enough for even the dazed blue hedgehog to feel and he slightly turned his head towards Knuckles, drowsy green eyes questioning. They widened a little as they focused, or rather tried to, on the piece of metal in Knuckles' hand. "Whoa… that was in there…?"

"Yes, along with a lot of other weird stuff." Knuckles held it out at him between two fingers, letting him see it for a moment before dropping it into the bowl. "Hope you didn't want to keep it."

"Uh, no." Sonic smiled a little and settled back into the pillow as if he'd never done anything more relaxing than lying here.

Knuckles watched him briefly. Strong stuff indeed. Still, there were upsides to it. He wouldn't want his friend to be in pain, and his work was easier when Sonic was relaxed like that than it had been if the hedgehog were tense or squirming.

He returned to searching for any more pieces to be removed. Of course, there were also downsides to Sonic's obliviousness. If he could say where it hurt and how, Knuckles would be able to tell if he had missed something… His examination however didn't turn up anything more and he went over to cleaning the wounds and applying some bandages.

When he was ready, the echidna found Sonic had fallen asleep at some point during the procedure. Knuckles shrugged to himself. Probably he was best off that way. He fetched a blanket for his friend and sat back on his stool for a moment. He'd done what he could. Now it was waiting for Sonic to sleep off his intoxication… Whatever had caused it.

Knuckles sighed. Hopefully he'd wake up with a functional brain again. He needed to answer a lot of questions, and Knuckles was really sick of guessing.