Speedy's note: Yeah... I'm not dead. And I'm very sorry. Next chapter is actually done and edited, so hopefully you guys won't have to wait another couple of months for the next installment. Sorry for the wait this time. I'm trying not to make a habit of it. :(


Chapter 21: Oversight

He was falling. Falling down a long kind of tunnel with colorfully flashing walls. A tube of blinking neon lights.

No idea how long the free fall lasted already. His body was weightless as he rushed past thousands of other equally falling things. Rings, Chaos Emeralds, chili dogs, Eggman robots, spiked balls.

Sonic looked down. Had the tunnel seemed endless so far, now there was something at the bottom of it. Something red with a yellow star symbol on it. A spring.

The hedgehog had barely recognized the object when he already dropped onto it. The familiar sound didn't come, but the spring bounced him upwards. Sonic turned his head to see where he was going, just to find he was catapulted right towards a set of spikes. He struggled, trying to move away from it and his eyes shot open.

The sudden intense light drilled a sharp pain through his head, threatening to split it in half. In reflex Sonic clenched his eyes shut again, gasping for air. His head felt as if someone was beating a large hammer repeatedly against his brow. For just a second the unpleasing image of Amy Rose wielding that hammer lingered in his mind, followed by a couple of random impressions of weird places with colorful balls and confusing, glowing patterns, then he managed to shove them off for a first conscious thought.

"Sweet chaos, my head…" His hands moved to feel for it, and the pounding headache was joined by a painful twinge from his left shoulder and side. "Oww…"

In a reaction more based on instinct than decision, Sonic let his left arm drop back onto – yeah, what? His fingers moved over the soft surface and he slowly tried opening his eyes again. The surroundings were still terribly bright and the light stung in his eyes. Sonic blinked quickly and the world around him started to shift into focus.

The soft thing was a dark brown woolen blanket. It apparently belonged to the bed he was in. The pillow and mattress were nothing short of comfortable, but Sonic was perfectly sure that wasn't his bed. Neither To his left, a blank and rough stone wall rose up to where it became a kind of ceiling. There was a small hole in it, the main source of this terrible light.

Sonic's gaze returned from the ceiling to the covers pulled over him, and he spotted the white bandages around his upper torso and left arm. For another few seconds he stupidly stared at them, then carefully felt over the gauze with his right hand.

"I take it they hurt now."

The hedgehog turned his head to the right at the dry, matter-of-fact voice. At the other side of the not exactly big room sat a crimson echidna on a three-legged kind of stool, watching him out of dark violet eyes. "… Knux?"

"Good observation." Knuckles stood and picked up his seat, walking over to him. "I'm actually kind of glad you really know who I am, though."

"Huh?" Sonic carefully got up to a sitting position, again holding his head. His stomach turned over even before he was fully upright, a wave of nausea bordering on dangerous level shot through his body and he was damned if he knew what Knuckles was talking about.

"You weren't exactly… sane, yesterday." The echidna shrugged a little. "You know where you are?"

Sonic shook his head and immediately regretted it. "Ugh… No. Oh, and while you're at it, tell me how I got here, what happened to my shoulder and most of all why my frickin' head feels like it's gonna explode…"

Knuckles suppressed a chuckle and put his chair down to sit next to the bed. "In short, you're on Angel Island, specifically at my houseroom not far from the Temple of Chaos. I brought you here yesterday, after I broke you out of the Master Emerald you were caught in. There was debris from an explosion stuck in your shoulder and you'd been shot with a tranquilizer arrow, I suppose that's where the headache comes from."

Sonic stared. That… didn't quite make any sense, and it wasn't just because his head hurt so badly and the room was doing a slow carousel motion. "What?"

"Do you remember yesterday?" Knuckles watched him in what looked like distant interest.

Sonic blinked. Once, twice. Yesterday. That probably meant the day before now. What had he done before waking up here? Sleeping, obviously. But what had he done before that? He remembered Knuckles. The Emerald altar. A walk through a forest. Talking. What had they been talking about?

"Should I take the long silence as 'no'?" The echidna's words, in spite of their content, were spoken softly and without any feeling behind Sonic could identify.

"I… We've been… walking here?", Sonic asked finally.

"Yes. One could reasonably say I rather carried you here, but okay." Knuckles leaned forwards a little, resting his forearms on his knees.

Sonic looked at him, trying to make something like sense of his words. "What'd we talk about?"

A short impression of a grin darted over the guardian's face. "Your last chili dog, who you're going to share it with and clouds that look like Eggman."

The blue hedgehog felt his jaw drop. "What?"

"Don't look at me like that, I surely didn't prompt any of these topics," Knuckles remarked dryly.

"Oh." Sonic let his gaze wander through the room briefly. "How'd I get here you said?"

"Uh, we walked? Didn't we just establish that?" The red echidna had tilted his head, a small frown wrinkling his brow.

Sonic shook his head. "No, I mean, yes, I mean… How'd I get on your island?"

"Your sentences are just slightly better than yesterday…" Knuckles' face had taken on an amused look. "But really, as I already said, I broke you out of the Master Emerald."

Although his friend had spoken slowly, as if to make sure Sonic understood him, the hedgehog wasn't quite sure if he did. "Excuse me?"

"Someone I still don't know who they really are sealed you inside the Master Emerald. And no, I don't know how they did that. I was hoping you would." The echidna's amethyst eyes tracked him, suddenly piercing.

Sonic closed his eyes as he forced himself to push past the headache and try to get some hold of his memory. The weird green crystal wall, his reflection in it, the moment when it had suddenly fallen apart. Had that been the Master Emerald?

"There was, like, a wall. A wall consisting of green crystal stuff. It was like a giant green mirror, but a crazy one." Sonic opened his eyes again, looking at Knuckles. "I could see my reflection in it, and suddenly it would change and it was like there was a picture in it, or as if I could look through it. As if the mirror turned to glass."

The guardian's look was firmly set on his face. "Go on," he urged, and his voice was quiet as if spell-bound. "What did you see in it?"

Sonic shrugged. "All sorts of stuff. I guess I saw you once. And I saw other people I don't know, houses, and all sorts of places. I think I saw Chaos, too. And one of Eggman's flying things. It was kinda random."

Knuckles nodded slowly and Sonic thought he looked somewhat disappointed. "Anything else?"

"Before I found that wall thing," Sonic continued, "I was in a few very odd places. I thought it was some kinda special zone, but there was no end to it. There were colorful balls in there, but no Chaos Emerald turned up when I collected them, and I couldn't get out of there. Everytime I thought I reached the end of it, I just landed in a new weird looking place."

"A special zone you say?" Knuckles kneaded his hands.

"Yeah, it really looked like one sometimes. Just that it was huge. And even stranger than a normal special zone…" Sonic felt a frown form on his brow. "As much as any special zone is normal…"

Knuckles remained silent for almost a minute. "Do you remember getting sealed inside the Master?", he asked then.

Again Sonic closed his eyes. What had been before he'd wandered through all this weirdness? It felt like it was a long time ago… "What'd we do?"

The echidna seemed to begin catching up on Sonic's problem. "You and Tails came along to help me get the Master Emerald back. Someone disguised as you had stolen it, you remember?"

"Yeah…" Slowly Sonic actually did. "You showed up at Tails' workshop pretty pissed 'cause you thought it was me. Then you figured it wasn't me and we went to get your shiny stone back."

Knuckles nodded, silently skipping on his error of judgment. "We found the Master Emerald in an old, deserted base of some sort, but when we wanted to get it out, robots attacked us."

Sonic massaged his temples. "Tails went to try and find a way out of there for us…"

"I was fighting a few robots," Knuckles continued, "when something blew up and I thought I saw you being thrown into another room by the explosion. I wasn't sure, though."

Sonic stopped drawing circles on the sides of his head. "I remember the explosion. I crashed into some wall and when I got up to get back to you and Tails, I was suddenly dizzy. I… don't know what happened after that for sure. The next thing I really know is that I was in this weird place."

Knuckles nodded again. "When I got you out of the Master Emerald yesterday, you still had pieces of metal from the explosion stuck in your shoulder, in what looked like barely a few minutes old, bleeding wounds. And I found a small tranquilizer arrow in your neck." The echidna cocked his head aside. "Someone must have shot it at you while you were recovering from the explosion that hit you. The drug in the dart sedated you and that person was able to do whatever they did to trap you inside the Master Emerald without you resisting." The guardian scratched the back of his head in thought. "I don't know if and how time passes inside the Master Emerald, or in the special zone, or wherever exactly you were, but when I got you out, you were still very stoned and your wounds looked still fresh. After almost a week. At least for your body, that week didn't happen, maybe…"

"A week?" Sonic gawked. He wasn't even sure if he would have thought it was a longer or shorter time. Now everything that had happened felt more and more like a very weird dream to him. "If you say I got so many cuts in my shoulder, why didn't I feel them before? Or see them? And why do I remember what happened in this weird place, but not really how I got there or how you got me out of it?"

The Emerald guardian shook his head. "I don't know, Sonic. The only people that got sealed inside the Master Emerald before were Chaos and Tikal. Chaos was a water monster, a mutated chao. There isn't any creature like him. And Tikal was probably the first ever guardian. They are quite different from you." Knuckles ran a hand through his dreadlock-quills. "We never asked Tikal or Chaos what happened while they were stuck in it. Thing is, they could be in it for over four thousand years and they didn't age. Nor did their personality change. Chaos, after released from inside the stone, felt the same anger and hatred he had felt when he was sealed in it." The echidna shrugged. "Like I said, maybe time doesn't pass inside the Master Emerald. Maybe everything you saw and did was some kind of dream or vision."

"You mean, it never happened? All of this?" Sonic felt his ears droop. "It felt like forever!"

"It maybe was forever." Knuckles' voice was neutral and flat when he said that. As if it were an everyday statement. As if it wouldn't confuse him at all. "Were you ever hungry, thirsty, tired?"

Sonic blinked slowly. "Tired, yes. I remember sleeping on some weird giant cotton cloud thingy in a place that was full of big… soap bubbles or something that looked like it. And I slept a next to the strange green wall on the floor."

"Okay, but were you hungry? Did you eat something, or drink?" Knuckles had folded his arms as he looked at him.

The blue hedgehog frowned. "I… no. There wasn't anything like food or water. But I never really thought of it."

"Get what I'm saying?" Knuckles nodded slowly. "You were in there for six days. Given the amount of energy you have to burn daily you'd have at least gotten remarkably thinner than before without food. And without water for six days? You'd probably be dead."

"I am pretty thirsty…", Sonic trailed thoughtfully.

"You're pretty thirsty because of the blood you lost and having been out for the count for fifteen hours here without drinking," Knuckles gave back dryly.

"But… I… That doesn't make sense…" Sonic shook his head, ears still flat. "My head hurts."

Knuckles stood from his stool. "I know," he said and Sonic was grateful for the quietness of his voice as the echidna moved to a small kind of shelf on the opposite wall of the room and got a thing that looked like a mixture of bottle and amphora out of it. "I suppose it's not very fair of me asking all these questions… without breakfast even." He returned to sit down on his stool again, holding the bottle thing out at Sonic. "Here, fresh water from the creek outside."

Sonic smiled a little. "Thanks," he mumbled. He felt like his angrily pounding head couldn't stand much more talking or, even worse, thinking. The blue hedgehog took the bottle from Knuckles and drank.

The water was cold and had the taste only water from high mountains has, pure and pristine. It ran down his dry throat and slowing revived at least a few of his spirits. Sonic sighed between greedy gulps. For a moment he fought the urge to take what was left of the cool liquid and dump it over his aching head, in spite of his general disliking of getting wet. In the end the thirst won though, aided by the unpleasant image of what Knuckles would do to him if he dumped water into his bed. His head really wouldn't survive a punch of a spiked fist today…


When the door of his cell closed behind him, Tails tiredly sank against it and closed his eyes. They felt dry and burned painfully, from both lack of sleep and the bright light in the laboratory. By tomorrow, the Master Emeralds would be completed. After a few hours of stabilizing them Metal Sonic would be free to use them.

Tails sighed. He didn't know how long he'd been up. It seemed like forever. His body felt leaden and sluggish and his brain seemed a dull lump of cotton at the moment. He sank down to the floor and picked up the tray of food his captor had left for him, eating it in an automatism without knowing what it was he'd had afterwards.

Numbly he stared into the pale blue room. He didn't want this to happen. He didn't want Metal Sonic to rule the world, or destroy it. He didn't want to help him. He wanted home, he wanted Sonic to be there, smiling at him and telling him everything would be fine. He wanted to see the sun, the sparkling sea at the Mystic Ruins' coast. He wanted to sit in the Tornado, with Sonic cheering on the wing as he flew a loop and Knuckles complaining he'd get sick. And then he wanted to listen to them having a senseless argument. He wanted things just to be back to normal, like they used to be.

But they weren't. He was stuck in this stupid underwater base, a prisoner of an insane robot, forced to help him. And he was alone.

Tails swallowed dryly. He needed to escape. He had no chance stopping Metal Sonic on his own. He had to escape and get help.

Warily Tails looked around his cell. No matter that he had to be here for days already, he'd hardly even looked at the room. Metal Sonic let him work until he was so exhausted he practically fell asleep as soon as he got here and was back to bring him to work again almost as soon as he woke up.

The young fox' blue eyes wandered through the room. There wasn't much to see due to the lack of furniture. The walls were smooth and spotless… aside of a grating near the top of the room.

An air bent? Probably, an underwater base, like a space station, required a complex system to circulate the air. Tails smiled a little. Maybe he could get out of here that way. And then he'd alert someone. Rouge maybe. While she wasn't exactly a friend, she would help him, and she had Shadow on her side, too. Maybe the self-proclaimed Ultimate Lifeform was a match for Metal Sonic? At least it was better than being on his own.

Tails crawled to his feet, tiredness momentarily forgotten. He spun his tails and slowly hovered up until he was facing the grating. It was secured in place with four screws at the edges, but it didn't need long for Tails to get rid of them. He pulled the grating open and slipped into the narrow tunnel that lay behind.

Ignoring the discomfort of the tight place, the young fox carefully crawled onwards. He was going to escape from his prison, he would get help, Metal Sonic would be stopped… Tails smiled, speeding up his crawl.

When he reached the end of the narrow air tunnel, he was in relatively good spirits and already plotting how he could most quickly alert as many people as possible of the upcoming threat.

The end of the tunnel was closed with another grating, but unlike the one in his cell this one wasn't closed with screws and opened simply when he pushed against it. Cautiously Tails slipped out of it, dropped to the floor –

And was caught by his tails in the iron grip of a metal claw. The fox froze as Metal Sonic lifted him up and held him in front of his face, the red eyes piercing. "I knew you were going to try this one day," he snarled sharply, holding Tails upside down. "If you try again, I will kill you."

The fear was back instantly, pouring liquid ice through Tails' paralyzed body. He didn't even dare struggling as Metal Sonic carried him back into his cell.


Sonic sighed, sitting on the edge of Knuckles' bed and massaging his temples. "I'm sorry, if you're expecting any great insight on how your shiny stone works inside, there's nothing I can tell you. All I saw was a lot of mind-blowing stuff. There was no mystical magic voice that explained the sense of life and Emerald guarding to me. If anything like that is there, it clearly ignored that I was there as well. And what I dreamed sure was very strange, but my days were so weird it's not really surprising." Sonic looked up at the echidna. "Really, I'm sorry, if I had anything important to tell, you'd be the first to hear it."

"I see…" Knuckles nodded slowly. He still looked disappointed to Sonic. The past hour had passed by with nothing but Knuckles asking questions about Sonic's past few days, the time he'd - supposedly – spent inside the Master Emerald. Sonic wasn't quite sure what Knuckles hoped he'd have seen or experienced, but a few times he'd been tempted to ask the echidna if he was jealous Sonic had been there instead of him. In the end, he'd kept silent about it, out of fear his words would hit a sore spot and the reaction that would follow maybe wouldn't be healthy for him having said them, as much as out of simple indifference. Right now Sonic really couldn't have cared less where exactly he'd been and what Knuckles thought of that. He was tired, his shoulder ached and his head hurt and he really didn't want to answer any more questions.

Knuckles was watching him, shifting around on his stool. "I think I'm the one who should be sorry," he said quietly. "But nobody's ever been where you've been before, well, nobody I could ask at least, and this is really important to me… And I'm afraid if I wait until later you'll have forgotten things." The echidna dropped his gaze onto his large hands that lay in his lap.

Sonic nodded a little. He could, somewhat, understand Knuckles. There he spent his whole life sitting in front of that giant glowing stone trying to understand it, and then someone came who had seen it from the inside. It kind of made sense Knuckles was trying to squeeze the last bit of information out of him. Just that Sonic didn't really have any information other than 'it looks weird inside your shiny rock'. "It's okay," he said anyway. "Y'know, if I'd known where I was and that anyone would ask for it, I would have paid more attention to the details. But I didn't. I was basically just awed because everything was so weird and all I did was trying not to kill myself and find the exit."

A short chuckle came from the red echidna. "Can't claim I would have done anything else," he admitted.

Sonic smiled. "So, now that I've told you everything I know, how about you tell me a few things?"

Knuckles titled his head. "I… can't really tell you anything about what you saw inside the Master. It is –"

"No, not about that," Sonic interrupted. "About what happened in the, yeah, real world while I was gone traveling through the depths of shining crystals."

"Oh." Knuckles looked actually taken aback a little. "That."

Sonic grinned. "Yes, that. Just to remind you, the real world still exists."

The guardian frowned. "I know that."

"Uh-huh." The hedgehog twitched his ears in slight amusement. "Then fill me in on what it did while I was… uh, absent."

"Well, I spent most of the time here, on the island I mean, especially in the Temple of Chaos," Knuckles began.

"Guarding the Master Emerald," Sonic added. It seemed the obvious thing.

The echidna nodded absentmindedly. "Yes, sure. Although we weren't sure if the thief was still out there, no-one came here and I brought the island back to a safe altitude and far out over the ocean." Knuckles paused for a moment, thoughtfully looking at Sonic. "The things that disturbed me weren't any intruders. There was something about the Emerald. It's field, the energy, it felt… different after I returned it to the shrine, but first I thought that was just because of it having been displaced before. The Master's moods are complicated and it has always been different to normal after it had been taken away from the island, or its power had been used, or it had been broken. So I just waited for everything to return to normal over time."

Sonic looked back at his friend. "But it didn't," he concluded.

"Right, it didn't." Knuckles nodded again. "Instead… something happened to me."

"To you?" The blue hedgehog raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"

Knuckles shrugged. "It started with little things. Sudden headaches, dizziness, zoning out. I was doing something and suddenly I was somewhere else and didn't know how I'd gotten there. Aside of that, there was just a constant feeling of… wrongness. At first I thought I'd maybe snatched a cold or something. And then, after a few days, I started to have visions and nightmares."

"Of what?"

Knuckles' violet eyes snapped to fix on him. "You."

"Me?" Sonic stared.

"Yes. Of you in the base we'd gotten the Emerald from, lying in front of the Master Emerald, I guess. Another time I saw you and you were in some very dark place. And finally I kept seeing always the same picture, of you standing in front of a wall of what looked like glass to me at first, pressing your nose against it trying to look through it. And then I kind of phased through that green wall and was standing in front of the Master Emerald." Knuckles exhaled.

Sonic blinked. "You… you knew I was inside of the Emerald because you dreamed it?"

Knuckles nodded silently.

Sonic shook his head in disbelief. "I was rescued because of your nightmares…"

"No, you were rescued because the Master, excuse me for putting it that way, wanted to get rid of you and used the… link that exists between the Emerald and me as its guardian to let me know it," Knuckles corrected.

"Fine, then why didn't it just tell you 'there's a guy stuck inside of me that needs breaking out'? Why the hold up?"

"Because it doesn't work like that!" Knuckles shook his head. "The Master can do a lot, but it can't talk."

"Okay, fine, I get it," Sonic soothed. It was funny that he was the one with the jackhammer lodged between his temples and he needed to do the soothing. "The shiny stone didn't like me and tried to tell you you're supposed to get me out again." He stopped. "Wait, why didn't you ever feel weird while Tikal and Chaos were inside the Emerald?"

Knuckles shrugged slightly. "I can only assume the Master Emerald accepted their presence. Tikal had willingly sealed herself alongside with Chaos into the Emerald. The Master allowed her to be inside of it. You were, again sorry for saying it like that, an intruder."

Sonic frowned. "It's not like I was there on purpose."

"I'd suppose it knew that, otherwise you wouldn't have come out that unharmed I assume," Knuckles remarked. "It pretty much let you go in peace, didn't it?"

Sonic pointedly looked at his bandaged shoulder. "Uh-huh…"

"You know that this wasn't the Emerald's doing," Knuckles noticed.

"Now are you defending it?" Sonic suppressed a chuckle. "Okay, but it could have been so nice to do the awesome chaos healing thing for me while I was there."

Knuckles shrugged. "Either it didn't feel like it, or… I'm not even sure if Master Emerald healing works for anyone but the guardian."

Again, Sonic's hand went for his aching head. "Fine. Let's just drop the matter of the shiny stone for now. There's something else I've been wondering about."

"What?" The red echidna watched him, observing the slow circles his fingers drew on his temples.

"When I was quite obviously inside that giant Emerald of yours… why did you never wonder where I had gone?"

Knuckles' eyes snapped wide in momentary confusion, then even further in barely concealed alarm at some shocking realization he'd made privately in his head just now. "Because you were there," he mumbled distantly, dazedly. "Well, we thought you were there."

Sonic's head pounded more angrily and he just knew he looked stupid right now. "Come again?"

"We thought you were there alright," Knuckles repeated, audibly forcing a pretense of steadiness back into his voice. "Tails and me, I mean. We were inside that base, then a bunch of robots attacked us and we kind of got split up. Tails went to find the quickest way back to the exit and where we'd left the Tornado. I kind of lost track of where you were during the fight, but I couldn't find you afterwards. Instead, I found the Master Emerald and quickly got it outside. You were already at the plane when I got there, and Tails flew me back up to the island where I restored the Emerald to the altar. You and Tails just left. It all made sense – until the Emerald started giving me strange visions."

Slowly shock was working its way through Sonic's body. "That means, you took that whoever he is that looks like me along – and now Tails is alone with him!"

Obviously Knuckles had been struck by the same thought, just a moment earlier than Sonic. "It's my fault," he mumbled. "It's my fault."

"What if he does something to him?" Sonic felt his heart beating faster. "We gotta go and check out if he's okay!" He quickly jumped to his feet and darted for the door, totally disregarding the fact he still didn't even have shoes on.

He didn't get very far anyway. His stomach lurched, his head felt like someone had ripped it off his shoulders, span it around three times and put back on his neck upside-down. In a desperate search for stability Sonic stumbled against the stone wall next to the door he'd meant to take, but it was either dropping against that wall, throwing up or fainting outright. Sonic picked the first option, slowly sliding down against it while feeling like the floating island was a ship tumbling through a storm.

Knuckles seemed strangely unaffected by the ground's mad tilting. He was moving closer, a frown on his face and concern obvious. "Sonic!"

The hedgehog struggled to crawl back up against the wall. "I'm…fine…"

"Sure you are," Knuckles remarked dryly. "The whole falling over your own feet routine is just for laughs."

Sonic had made it halfway up again. "I'm good, we gotta go," he insisted. No chance in the world he'd admit that he'd keeled over again if it wasn't for the firm grip Knuckles had assumed around his shoulders. It hurt, but that hardly mattered now.

"To use one of your standard phrases: no way." Knuckles shoved him backwards slowly. "You're hurt and just not well enough to go anywhere right now."

Sonic's legs bumped into the edge of the bed and his knees somehow took that as a cue to give way. "Tails needs me," he protested weakly as he dropped down.

"Probably, but do you seriously think you're a help to him like that?" Knuckles pushed him back on the bed until he fell on his back.

"I can handle it…" Sonic struggled against the pressure of Knuckles' hands. The pillow his head had fallen in felt nice, the mattress was soft and his sore body was melting into it and Sonic hated it for that.

"Sonic, listen." Knuckles hosted his feet up onto the bed while keeping him down with one hand and the fact he looked like it didn't cost him the least bit of strain was also something Sonic hated. "It doesn't really matter if you rest for a bit, really. The island is floating at several kilometers of altitude over the open sea, probably hundreds of kilometers away from the next land. If we want to go to Tails and check up on him, I need to lower the island a lot and move it closer to the coast at least so we can get off it, you understand?"

Sonic stopped resisting, trying to force his pounding head to follow Knuckles' words. "We can't go?"

Knuckles shook his head. "Not as quickly as you probably thought."

"But, Tails needs help and –"

The echidna's amethyst eyes softened ever so slightly and amidst the shock, anger and guilt that burned in them it made him look inexplicably lost. "I know, and I understand. In a way, we're both guardians…"

Sonic stared. The room still titled and rotated gently. "What?"

"Never mind." Knuckles forcibly smiled a little. "I will go and start moving the island towards Tails' house, okay? And while I do that, you have plenty of time to rest that head of yours, and whatever else is giving you trouble. This is a floating island, not a fast aircraft. It moves slowly. I'm sorry to say that, but we won't make it there before tomorrow."

"To-" Sonic blinked. "And what if something happens until we're there?!"

Knuckles' tone was calm, even as his eyes were anything but. The deep violet flickered with barely contained fire, but he kept it there, right beneath the surface. "Then we'll find a way to deal with it. Fine?"

"Oh…okay…" Sonic nodded, exhaling a deep breath, trying to pull himself together. If Knuckles was making an obvious effort, he'd have to do so as well. The nausea was abating slowly and the pain in his head was receding to the initial default level.

"Relax and try to get some more sleep, Sonic." Knuckles looked down on him. "I can perfectly steer this island alone. I've done that a lot of times."

Relaxing his quills, Sonic surrendered to his fate and finally allowed his heavy head to sink deeper into the pillow, and closed his eyes. "Don't you dare screwing it up…"

Knuckles' tone was bitterly hollow even to his ringing ears. "I think I did enough screwing up, didn't I?"