So, we're back! As promised, this episode reveals some of what Eggman's been up to over the nearly two years since his escape from custody. Thanks to the guys that have bumped the story up to three follows and three favourites, it really feels good to know that someone likes my writing! The usual disclaimer: I don't own Sonic or any of the other characters. They're owned by Sega, Archie Comics, Fleetway, Ken Penders and DiC. Also, as it gets a mention in this chapter, I don't own Star Wars either (I wish!) Star Wars is owned by either George Lucas or Disney (not quite sure which has executive control after Force Awakens.)

TIME: 22 June 3324

PLACE: The Egg Bunker, undisclosed location.

The rotund figure of Doctor Eggman sang merrily if tunelessly as he sat in the luxurious command chair in the Egg Bunker's control room. The room itself was a sterile white amphitheatre surrounded by various computer consoles and dominated by Eggman's large, vaguely eggcup shaped command chair. The effect was not unlike the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

"I am the Eggman, that's who I am! I am the Eggman, I've got the master plan…!" Eggman sang out at the top of his voice, tapping away briskly at the keyboard attached to his chair. The prospect of mayhem on a global scale, eventually leading to his supremacy, was something that always made Eggman feel musical, and the program he was currently writing was no exception. Lines of code for the computer virus nicknamed, with all Eggman's usual subtlety, the Egg Virus, played over the screen of the console behind him. Eggman was very pleased with himself for creating the Egg Virus. To all intents and purposes, it worked like a computerised version of HIV-AIDS. As soon as it was detected by an antivirus program, the Egg Virus both squelched any warning messages sent from the antivirus, then infected the antivirus software itself, before laying dormant. Dormant, that is, until Eggman sent a seemingly innocuous signal, and then…boom. The Egg Virus would explode out of the compromised antivirus and bring the infected system to a grinding halt.

With perfect timing, the Egg Bunker's lights flickered and went out. At the same time, the computers around the room went dead. Eggman snarled, lost in the darkness, before the sinister red lights of the emergency power system kicked in. Eggman had stopped singing when the power failed, and now sat slumped in his command chair, quietly cursing at the loss of the last ten minutes' work on the Egg Virus. He knew exactly why the power had failed as well. It was a very simple answer, he was out of fuel. The Egg Bunker had been designed with an omnifuel furnace, a type of power core designed to drag the maximum energy from any kind of fuel, from weapons-grade plutonium to mouldy potato peelings. The omnifuel furnace had been one of the crowning glories of his previous self's national industrial corporation, Robotnik Industries. It had made the future terrorist a billionaire. Eggman suppressed a snarl as he recalled that the company had now passed to his balding, big-nosed, slimy nephew Colin. Rumour was, even the workforce didn't like their new CEO much, referring to him behind his back as "Snivelly." Well, Colin had better watch out, because when Eggman made his move…

Eggman's scowl deepened. That move would have to be postponed, given the fuel situation. The omnifuel furnace was an amazing piece of technology, but even it couldn't break the laws of thermodynamics and run on nothing.

A small yellow and black cube rolled like a dice into the room, drawing Eggman's attention. As he watched, the cube unfolded into a pair of blocks connected by a long, jointed arm like that of a cherry picker. Two spindly arms ending in oversized white metallic hands sprouted from the sides of the upper block, followed by flaps opening to reveal a crude robotic face of two glowing blue optics and a mouth set in a permanent goofy grin. "Hey, boss-man! I heard you down the corridor. You in pain?" the small robot asked in a voice with an accent straight out of a spaghetti western. A small tic started fluttering under Eggman's eye. He'd always been rather touchy about his less-than-melodious singing voice ever since the humiliation of being thrown out of his primary school choir. There was a loaded silence for a second, then Eggman erupted, screaming madly while throwing the contents of a conveniently placed wrench set at the hapless droid, which scurried madly around to try and avoid being hit.

"No, I am not in pain, Cubot! I am merely singing melodiously as a prelude to my inevitable worldwide takeover, you mutinous, mutated slab of insalubrious circuitry! Why I bothered to construct you in the first place is beyond me! And another thing, it's not 'boss-man', alright? It's 'Master!' Got that? 'Master!'" A large spanner finally impacted Cubot's head with a satisfying thunk, and Eggman's incandescent rage began to subside. "Now, what did you want, Cubot? Make it quick, I'm a busy megalomaniac." Cubot scratched his metallic head, and Eggman resolved to give Cubot's computer brain a tune-up as soon as power was restored. The small yellow and black droid had been one of the first creations to come out of the Egg Bunker's foundry, and he was showing his age after two years of constant operation. Not only was Cubot's memory suffering from lagging response times, but his artificial intelligence had dipped to the level where Eggman doubted that Cubot could now even spell "artificial intelligence." Most worrying of all was the fact that Cubot's voice chip had become corrupted, giving him a voice like Lee Van Cleef in "The good, the bad and the ugly."

"Oh yeah, I remember now!" Cubot drawled, the memory filtering through at last. "Y'all remember that stupid robot you built with the drills for hands and a stupid pointy nose?" Eggman thought for a second. "You mean Grounder?" Eggman referenced the mining robot that was the most likely candidate to fit Cubot's description, all the while amazed at Cubot's gall in calling anything else stupid. "Yeah, that's the one." Cubot continued blithely. "Y'all sent him out looking underground for energy sources, didn't you?"

Eggman was rapidly losing patience with the erratic robot. "I did. As a mining robot, it seemed like a good idea, especially as I didn't have to take the Egg Mole and do it myself. Now, kindly get to the point!" Cubot was unfazed by Eggman's shouting. He'd suffered it many times before. "Grounder's back. Apparently he's found something." Eggman's face split into his trademark deranged toothy grin. "And just in time. We're out of fuel, and the emergency power won't last much longer. Get Grounder in here at once."

Cubot folded up into his "dice" form and rolled out of the room. Minutes later, the mining robot, Grounder, rolled into the room on tank tracks. He was about four feet tall, and coated with a layer of blue-green paint. His short, stubby arms were currently tipped with a pair of rock drills, but Eggman had designed a variety of attachments to fit on Grounder's wrist sockets. A third drill bit formed a rudimentary nose under the two silver pressure gauges that formed Grounder's "eyes". "Ah, Grounder! So good to see you!" Eggman said pleasantly. "I understand that you have located a source of energy?" A flap below Grounder's drill nose opened, forming a kind of mouth. "Yup, I got something good here!" Grounder declared in his goofy, nasal voice. "So, what is it?" Eggman prompted expectantly. "Oil? Coal? Natural gas? Uranium ore?"

"Better than that!" Grounder declared confidently. A panel on his chest opened, revealing a secret compartment. Inside the compartment sat a blue gemstone. It was about the size of a man's fist, and glowed with an inner light. However, all Eggman saw was a pretty piece of jewellery. Moving with a speed that was at odds with his portly frame, Eggman lunged at Grounder and grabbed the surprised robot's thick neck section. "You metal moron! Computerised cretin! I need a power source, not a piece of jewellery! I might have known you'd mess up without Scratch to oversee things! You…you…you…" Eggman floundered for an insult. "NINCOMBOT!" As Eggman paused for breath in his tirade, Grounder spoke up. "But boss, that stone's packed with energy! My sensors nearly blew when I scanned it!" Eggman paused, letting the relieved Grounder go. While Eggman knew that Grounder wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, and for that reason was often overseen by a chicken-shaped tactical robot dubbed "Scratch ", Eggman also knew that Grounder's energy sensors were second to none. "Very well, Grounder. Tell me about this gem."

At Eggman's request, a long roll of data printout started spewing from Grounder's mouth like a long tongue. Eggman grabbed the printout and started reading. "Stone is of unknown origin, hardness 10+ on the expanded Mohs scale, crystal formation hexagonal, specific gravity 3.0. Emitting unknown form of energy (not radioactivity) that defies analysis. Unknown energy is in excess of 3000 terajoules. Conclusion: if energy is continuous, it would be capable of running all functions of the Egg Bunker at 200% capacity for years." Eggman put down the printout and patted the waiting Grounder on his head as if he was a pet dog. "Grounder, you are a genius!" Eggman praised his creation. Grounder's face twisted in confusion. "Is that good?" he muttered to himself. Fortunately for Grounder, Eggman didn't hear him. He was already halfway to the power generator. If his hunch was right, he could bypass the omnifuel furnace and link the gem directly to the power coils. He had a pretty good idea what he was holding. Eggman's grandfather, Gerald, had been a notable scientist as well, although Eggman recalled from his early years that Gerald's experiments had eventually turned from "impressive" to "totally wacky." Just before Gerald had disappeared-Eggman remembered as a child listening to an austere, black-suited government official conveying his regrets to the family that Gerald had been killed in a car crash, and even at that tender age, not believing a word of it-Eggman recalled his grandfather babbling excitedly about his experiments and research. Quite frankly, the young Eggman had dismissed the claims as little more than fevered ranting. Genetically spliced Mobian/alien hybrids? Sentient, gelatinous cyborg sentries based on an old legend about a super-powerful water god? Yeah, right!

However, young Eggman had been intrigued by one little nugget of information that Gerald had let slip in an unguarded moment. On the last day before Gerald had to return to his scientific research centre, the old scientist had expressed a desire to watch a film with young Eggman. The younger Robotnik had chosen his favourite movie at that time, the original Star Wars. As the movie had come to the scene where the Death Star destroyed planet Alderaan, young Eggman had asked curiously how much energy would be required to accomplish the destruction of a planet. Gerald had smiled benignly and explained that the only things capable of producing that much energy were a kind of extremely rare gemstone. Over the centuries, these stones had become extremely rare, and most people just thought of them as a fairytale. However, as Gerald explained, there was overwhelming evidence that these "Chaos Emeralds" did actually exist. "So these emeralds could blow up a planet?" Young Eggman had asked, wide-eyed. "Only if their energy was tapped, stored, and released all at once." Gerald had clarified, before a sour look flitted across the old man's face and he muttered something unintelligible about "eclipse cannon."

Back from his memories, Eggman carefully linked the shiny gem up to the power coils of the main generator, stepping back and hesitantly throwing the main switch. There was a loud 'thunk', followed by a rising hum of power, and then Eggman staggered backwards, temporarily blinded as the dim red of the emergency lighting was instantly replaced by dazzling blue-white spotlights. Eggman's maniacal grin returned as he did a portly little dance around the generator room. "Hahaha! It works! It's a Chaos Emerald! Thank you, granddad! Now that I have this much power, it's only a matter of plotting my last few schemes! The age of disorder is over, and the age of the Eggman Empire has begun!" Eggman paused in his rant to pose dramatically like Mussolini, then immediately started cackling again. His raucous laughter echoed down the corridors of the Egg Bunker, entering the storage hangars on the lower level, and coming to the unlistening ears of a vast legion of rotund orange robots.

Hands up everyone who used to love Robotnik's imaginative insults to Scratch and Grounder during AoStH! Well, the dumbots have come up with the goods this time! Eggman's got a Chaos Emerald and he's not afraid to use it! Join us next time as the storm breaks over the United Federation, and the manure really starts to hit the fan...