Overlander Hospitality
Year 3236, Day 142:
"Where eez zat man?" Antoine huffed as he tapped his foot.
Bunnie stifled a giggle. Despite not liking Sonic all that much, he could be just as impatient as him sometimes. Though, he did bring up a good point. Trystan hadn't showed up for training again, and it was already half-past eleven. "Well, y'all wanna go'n look fer 'im, 'Twan?"
"Oui!" he exclaimed, immediately pivoting and marching back to Knothole proper with his chest puffed out. "I shall be giving him, as zey say, a pierce of my mind!"
"Ah think y'all mean 'piece' a yer mind, An-twan," Bunnie corrected.
"Bunnie, zat eez what I have just said," he said as looked back at her, shrugging his shoulders. She only giggled in response.
They walked side by side all the way up to Trystan's pad. The windows were dark, and as Bunnie squinted into one, she couldn't see anything moving. "Shoot, 'Twan, Ah don't think he's even here…"
Antoine slapped his forehead and groaned. "Zen where on zis planet could he be, hm?"
"Could be grabbin' lunch," Bunnie chuckled with innocent flair. "Lordy knows he needs his calories."
Well, about seven minutes and no luck later after searching the lunch pavilion, Bunnie and Antoine tried the only place close by that Trystan could be: the kitchen, located just a hop to the east. The kitchen was more of a network of room s with cooking supplies in it than an actual kitchen, but it served well enough for the people who wanted to make their own food when the stuff in the mess hall got old. The two Freedom Fighters didn't need to wander far to find who they wanted.
His blade sharp and his eyes lazily focused, Trystan struck a skinned carrot repeatedly, going horizontally and then vertically until it had been reduced to fine little cubes. It was a regular vegetable horror movie.
He picked up his cutting board and slid the diced carrot into a pot of boiling water before picking up two tomatoes and tossing them into a blender. He set it to "puree" and let the machine work its magic. As he went to grab a red onion amongst a larger group of vegetables he had laying on plastic on the side of his counter, he noticed Bunnie and Antoine standing in the doorway to his little work station.
He smiled weakly and motioned for them to come over as he started working his knife in circles around the onion. "Hey there, guys. Sorry, I meant to come over and tell you I'd be cookin' something up, but that was after I had cut up a few veggies, and then, hey, stupid ol' me remembered it again after I had the water boilin' for five minutes, so…" He shrugged and quickly deposited a couple long strings of onion into the pot and leaned over it, taking a few good whiffs.
"Ah, that's all over an' done with, sugah," Bunnie told him.
Antoine crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. "If you're still available in about...thirty to forty-five more minutes, I can still train," he offered, checking his watch.
"Well, Ah'd hope ya'd still be willin' t'fight, hun," she instructed, coming closer to inspect Trystan's setup.
Suddenly, there was a scent hanging in the air that reminded her of her parents' garden back home. "Trystan, wat'ch y'all cookin' up in heah?" she asked with mild interest.
He laughed. "I was hoping you'd ask!" He grabbed the tomato juice from the blender and poured the whole container into the pot and grabbed a spoon next to the stove and began to stir the contents moderately fast. The aroma changed from raw vegetables to something smoother, and far tastier.
It gave Bunnie a mild surprise. "Mistah Trystan, Ah do declare! Are ya'll makin' some sorta soup?"
Trystan looked over his shoulder, practically beaming with pride. "Yes, I am! It's my mom's own recipe. She taught it to me when I was about knee-high to a SWATbot!" he joked. "I'm honestly amazed I still remember the damn thing after not preparing it for so long…"
He pulled out the spoon and tested his concoction, muttering, "Needs more salt," to himself. He sprinkled some salt out in his hand and tossed it into the pot as well. Although, the last thing he expected was Antoine to walked up to his opposite side and inspect his soup, on top of sniffing the air and giving him advice on what to do next.
"Zee soup needs some baseel," he said.
"The recipe don't call for any basil," Trystan retorted.
"Eet would be tasting much bettair with baseel," Antoine rolled his eyes.
"My mom's recipe uses salt and cumin, and salt'n cumin only," he retorted again.
"Monsieur Treestan," Antoine began, "I 'ave taken sevairal extensive cooking classes, and I pride myzelf on being able to tell what any given dish needs based on zee sense of smell alone. Zis soup needs some baseel."
Trystan turned to face him with a hand on his hip and pointing his spoon at Antoine. It was close enough to poke his nose. "Ant, insultin' a man's soup is worse than insultin' his mother, and insultin' his mother's soup is a crime punishable by a swift kick in the ass." He didn't wait for a response, going back to stirring for a moment before he grabbed a chicken breast from a separate piece of plastic on the counter. "Jesus, next you'll be telling me to add butter when I should be using margarine to spread on any dish involving scallops," he chided as he pulverized the poultry.
Antoine retched and clutched his stomach, whispering, "Please be reminding me nevair to ask you to prepare any escargot…"
Bunnie turned to leave, wishing Trystan the best of luck, to which he responded in kind, and that he'd be out at the field soon. Antoine stuck around for a minute to scrutinize his cooking more, to which Trystan paid no mind.
"Heh. All haute cuisine, no homestyle," he said to himself after Antoine left.
The sun reached its zenith, but Sally still hadn't worked up the guts to go outside and face reality. Which was a shame, because it looked beautiful; not a cloud to be seen in all directions. No, she only sat on her bed, staring at a picture at least seven or eight years old. Her father looked nearly identical to how he did the previous day, his moustache was only a little shorter. Her mother and brother probably looked a lot different now, considering they were about seven years dead.
She would have started crying for the second time today, but a knock at the door forced her to keep the tears back for a few minutes, at the least. She got up and trudged over to her door and took a few deep breaths. She was about to reach for the knob and open it when there came more knocking accompanied by a voice.
"Hey, kid, you in there? Holler if you are."
The knob turned and the door creaked open. Sally was surprised to find Trystan standing outside her door with a bowl of what looked like soup, covered in plastic wrap. "Hey, Sally. You doin' okay?"
"Kind of," she muttered, rubbing her forehead.
"Well, hopefully this will help kill some of the pain," he said holding out the soup bowl. "I know how it feels, losing loved ones like that, it...it killed me when I lost mine."
Sally took the bowl after retracting once from it from the sudden heat. This was definitely an interesting gift. She smiled. "Thanks, Trystan. This...this means a lot."
He winked. "It's my mom's special," he confided, "It would probably taste better in colder weather, but I mean, I'd rather have it be hot outside than negative forty at noon."
"Have to agree there," she replied with a small chuckle. "Thanks again."
"Fuhgedaboudit," he said as he walked away, "It's the least I can do. Needed the practice anyway!"
She shut her door and carried the soup over to a small table opposite the bed, then fetched a spoon from one of the several cabinets hung on the walls and sat down and threw the plastic wrap away. She dipped her spoon into the broth, slid it into her mouth, and quickly realized:
Wow, this is really good.
Tails was busying himself in one of the few underground bunkers in Knothole that served as either a bombing shelter or radar station. It was his turn to monitor the sensory equipment, and he'd been at it for fifteen minutes without so much as a wild animal turning up. He was about to leave and get a quick snack when a blip finally appeared on the radar.
He leaned over and read over the data being streamed in by the sensors, and the more he kept reading, the less he understood. "...Why would there be a box out there?" He punched in a few algorithms for the sensors, and it fed him a bit more detail on the object that had suddenly appeared. According to the data...
"And why...is it at least several yards off the ground?" he wondered aloud. His first thought was "it's obviously a bomb," which, while unlikely, was still within the realm of possibility. There was a chance that Robotnik would wear his patience so thin searching for Knothole he would simply start randomly bombing, but he was more sadistic than that. He would want to find Knothole's location, keep it secret for awhile, then storm the place out of the blue and snatch up as many mobians as he could, run them through the roboticizer-
Rapid beeping from the radar brought Tails' mind back from wandering. He smacked his head. "Don't get ahead of yourself, Tails," he muttered, looking back at the radar. The object had landed, and there was no explosion; that alone warranted an investigation.
He hopped off his chair and exited the bunker through a steel blast door and up a set of stairs that let him out of a small above-ground entrance. He took to the sky to make better time to the west entry point to Knothole, where the radar had picked up the unidentified object. He eventually made it to the limestone cliff that bordered the village and made a sharp turn upward, climbing the cliff by airway.
He stopped to catch his breath after he landed on the solid ground at the top, and immediately caught sight of a strange metal box, just like what his radar pointed out. It definitely didn't belong to Robotnik, though; his insignia was nowhere to be found on it.
"That's weird...maybe if I…" Tails picked up a nearby stick and cautiously tiptoed forward and poked the box once, then twice, then went on to touch it with his hand. Nothing happened.
"...That's really weird," he mused. He walked up to the box and tried to lift it.
He was pretty sure one of his disks cracked and slid out of place.
Tails yelped and shot straight up, massaging his lower back, and he sighed. This was gonna be a real pain to get to the command center.
Rotor punched a few figures into one of the computers at Sally's behest. "Hmm...According to this, if we had enough Chaos Quotient compressed into a singularity and then shot it out through a tachyon relay at a sufficiently high velocity, it could release enough energy to shatter the dimensional walls and allow us to get into the Special Zone," he explained.
Sally sighed and then suddenly punched the table she had been leaning on in frustration. "But the Rings we get from Chuck's machine only have enough of that energy to supply Knothole with power. And that might be a lot of power, but I don't think it's nearly enough to punch holes in spacetime. Damn."
They both remained silent, weighing their options, until Rotor suddenly perked up. "What if," he began, "we supercharged one of the Rings instead?"
"How would we do that?" she replied.
"Well, we could try gathering up enough Rings in one place for a kind of physical power matrix...or, or...we could try hijacking power from the Grey Gardens generator in Robotropolis. That might be faster," Rotor theorized. "I'll have to talk to Tails and get his input."
As soon as Rotor finished talking, someone knocked on the door. When Sally went to get it and opened it up, Tails himself was standing there, holding a giant steel crate of some sort, and it was obvious it wasn't doing him any favors.
"Little...help…?"
Sally immediately gave him a hand carrying the box, and Rotor rushed over to assist as well. They heaved it on top of the table in the center of the room, the one Sally had been leaning on, and started looking over it. Rotor asked where Tails had found it, and he explained what he had seen during his shift behind the radar.
"...So then, I rushed over here, since I figured you'd want to take a look at it, Sally," he finished.
"I'm glad you did, Tails," she said, turning to look back at the box. "I wish I knew how to open it, though."
Rotor, on the other hand, was eying the box carefully, scrutinizing every square inch of it. After a minute of this intense examination, and deducing it was harmless in this state, he touched a panel on the front of it.
In response, an antenna flipped up from a crease that ran vertically across the top of the box and rotated around while beaming out some sort of blue sensory matrix. Everyone yelped, jumped backward, and froze, but the antenna just as quickly went back down and some kind of recorder played the words, "Area secure. Audio message playback..."
Everyone heard the automated recorder inside the box start up and a mysterious man's voice said, "Blesse, is this thing on now? Am I recording…? Good." He paused to clear his throat. "Greetings to whoever finds this care package. I am the General Praetorius, head of the Filii Rubrum army, and you...you are the Freedom Fighters, if my intelligence branch is correct."
Everyone looked at each other with a mix of dread and shock. Were they going to have to deal with two opposing forces now? They had next to no information about this army.
"It was brought to my attention that one of our kin has been brought into your midst," he continued. "But have no fear. We are not seeking retribution, nor his return to our fold. All we ask...all that we hope, is that he remains alive." The box suddenly split open, revealing some wiry comms devices all crammed together as if a toddler had gotten ahold of a jigsaw puzzle and was forcing the pieces into spaces that they wouldn't fit into. "As a gift of good faith, I've taken the liberty of sending you several dozen earpiece-telecomms, to use as you see fit. I promise you they will work just as well as the equipment we sent to the Cronus boy. From our family to yours..."
They had already sent equipment to Trystan? It would certainly explain where he got his grenade launcher from. Either way, Sally cautiously reached into the box and picked one of the earpieces out. They seemed to have been stripped of some of their protective shells, which was made obvious by the realization that they could now be manipulated into whatever configuration was needed to better fit the species of mobain wearing them. Awfully considerate, for an army of Overlanders.
"Much like yourselves, this...Doctor Robotnik is our sworn enemy. He attacked our home without provocation and without warning. We would have been content to remain in the shadows, training ourselves for our planned seige of your capital city," he continued, "but once I found out that your resistance cell was active, I threw that plan out the window. On behalf of my people, I now seek an alliance."
"The Overlanders want an alliance...?" Tails muttered.
"Please consider it, at the least. And like all those before us," the General concluded, "Fight hard, die harder." There was a long silence before the computer's voice from before came up.
"This is a prerecorded message. Do not respond."
So that was that. "Of all the weird things to happen today," Sally said under her breath.
"Want me to tell Trystan his buddies sent us something?" Rotor asked.
Sally shook her head. "No, I'll take care of it. You focus on filling Tails in on what you're planning. I'll go talk to him about all this." She quickly stepped out of the command center and went to the training grounds, where she found him training with Bunnie and Antoine, and subsequently informed them of what Tails found. It also, of course, led into asking Trystan about this "equipment" he had received.
He told her about the message he'd received, but left out the part about blowing up an entire factory district against orders and said he found it while strolling outside in the Great Forest. White lies, considering she was already stressed out over her father.
A/N: Bit of a shorter "down-time" chapter, mainly because I'm about to dive into one of the more complex story arcs I've come up with. Hopefully it'll turn out at least half as good as I planned it. Keep your fingers crossed.