Air raid sirens blared overhead.
A family that was seated and having lunch would all get up from their seats in near-perfect unison and start leaving the room single file.
This event happened often enough that they and the rest of the families living in this district of Station Square knew the emergency response procedure like the back of their hand. To the uninitiated, it all resembled a well-rehearsed play once it was in motion.
Each time, they'd catch a glimpse of their defenses and find themselves in awe of them - entire buildings disguised as apartment complexes that slid their roofs open to reveal defensive platforms outfitted with massive turret guns. Some were operational, while others were purposely left vacant, only displaying a holographic version of said turret.
The family, like all the others, would make their way to the nearest underground shelter and stay there until they were given the all-clear. Usually, this took less than an hour. One was free to leave whenever they wanted, even right after the outside was dead silent once again, but the resulting debris and shrapnel that rained down as the result of the defenses doing their job made the prospect an oft fatal affair. G.U.N. ensured the populace was made aware of this fact by running blurbs about anyone foolish enough to try in the newspaper.
This attack, like all the others before it, wound up as yet another failure.
Sappers surveying the damage wouldn't find anything out of the ordinary at first, which confirmed Eggman's method of slow and steady attrition was still his modus operandi. That being said, they were still stumped by a strange find.
Two large holes in a canvas draped over a destroyed roof weren't that out of the ordinary, given the frequency of the attacks, except for the fact that they lacked scorch marks and the rest of the building showed no other sign of damage. Whatever it was that punched through, it wasn't the usual that Eggman was sending their way.
Elsewhere, someone covered in two pieces of cloth was attempting to fashion them into a piece of attire, but the more they tried, the more they just tore the thing up. Furthermore, its white unstained color would make them stand amongst all the dirt and rubble.
Instead, after surveying their surroundings, they'd spot someone sleeping on cardboard and simply folded up whatever remained of the canvas into a sheet and covered them with it.
Then they helped themselves to the person's only other set of clothes.
With them on, they could easily move around this city without attracting unwanted attention as they set out to complete their goal. The smell helped too.
They'd seclude themselves behind a dumpster and roll up one their sleeves.
A panel on one of their arms would open up, revealing a sophisticated, albeit tiny, communications array.
In the absence of standing orders, they had only one course of action.
The few times that Metal had been misplaced, he'd use it to send a ping back to either the Egg Fleet or the closest Eggman base. Once received, either of those two locations would then send one back, as well as a packet of information, including exact coordinates as well as the general direction in which he was to fly. For the Fleet, which was constantly on the move, this also meant an approach vector.
Only this time, he would get no ping back. The robot would slam his arm and even give it a hearty shake, but to no avail. It must have been damaged in the crash.
Still in his guise, the robot would begin searching for any kind of repair shop. Based on information gleamed from his databanks, such establishments usually featured a wrench somewhere on the building itself or in the name of the business itself. He'd approach the closest one and circle round to the back of the building, picking the lock and inviting himself in.
The machinery present hinted at the shop being used solely for fixing small consumer electronics, but it would have to do.
Secluded in a corner flanked by a hydraulic press and a soldering machine, the robot opened up a toolbox and rolled up his left sleeve.
In the meantime, the shop had closed and its owner was clocking out for the day, having been flooded with enough faulty phones to be busy for at least a week.
Metal would soon be made aware of their presence by their loud shouting. His sensors didn't pick up anything sooner - not them opening the door or walking around.
"What the hell, man? If someone's busted up your phone again, I'm at the front desk! I know it's warmer here, but you gotta stop doing this crap! Locks are expensive to replace, too, you know?"
Their tone sounded apprehensive, yet implied some manner of familiarity with whoever the clothes originally belonged to.
"I will perform the repairs required, then leave."
The shop owner stopped dead in her tracks, picking up a hammer off the nearest table.
Metal wouldn't hear her walking until she was right behind him and about to take a swing at him.
He'd grab her hand and turn to face her, keeping his head down for the disguise to hold.
"I've no quarrel with you. I must perform repairs."
The cat struggled to break free of his grip, but was relieved when the trespasser let her go of his own volition.
Then, as if she didn't even exist, he'd turn his back on her and resume his attempts at repair.
"You know, you could have just asked. Why go about it like this?" "I require specialty repairs." The cat raised her eyebrow, expecting the homeless guy to pull out the biggest, most ancient brick she had ever seen this side of the city. Instead, she just stared in awe, mouth agape, as the guy pulled up one of his sleeves, opened up his freaking arm and started going to town on it.
"You're a robot?! That's so freaking cool!" she exclaimed. "Are you one of Eggman's robots?" This line of questioning implied the existence of robots created by others, for which the robot had no available data.
"Yes."
The robot was finished using one tool, only to find the cat's face right in front of him when he tried to reach for another.
"What kind?"
The robot would push her away from him. "Metal."
The shop owner would scoff.
"Well, duh, you guys are all made of metal. So, are you a Motobug, a Buzz Bomber or Crabmeat? Oh, I always wanted a Newtron! They're so cute when they're not shooting at you."
"Neither."
"One of the newer ones then? I'unno, I think the old ones were better. No offense, if you're one of them."
"I'm not."
"Damn, one of the really obscure ones, eh?"
The robot didn't reply to that one at all, as he lacked the required data in order to reach consensus.
In other words, he didn't know.
She'd observe him for a bit, her smile fading, then coming back even stronger than before, now ear to ear.
"You have no idea what you're doing, do you?" For the last five minutes, the only thing the robot had done was to unscrew his arm panel and then screw it back on. Fifty times.
"No."
"Let me see."
Now that the cat was as close as she could get, her curiosity began acting up as she tried to sneak a peek at his face. The whole time they were talking, his disguise held.
He'd stop her attempts at breaking it by shoving a wrench into her hand and closing it. "Repairs."
"Right!"
Once she removed the arm panel, she'd find what may have caused the robot so much grief.
To get to the next layer and reach the circuitry, one would have to go through a set of six-point star screws, with an additional pin in the middle to ensure the old trick of just using the right size flathead screwdriver wouldn't cut it.
Took a while to find the only tool that could work with them.
"I hate these things. I swear, if I ever get my hands on a time machine."
And out they were.
She was considering chucking them into a corner where no one would ever find them, but she also wasn't keen on finding half a dozen replacement screws that would fit, so she perished the thought.
It only took her a customary glance to see what the problem was.
"There's nothing wrong with whatever this is. Nothing's broken off or damaged."
"Check again."
"You got foam in your ears? There's nothing to 'check again'." Before the robot could protest, she'd start putting his arm back together. "What were you trying to do anyway?"
Once she was all done, the robot would open up the panel and bring up the communications array. "Call home." Metal would then do what he tried earlier. He still got no response back.
"Oh, whoa, this is awkward," she started, running her paws through her hair.. "I'm only gonna say this once, so I want you to listen very carefully."
She'd clear her throat and began reciting, almost as if reading from a card. She already had to explain this very same concept to some of Station Square's pensioners.
"If you're the one calling and someone else isn't answering, there's nothing wrong on your end. People do that sometimes and it's pretty crappy of them, but that's just how it is." Metal automatically translated the metaphor into propositional calculus to understand her metaphor, but didn't budge.
"I have no standing orders. In the absence of standing orders, failsafe protocol dictates that I am to procure them from Eggman." He then started walking away from her.
"Where are you going?" The cat followed behind. "A different repair shop." She pouted, crossing her arms with her back turned on him.
That should have been it. A disgruntled unwanted customer would storm off saying they can get better service elsewhere and that would be the last time any of them would ever cross paths again.
His stubbornness in the face of what she thought was obvious was driving her up the wall.
She probably would have been upset about this for the rest of the day, had something else not happened to him right after.
The robot would make it halfway across the room to the backdoor from whence he came, then promptly collapsed and struggled to get back up on his feet.
With the feline's help, he found himself seated on the nearest chair. "You see that?" she'd point to this knee, which was now bent at an angle that shouldn't be possible, not even for robots. "That's definitely broken."
She'd point towards his clothes.
"You're gonna have to take these stinky old rags off. I want to do a full check-up, see if anything else is close to breaking."
The machine shook its head and crossed its arms. Those 'stinky old rags' were with a high level of certainty the only thing standing between him and the entire city turning on him.
"The safe and successful fulfillment of the failsafe protocol demands secrecy."
"You're out of your mind if you think no one would find someone dressed as a homeless guy crawling around suspicious or unworthy of attention." He ran a simulation of how fast he'd move around with such an impairment. Efficiency took a great hit, as did his chance of completing his objective given to him by the failsafe protocol.
"My standing orders are vacant. I have no quarrel with you."
The cat scratched her head, not knowing what what he said had to do with anything.
"Look, I don't care if you're three badniks in a trenchcoat. You're busted up and this is a repair shop."
With that said, the robot conceited and allowed her to remove his top consisting of an oversized sweatshirt worn over a hoodie.
What she saw shocked her.
"By the grace of Chaos' mighty gelatinous ass, you're Metal Sonic!" "I have no quarrel with you."
Him saying that phrase again immediately changed her understanding of it.
It wasn't a statement of fact; it was a warning.
He didn't want to hurt her.
Judging by how banged up he was, there were definitely people who didn't show him the same courtesy.
"What happened to you?"
"My memory banks have a gap between the destruction of the 4th Egg Fleet and twelve minutes before evening of today."
The cat would stroke her chin. That didn't quite answer her question. "Well, that certainly explains where you've been since your last sighting - you were most likely deactivated during that gap. Doesn't explain how you ended up here, though."
She started taking apart his knee joint. As she suspected, a few of the gear's teeth broke off and she'd have to replace the whole thing, so she started looking for one in the various boxes she had for spare parts.
"I fell."
"Oh? Fell from where?"
"The sky." The cat would sigh and roll her eyes, annoyed at the thought of having to go through this again. She knew he wasn't being obtuse on purpose, but it being intentional or not still made it unpleasant to deal with. Given the situation with his communications array not getting a response back, she had a hunch.
"Alright, I'll play ball. Where were you before you fell out of the sky?"
Metal would go silent for a few moments as he gathered the necessary data. It had all happened so recently, he hadn't yet moved it to his permanent records, which were indexed and thus could be accessed way faster.
"Unknown ship of Eggman design. No orders given by Eggman. I was loaded into a large cylinder."
The cat's ears perked up. "The cylinder didn't happen to shake and suddenly turn extremely hot, did it?"
"It did."
This was the moment it all clicked in her head.
The salvos she heard being fired from the Egg Fleet flagship - Eggman's preferred way of softening up targets before raining down missiles and bombs on them.
"That heartless bastard really did shoot you out of a cannon!"
"Failsafe protocol dicta-" The robot didn't get to finish as the cat slammed an entire box of spare parts on the ground.
"Fuck the failsafe protocol. What do you think he's gonna do to you if you show up again?"
The robot stayed silent. He had insufficient data from just one occurence to analyze and deduce a pattern from.
"In fact, I have an idea." The cat would grab her laptop and a couple of cables, put them on another chair and place that chair next to Metal. It looked silly, but it beat grabbing an entire table just for a quickfix.
Metal would have a customary glance at the equipment and then looked right back at her "Elaborate."
She'd show him a cable that the robot recognised as one that could be plugged into him."I'm gonna try and change a teeny tiny little thing, since I don't wanna see you try and get yourself killed, okay?"
The machine stayed silent for the longest time so far. A unit that was destroyed or disabled was far less efficient at completing its objectives. If destruction could be avoided, it was critical to the mission to seize such means and opportunities.
Instead of expressing his opinion on her idea verbally, he gave her the go-ahead with a thumbs up.
By virtue of how much the staggering majority of Eggman robots ended up being destroyed more often than simply disabled, none of their inner workings were encrypted.
Metal was no exception.
"I see the code."
But there was a catch - all of it was raw assembly and mirrorred the hardware perfectly. If she changed as little as a single letter without also making that adjustment on the hardware level itself, she'd most likely trip some kind of anti-tamper mechanism and cause the unit to self-destruct.
"I'm gonna have to remove your faceplate, but I don't see any screws. Think you could help me with that?"
The robot would put his hands around his head, twisting it in one very specific spot and angle, after which its faceplace broke off into two halves.
She was amazed at how neatly they fit together and how convincingly they looked as if they were just a single piece. Regardless of who was responsible for the craftsmanship, parts machined with such precision deserved the praise.
What she then found underneath them almost had her jaw drop on the floor. Despite presumably not seeing a single upgrade in the last three years he was dormant, Eggman tech and its compact, yet efficient design was still far and above anything anyone could get their hands on even today.
While all the innards were proprietary, all robots from the same year tended to be built or rebuilt to run on the same architecture. It was simply more efficient to be producing one for all, instead of smaller quantities spread across multiple systems that weren't cross-compatible.
This meant that if Metal really was last active three years ago, she just had to look up the badnik architecture corresponding to that year. That being said, even after she got that, it still didn't make the next step any less difficult.
She cross-referenced the plans she had for the other badniks with what she saw physically present on Metal's motherboard and even then, it was an educated guess at best. Going off pure colour-coding, which was present on some boards, but probably not ones of Eggman design, she deduced the microcontroller responsible for the failsafe was most likely a small innocuous-looking yellow thing with red painted edges. Her tweezers could barely get a good grip of it.
"Success rate?"
"Ten to one. Don't worry, I'm a pro at this."
But she was in fact not a pro at this. Given her past experiences, her real success rate was a measly one to five, meaning just a single success out of five intact badniks she got her paws on.
Metal didn't need to know that. For him, ten to one odds made failure highly unlikely.
She double- and triple-checked the steps of her very stupid and possibly very explosive idea, then breathed in.
With bated breath, she performed the procedure, making sure to get as close as she could to making sure tearing out the chip and pushing a button to remove all references to it in Metal's still-running code happened at the same time.
When the robot inexplicably shut down right after the fact, the cat ran for cover, stacking a table on its side like it didn't have a pile of phones stacked on top of it and held her paws over her ears, expecting a boom.
It didn't come. Not after twenty seconds, thirty, not even after a whole minute either.
After two minutes had passed, she'd stick her head out, only to find a very confused Metal looking around for her, hopping around on just one leg.
"Oh, sorry! I saw you switch off and thought I'd messed it up!" She'd jump over the table to make her way back to him, plopping him on the chair again and continuing the leg repairs she left unfinished.
He went over his most recent records - this was a mandatory step each time he unexpectedly shut down for whatever reason. Though he had a transcript of their entire conversation, including a reference to something called a 'failsafe protocol', there was no definition available, nor any record of it ever existing in the first place.
When he viewed his current objectives, they read 'No standing orders, in the event of no standing orders' followed by a lot of blank spaces.
"Well, any change to your mission parameters?"
He didn't respond.
The cracked screen meant for his eyes had them replaced by what appeared to be a constantly shifting starry sky. It reminded her of a screensaver.
She was surprised to hear an entirely different, monotone voice come out of Metal.
"Recovery mode engaged. Please input a valid command. For a list of valid commands, please refer to-"
It then spelt out the name of a file which was just a random assortment of numbers and letters. Even without checking, she knew she didn't have such a file.
"This unit will shut down in sixty seconds."
The cat opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it again. One of the modes of operation available for ordinary badniks was 'roamer', which despite sounding similar in function to 'patrol', was actually entirely different and could mimic the behavior of the animal trapped within. It could do so even long after the animal had been rescued as it had saved its behavior as an imprint.
However, Metal was anything but ordinary.
She'd quickly sift through her notes, looking for any commands that were universal.
A photo of herself with the one badnik she managed to fix up gave her an idea.
"Search your memory banks for any events in which this unit had no standing orders," she'd proclaim, then adding. "And make sure these events weren't the result of this unit being abandoned or left behind after some battle or bout."
The robot's numerous exposed processors began to audibly whir.
Surprisingly enough, the machine not only complied with her request, but also displayed said memories on the robot's visor.
Not that she could make much sense of them - they were mirrored and playing at great speed.
When they finished, the screensaver was gone and the robot's eyes came back on.
"Hey. Welcome back." "Hello. New mission acquired."
The fur on her back stood up, even though it was him saying it and not the other, recovery mode voice. "Oh?"
"I have detected an anomaly in my memory banks. Four years ago, I had trained with two other units - Metal Tails and Metal Knuckles. Only data on them originates from that week of training."
There was a pause, after which the robot added. "I wish to resolve said anomaly by finding them."
The cat nodded her head. Finding long lost family members was a much nobler goal than walking up to Eggman and asking him to finish the job.
"Well, I know through a mutual friend that Sonic and co. keep track of all the badniks they've seen or scrapped, but I don't know if they write them all down or just keep a tally."
Metal stood up, clutching one hand into a fist and holding it up to his chest. "Then I must infiltrate this group and acquire this data."
"I don't think it'll be that easy. It's already on a need-to-know basis and with Eggman trying and failing to take the city, they're gonna be even more tight lipped about it," she explained. "That being said, I do think there is an alternative."
The robot turned to face her. "Elaborate."
"I could call Amy, see if I can cash in some favors, but in case that doesn't work either, you may just have to try and do this the hard way."
Metal would brandish his claws.
"No, not that kind of hard way," she'd lower his hands. "Befriend them, earn their trust, then they'll just give it to you without you needing to fight." It sounded awful now that she was saying it out loud, but this was how a lot of folks behaved subconsciously.
She didn't even notice she put her hands in his.
"Insufficient data."
That got a smile out of the cat. "That's okay. That's what friends are for. No single person is supposed to know everything. I'm Honey, by the way."
"Honey? Because you're-"
"Just that sweet?"
"Difficult to gather?"
Silence.
If anyone else said this, she'd be a tad upset, but this robot she had known for less than a day managed to make a jab at her name she hadn't heard before.
And he did it by complete accident.
She smiled, but it was a contemptuous smile. She'll have to think of some way to get back at him.
"I can start teaching you what I know at my place, in addition to finishing up the repairs. I don't know if you've noticed by my sluggish performance, but I don't exactly keep a whole lot of spare badnik parts lying around the shop."
The robot would nod back at her and attempt to put his top back on, completely oblivious to the fact that his faceplates were still missing. With a smile, she put him back together and helped him with the clothes.
On his way to her place, the robot parsed through his recent records and flagged them as important. This didn't make them permanent records - that process happened automatically - but it would bump them up the queue.
A quick query determined this to be one of his most eventful days.