How could you sleep knowing you just lost your best friend?

The answer for Jewel was that she could not. Not for lack of trying, mind you; when her aides had found her weeping and insisted she go home until she gave in, the sweet release of just not having to worry about things sounded incredibly appealing. But it just… Didn't come. When you were alone with your thoughts, everything seemed so much more real and the source of the sadness so isolated. The few times she did drift off, it was brief and full of terrible dreams. Cries for help, flashes of violence, and a tearful awakening.

The dark baggy eyes the next morning when she arrived back at Restoration HQ had been murmured about in the hallways. The beetle, normally prim and perfectly polished, had looked so ragged that more than one of her aides told her they thought it best if she went home. She knew that they meant well, but she also knew from experience that being alone with her thoughts were the absolute worst thing right now.

But as the morning wore on, things seemed to continue to fall apart. Lanolin had reported in once while she was gone and simply advised that she and Whisper were "following a lead." She was more than a little upset the pair seemed to have decided to not follow her orders, but as the hours went by and a second report from then never followed, the anger transposed itself into fear.

Sonic and friends were busy on South Island dealing with Eggman. Reports were scant, as they always were when the hedgehog was involved, but she had no doubt it was under control. It also meant, however, that they weren't really available to help on this situation. And without much of a presence on West Side Island, it would be at least a full day more before the Restoration could get any sort of backup for the Diamond Cutters there.

Inadequacy was not a rare feeling for Jewel, but it had been a long time since she had felt this outright powerless. Where were those two? What were they doing right now?

Was it already too late?

Clean Sweep Inc had entered into a partnership with The Restoration some months ago as a form of assistance in disposing of the aftermath of badnik battles. Robots, weapons, even just spare badnik parts were their specialty; they were more or less an environmentalist group. According to their owner, Clutch the Opossum, they had a holding in several old and infamous spots from previous Eggman campaigns, and West Side Island was among them.

Whisper was shocked Lanolin knew so much about them. Lanolin was unshocked, as usual, that nobody but her read the daily dossiers about developments in the Restoration that they got.

The first claim Clean Sweep had on West Side was tidying up the Aquatic Ruins, an ancient place located near the heart of the island which was once the home of an ancient civilization. The vast majority of the fresh water on the island was sourced from there, and it was a wonder Eggman hadn't completely destroyed the ecosystem when he had decided to start sending badniks there.

The second spot they had set up shop in was the old West Side Island Chemical Plant. That structure, as massive and imposing as ever, was what sat before Whisper and Lanolin right now. Tangles of scaffolding and pipes that ran between huge smokestacks and chemical tanks like roads in the sky, and below it all a churning purple flood of liquid that they could smell even from the hillside overlooking it that they both were perched upon. It reeked, especially to sensitive animal noses

"That stuff is called Mega Mack. Apparently it was a bio weapon specifically created to kill Sonic," Lanolin said to Whisper, who was scanning over the factory with the scope of her mask, "It failed, obviously. Still a lot of it left over though, which I think is what Clean Sweep is supposed to be doing something about." The sheep squinted at the plant, "I'm not seeing any movement. How about you?"

"Nothing out of the ordinary. A few vehicles, no workers. Quiet as can be," Whisper observed. The wolf didn't like that, somehow more so than if she had looked and seen a bunch of armed guards or badniks. She emphasized this with a simply appended, "Too quiet."

"Agreed. How do you want to do this?"

She looked up to Lanolin, surprised beneath her mask. With how she had had to talk her down last night from going into things alone, she had thought for sure the sheep would be tightening the leash with her leadership role a little bit. Eventually the wooly-haired diamond cutter read the silence for what it was: "You spent most of the war sneaking into places like these and scouting them out, right? Makes sense for you to take point. I trust you."

The words felt nice. A fine distraction from the unease she felt as she returned to scanning the facility. There was a massive building at the heart of it all, the smokestacks along the windy paths Sonic must have blazed through so long ago leading to one a good three or four times the size of all the others built into its roof, "Main entrance is there. Accessible, but far too open."

After a short time more of going over their surroundings, something useful looking caught her eye: "Down near the bottom of it. Looks like a loading bay. Flooded with the purple stuff-"

"Mega Mack," Lanolin repeated helpfully.

"-The purple stuff, but accessible. That would be the quietest way in."

"Sounds like a plan to me." The sheep rubbed her shoulders. She was about to begin to make her way down the hill when Whisper stood, holding the Variable Wispon to her side as it and her mask's eye flashed green. The newly-repaired hover module could prove itself useful once more.

"Don't suppose you have a spare?" Lanolin scratched the back of her head, but the wolf shook her head and pat her waist, "...Oh. Well, I did just say I trust you. So I guess I'll make sure to hold on tiiiiiiii-"

Up they went.

Getting into the interior of the factory's main building was initially rather simple. The small loading bay had been long abandoned, and for good cause with how the underside of the plant was completely saturated in that purple muck. There was no telling just how much money Eggman had burnt deluging half of the plant in that stuff, but Whisper could have only imagined he was left feeling pretty sore when the blue blur had spend through it unfazed as ever.

When the pair of Diamond Cutters began moving through the actual building itself though... Problems started cropping up. Within minutes Whisper and Lanolin found themselves skulking through shadows and hiding around corners as the sounds of whirring gears and stomping metal feet filled the halls. Clean Sweep wasn't deactivating badniks, far from it. It looked like they were turning them back on.

"Pretty cushy setup," Lanolin whispered as a tank-nosed Blastoid badnik wheeled itself past them, turning a corner, "We're paying them to go in and clean places up, when all they're doing is giving themselves free troops from the working leftovers. And anything they do with them isn't going to raise an eyebrow because 99% of people are going to blame Eggman when they see a Badnik."

Whisper nodded gravely, motioning for the sheep to follow her when the coast was clear as they plunged deeper through the halls of the facility. The wolf was shocked at the fact that there basically seemed to be no flesh and blood employees. They existed, sure; she knew Mimic worked for Clean Sweep at the moment, as did Rough and Tumble, but he had enough salvaged and functional robots that he didn't seem to need conventional guards among them.

It was intimidating, but it also meant that if she had to start shooting she wouldn't feel too bad about it later. Small solace.

"One thing bugs me, though." Whisper said quietly, peeking around one corner while Lanolin took another at a T-shaped intersection with wall-mounted pipes pumping who-knows-what to who-knows where, "Clean Sweep… Clutch's scheme is fixing broken robots. Why go through all that trouble to send Mimic in to steal data?"

"I don't know. We don't even know what it was for," Lanolin said, voice tinged with worry, "That stuff came out of the archives. The only person in the Restoration that would know how to read Eggman's crazy coding is Belle, and we aren't about to lock her in a room and make her read every document and data disk we have. All I can say for sure is if these guys want it, it can't be anything good, right?"

Their stealth crawl lead them, finally, to what seemed to be a central control area. A massive door flanked by thick plate glass windows looked into a room full of computer consoles and chemical tanks. From what she could see on the outside, Whisper found the centerpiece to be an enormous rounded device of some sort with prongs on the top and bottom being suspended from the ceiling, a grinning Eggman insignia boldly printed across the front. It was difficult to say exactly what it was for, but her interest was piqued.

Lanolin's, too, as she had approached the massive double doors leading inside. Seeing them not opening immediately from proximity as all of the other doors so far had, Whisper let Pink free from their wisp tube to see if she could cut a way in for them. The sheep put up one stalling hand though: "Maggie should be able to get us in a lot more quietly."

She tapped the bell-shaped wispon around her neck and with a bright spark, Lanolin's magenta note-shaped wisp fluttered from its confines. Maggie was particularly powerful against electronic things, which was certainly an asset to have considering the typical enemies of the Restoration. Whisper had seen them do everything from disrupt robots and stun them to outright destroy them depending on the volume of the blast created when the wisp unleashed its stored energy. This time there was nothing more than a quiet sound akin to a wind chime as a spark raced through the keypad beside the door, red numbers flashing rapidly on its digital display before it went out entirely and the doors shuddered open slightly.

Lanolin shared a rare smile with the wisp, placing her palm gently atop them and doling out an encouraging head pat (body pat?) before they vanished back into the bell. Whisper was impressed; Maggie could be a big and bombastic offensive weapon, but they were handle for subterfuge too.

Variable Wispon held close to her body, Whisper ducked into the now open gap in the door and into the shadows. The lighting in this room was impressively dim and moody, shadows broken up by ceiling spotlights and various arrays of colored lights on computer screens. It wasn't until a minute or two of scoping the massive room out that Whisper and Lanolin approached the middle area. Catwalks suspended over a drop into more of that foul-smelling purple ooze ran under that huge object suspended from the ceiling, a few computer consoles the only thing on them.

Lanolin wasted no time, beginning to tap on a few keys on one of the consoles. Whisper looked above her, a few televisions showing security feeds from various parts of the building. Badniks milled around on patrol and nothing else; she was thankful nobody seemed to be manning this place at the moment or their approach would have likely been spotted no matter how carefully they had been moving. Wherever these cameras were, they were well hidden. The wolf hadn't seen them at all on the way in.

"So, we're sitting under a bomb." Lanolin said suddenly, and Whisper snapped her attention to her in shock to the Eggman-stamped device above them that now seemed several steps beyond just being menacing. Lanolin poured over a file she'd pulled up on the computer console, the light reflecting off of her eyes, "Not the fiery blasting kind, but just as deadly."

"Some sort of chemical weapon?" Whisper guessed, putting two and two together with where they had found it. Lanolin nodded, tapping down through the design document bit by bit.

"It looks like the Mega Mack flooding the plant now is a prototype. Eggman was looking for new ways to mess up the environment of places that were resisting him and wanted something he could use to taint water supplies. The original iteration of the stuff dissolved too quickly in water, though. In the end he created a second version of it and succeeded in making something that could successfully exist and spread in water, but it was way more complicated and costly to put together. In the end, everything he managed to produce he loaded into that thing up there to make a great big bomb."

"Never got a chance to use it. Sonic ran in, he jumped to Plan B," Whisper tossed out a second guess, and again was rewarded with a distracted nod. As much as she detested Eggman, she had been fighting him long enough that she more or less knew how his main worked. He was all about big plans and big presentations, but once it came down to carrying things out, the execution was often random and haphazard at best.

"He was going to just load this thing into the Aquatic Ruins and let whatever happens happen, but the last updated entry on here says he had to flee and didn't have time to figure out a way to bring it with him. He loaded the bomb's triggering protocol onto a…" Lanolin paused as everything suddenly made a terrible amount of sense to her all at once, "Onto a data drive. That plugs into the bomb's face."

Whisper cursed, looking upwards at the bomb as she finally got her answer as to the purpose of Mimic's theft. That was Clean Sweep's game? Eco-terrorism? But what would they gain from that?

Behind them there was a quiet beeping sound, and suddenly the double doors slid open. The wolf winced and acted as quickly as she could, grabbing Lanolin's arm and calling out Green. The half-crescent umbrella light activated as she kicked off of the ground, Lanolin barely had time to close the file she was reading, stifling a yelp of surprise at her feet leaving the ground without warning.

"I don't like it." A voice came from the far end of the room that made every hair stand on end for Whisper, her face twisting into a mask of hate as she began to ready her gun atop the metal ceiling beam that her wisp had hovered them up top. Lanolin put a hand on her shoulder, trying to keep her from taking proper aim. Firing a shot right now would have every single Badnik they had snuck by and who knows how many more all rushing into this room with only one visible exit. They'd be dead meat in minutes.

"But would it be worth it?", she thought to herself coldly as Mimic made his way through the room with a well-dressed opossum that she had never seen before, assumedly Clutch. If Lanolin weren't here right now, she realized, she was pretty sure she would have decided it was.

"Both feet out of the grave, remember?" Lanolin whispered, looking into her eyes. Whisper could only nod in agreement.

"Pah. You're on edge. You've been on edge all day, my friend. This place is falling apart, things are short circuiting almost daily." Clutch swept his hand in a dismissive manner, "We're almost at the finish line. In just a few hours, West Side Island will be at our feet begging to be saved, and you'll be the richest murderer on the planet. Aren't you at least a little happy?"

"You know as well as I do I've got a right to be jumpy. You brought in a loose end. If you just let me in there and give me five minutes I could finish what I started and we'd have one less thing to worry about." The octopus growled.

"We're really talking about this again?" Clutch asked with a theatrical groan, "You need to learn to understand when to hold cards and when to play them. With your lupine friend snooping about, some leverage to fall back on is always helpful."

"What are they talking about?" Lanolin whispered. Whisper shrugged her cloak-swept shoulders; she had no idea, but the idea of them taking away anything more from her than they already had was laughable. She focused her scope in, zooming in on Mimic and getting more and more frustrated by the second at the fact that couldn't take his head off here and now.

Mimic simmered over whatever they were arguing about as Clutch came to a stop where the Diamond Cutters had been standing moments ago, looking up at the massive toxic bomb hanging from the ceiling with glee, "Eggman is a fool. How long did he leave the detonation key for this beauty sitting in some ruined bunker or another when he could have come and snatched it up at any time? Then again, all he ever wanted to do with it was kill dissenters. Why do that when you can make money off of them?"

"Quite a twisted way of looking at it, old man." Mimic looked at the weapon with markedly less delight, arms crossed and still in an even more rotten mood than usual, "You'll kill plenty of them with it too."

For a moment, just the briefest moment, through her scope Whisper saw that genial salesman act on the opossum slip. The expression on the man's face was unbridled cruelty, a hateful grin tearing apart the corners of his cheeks, "When the first few thousand start dropping dead, the rest will figure out the Aquatic Ruin isn't safe to drink from anymore. At that point, they'll find out that I own the land that every other source of water on the island is sitting on. And, more importantly, that I'll willing to sell them supplies for a price. "

The opossum cackled gleefully. Whisper was having to actively hold back snarling in rage at hearing all of that; the man was twisted. Killing thousands, seemingly a conservative estimate, for an underhanded business venture? Truly Mimic had found himself equally foul company.

"But enough about that for now. I need to go make preparations to move our little golden ticket here. You go down to the detention center and fetch our friend. It would be unfair to let anyone miss out on our moment of victory."

The pair stormed their way out of the room. As the metal doors slammed shut behind them, Lanolin quickly pointed out the obvious: "We need to stop them. Do you think you can get me onto the bomb?"

Whisper stared at the sheep in confusion for a few full seconds, thinking she somehow planned to defuse the massive device, before the other girl's plan of action clicked in her mind. Holding her hand out and taking Lanolin's, she kicked off of the steel girder they were perched on and hovered across the control center. She landed on the bomb as carefully as she could, four pairs of boots lightly coming down atop the huge blue-and-yellow device. Lanolin went down on all fours, scooting herself into the center and prying open a panel built flush with the top using her fingernails. Moments later, she raised a hand up with a small black-and-gray rectangle that had a metallic connector at the end.

"Let's destroy it and be done with it." Whisper suggested.

"Unfortunately, whatever Eggman makes these things out of, they're built to last. I don't even think your rocket wisp would put a dent in the casing. I think our best bet would probably be to get off site with it."

"I suppose just being able to end it here now would be too much to ask," Whisper sighed as the sheep stowed away the drive in one of the pockets of her baggy green tac pants. Lanolin was right, as much as she hated to admit it. They carefully lifted back off of the chemical bomb and landed back on the control catwalk, Lanolin already heading back towards the door. Whisper cast her gaze back up at the array of security camera feeds, just in time to see Mimic on one of them. The octopus was in an unfamiliar, dimly lit hallway heading into a door with the words "DETENTION CENTER" marked over them.

"This isn't over," she thought. As soon as the detonation key was safely off the premises, she was coming back. And she wasn't going to leave until he was dead.

The lights in the detention center flipped themselves on as Mimic entered, sensors at the door ensuring that the gloomy dimness that pervaded this room would only dispel when a jailer stepped inside. The octopus had to hand it to Eggman; even back when this place was built years ago, he was still delightfully cruel and petty enough to force his enemies to sit in the dark after he had captured them.

Of course, of the two dozen iron-barred cages in here once devoted to anything from good-intentioned freedom fighters to unruly test subjects, only one currently contained anyone. And their stay up until this point hadn't even amounted to a full day. They'd found her late last night… Much to his chagrin. How was he supposed to know the Aquatic Ruins' waterways ran all over the island? Even beneath Metropolis in the form of underground rivers?

Well, he would just have to wait for this little mistake to work itself out when Clutch decided they were in the clear.

"Wake up." He growled at the shape of the lemur sitting in the corner of the cell, back to the wall. Her hands had been tied in front of her, and the long bushy tail that normally had a habit of annoyingly swishing and sproinging all over had been bound against her back with restrictive wire. She couldn't stretch it even if she wanted to.

Around her waist was a tightly wound coil of bandages, which were frustratingly free of red blotches. Clutch had said the medical facilities here were still functional and they really must have been; when the opossum's workers at the Aquatic Ruins had found her during the search he ordered them to conduct, she had been on death's door. Couldn't she have at least knocked a little harder on it? Whatever Eggman's machines had done to fix her up now, she seemed more or less healthy.

"Do you really think I can sleep in all this crap you've got me wrapped up in?" Tangle glared at him over the knees she currently had drawn to her chest, "It's not enough you threw me in a tiny little box, you had to make it so I could barely move, either?"

"Oh, pardon me, mademoiselle," he sneered and put his hand to his stomach as he performed a mocking curtsy to the bound Diamond Cutter, "Is our establishment not to your liking?"

Truthfully, he knew they weren't. Although he couldn't get Clutch to just put a hole in her forehead and finish the job, he HAD at least been in charge of her "accommodations." Not only had he gotten her tail immobilized extra securely, he'd also gotten the opossum to toss her into the smallest cell the detention center featured. She'd spent about the first two hours of her stay having a claustrophobia-induced panic attack.

"When I get out of here you're not gonna be making jokes for long." Tangle narrowed her eyes frustratedly at the sarcastic spy, "In fact, about the only thing you're gonna be happy about is that I didn't wait for Whisper to bust me out first. She would do waaaaay worse than the clobberin' I'm gonna give you."

"What makes you think I haven't already killed her while you've been stowed away in here?" Mimic sneered, leaning against the bars lazily.

"Whisper would never lose to a scumbag like you! Besides, if you can't even manage me, how in the world are you going to get her? Tentacle brain."

"Moronic monkey."

"Shrimp breath."

"Flea bitten ape."

"Octopuss-"

"Enough," Mimic sweeped a hand dismissively, having regained his composure, "You don't have to worry about breaking out of here because I'm about to let you out."

Tangle stood up, suspicious. She'd come up without about a dozen different escape plans since waking up in here, but although her wounds seemed to no longer be a danger, she didn't think she had enough strength to attempt to carry any of them out and get far. Whatever that Clutch guy had done it had sealed her wounds, but she'd also lost a lot of blood and had been floating for what seemed like hours yesterday, dreamily coming in and out of consciousness.

The only reason she'd been saved in the end was sheer chance; a hefty piece of debris that must have fallen from Metropolis above had been floating in the water not far from where she'd fell. She'd had just enough lucidity to hang onto it with her arms and tail.

"Don't look so scared, it's not a trick. In fact, I'll lay it out for you. You get to come along and watch us ruin the lives of a lot of unfortunate people, watch me stuff my pockets for a job well done, and then when the old man is sure we're in the clear?" He put his thumb to his neck and very slowly started to drag the tip across his jugular.

"You're not going to get away with this, Mimic."

"Tangle, Tangle, Tangle… The only people that could stop us now would be your little Restoration friends, and even the puppy doesn't know where you are. We've been very careful to cover our tracks." Mimic began to move to unlock the cell door, snickering to himself with full confidence, "You're all alone. And that how you're going to die, t-"

Above them, a klaxon howled in alarm. Red lights began to flash all throughout the cell in a cacophony painful to both the eyes and the ears. Above it all, an intercom shrieked into activation as it carried a robotic voice that began to deliver the same mantra over and over.

"INTRUDERS DETECTED! INTRUDERS DETECTED! INTRUDERS DETECTED!"

Mimic looked up in shock at the flashing alerts, and then back to Tangle, who had the most infuriating smile he had ever seen on his life spread across her face. He could almost see himself in the pearly white of her teeth.

"You're really bad at this, huh?" She was almost shouting over the alarm. With a curse, Mimic slammed his fist on the bars and re-locked them. The lemur watched him rush out of room. Her friends were up there… Somewhere. She didn't know if they even know she was here, but they were there.

Whisper was there. It was annoying for her to be playing damsel in distress right now, because she wanted to be there too. But for now, she could only pray that the wolf was going to be okay.