When Knuckles woke up, he was in what appeared to be a magic red box. He reached out and tapped the force field.
ZAP!
"Argh!" He quickly withdrew his hand. "Where am I?"
"The lab."
Knuckles turned to the source of the voice. It was the guy from before, who told the officer that the doctor thought he was basic. "The sidekick guy. Stone, I think?"
Stone nodded. "That'd be Mr. Stone to you."
"The guy with the mustache calls you Agent Stone."
"He's my boss. He can call me whatever he wants."
Knuckles' brow furrowed. "And you're okay with this policy?"
"I rather like it, actually."
Knuckles decided to change the subject. "When you said the lab... what lab?"
Stone said, "Well, not really the lab. More like the mobile lab we're using to bring you to the actual lab, and study you a little along the way."
Knuckles pondered this for a moment, then covered his crotch.
Stone suppressed a chuckle. "I don't know what you think I mean, but it's not that."
"Either way, I'm not the one you were after."
"I know." Stone walked over to a large screen. "We didn't even know there were two. And we analyzed one of your quills, not nearly enough power to cause the explosion from last night."
Knuckles raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean by 'not nearly enough?' That implies there was some power in it."
Stone tapped a glass box, which contained one of Knuckles' quills. "There was," he said. "Not a lot, though. You might be able to charge a cell phone with it." Knuckles was bewildered. "...How is that possible? I don't have any powers."
"The doctor's voice came from the other room. "Stone! I need you to write this down!" The agent walked over to help.
Knuckles sighed. "At least I know my mission is accomplished," he said to himself. "With Sonic's speed, he definitely has found a safe place to use a ring. He has reached the safety of the Mushroom world."
Knuckles sat in his container for a moment. He hadn't considered what would happen to him once he was captured. Even if he didn't have powers, he still was an extraterrestrial. He knew the scientists were going to do something to him.
Knuckles examined his cage. The walls and ceiling were force fields, but the floor seemed to be regular metal. He pounded it with his fist and caused one portion to stick up slightly. He grabbed it and ripped it from the floor.
"Hey! Keep it down, you red barbarian!"
Knuckles ignored the doctor. He grabbed a handful of exposed wires and tore them from the contraption.
It worked. The shields keeping him in disappeared. He hopped out and looked around the lab.
"The Stone man said this was a mobile lab. One hand, it would be harder to get out while moving, but they could be a mile away before realizing I escaped."
Knuckles assumed he was in the back of the black truck from earlier. He knew there weren't any windows on that, but there was a door.
He found one area of the wall unobscured by shelves and counters and pushed on it with all his might.
Nothing.
A robotic voice said, "Please enter passcode." Knuckles whipped his head in the direction of the voice and found a keypad with numbers on it.
"Sonic told me about these," he muttered. "I need the right combination of numbers to open the door." However, the keypad was obviously meant for someone taller than him. He wasn't quite sure how he'd reach the buttons, let alone guess the correct ones.
After a few moments of staring at it, he jumped up and pressed one. Or at least tried to—he ended up breaking the keypad.
"pl-ple-ple-please ent-e-ente-enter pas-pass-passcodeeeeeeeee..." The voice said, sputtering out. At first Knuckles worried that the men would notice, then after a minute of them not coming in, he was worried he'd destroyed his only shot at escape. Then, the door shot open.
Knuckles chuckled. "No stronghold can contain the might of an echidna warri-WOAH!" it turned out, the mobile lab was not a truck. It was a plane. And Knuckles was staring down from a height he hadn't been aware it was possible to go to. Knuckles had jumped from high places before, but he knew if he jumped off the plane, he'd be a warrior pancake.
He looked down to see if maybe there was a lake to break his fall, but all he saw was a city. Then, he glanced in the direction the plane was going. "Oh. That looks promising."
The plane was flying toward a very tall building—not that it was going to crash into it, but going to fly past it.
Knuckles held tight to the door frame with one hand and leaned out as far as he could, holding his other hand out. The building drew closer...
Closer...
WHAM!
Knuckles misjudged how far the plane would be from the spire. He ended up smacking into it, face first. He grabbed it before he could fall, though.
"...Ouch."
He slid down the metal pole until the reaching an area wide enough he could stand on it. He turned to face the black plane flying away from him.
"Victory is mine! No one can hope to hold captive an echidna warrior!" He was about to walk away when he realized he didn't have a way of making it off the building. "Hmm. I did not think this all the way through."
He considered some options. He could dig the spikes on his gloves into the side of the building and climb down like that, but he was in enough trouble without adding property damage. And no other buildings were tall enough or close enough to jump too. There were no balconies on the side to jump onto either, but even if there were the only option from there would be breaking into people's apartments/hotel rooms.
Then he heard a noise. Another plane, this one white, was coming in the opposite direction to what the doctor's had left from. Judging from the windows on the side, it was a commercial airplane, and from the way it was going down, it seemed to be landing. It was farther away from the building than the doctor's, but it was his best shot.
Knuckles got ready and ran to the edge. He put all his strength into his jump. However, he came up just a tiny bit short. Knuckles had to grab onto the edge on the wing and pull himself onto that.
He sighed in relief, but then realized he had something new to worry about. He could see a dark-skinned woman through a window. She hadn't seemed to notice him yet, though. She was reading a book. Knuckles decided to climb onto the roof of the aircraft.
The woman glanced out her window, looked back to her book, then realizing she'd seen something strange, looked back out the window. She saw nothing, as Knuckles had successfully gotten onto the roof.
She looked back to her book, shaking her head. "I can't wait to get off this plane."
