"Knuckles! Please! You simply have to wakeup!"
Knuckles's eyes flew open.
His finely-trained warrior instincts told him that the sensation of weightlessness was not, in fact, because of how comfortable Earth beds were and how secure his slumber was; but instead because he was, in fact, actually weightless.
Well, his instincts and the sight of loose objects floating all around the room.
That was also a hint.
The woman who had awoken him with her frantic cries was not a human, but a rabbit-like creature with teal fur, a black bodysuit, a tan jacket with matching gloves, and short round ears.
"What enchantment is this?!" Knuckles demanded furiously, slowly spinning helplessly in the air. "Why has gravity failed us?!"
"Oh, gravity's still working just fine." The woman said, her voice somewhat shrill with panic as she floated up alongside Knuckles. "I'm afraid that's rather the problem!"
Knuckles didn't get the chance to demand this woman explain herself, because all of a sudden gravity returned with a vengeance worthy of the songs of old. The floor abruptly rose up to smash his face like the hammer of a giant, a force great enough to drive the breath from even Knuckles's mighty lungs.
Judging by the somewhat squeaky cry of pain, his mysterious companion had a similar landing.
Tails had once told him – in one of the many rambles the wise young fox was prone to – that sound had a speed, and that it took time to get from its cause to the ears of those hearing it. Tails had been attempting to explain why Sonic didn't seem capable of hearing anything when on one of his long runs, but that knowledge felt more pertinent now as a deep CRRRRRAAAAAAASSSHHH shook the ground around them; after their collision with the ground.
The impact felt most painful indeed, but if he were to just lie here he would bring shame to his tribe; so Knuckles pulled himself to his feet.
He and the strange woman were inside a small tunnel, just a short way from the entrance. Inside the tunnel was intricately carved stonework of a nature that Knuckles did not immediately recognise, but… felt like he should have? Outside was a simple field of grass, the splendour of nature marred by steel girders and assorted mechanical devices implanted in the ground with no regards for the landscape they despoiled.
"Ow…" The woman who had awoken him also pulled herself to her feet, her body shaking with what could only be fear or pain – or perhaps both.
"What was that?" Knuckles demanded.
Instead of answering, the woman placed both hands behind her back and pushed her spine inwards, an audible crack resulting from the effort. "Ow ow ow… that's the second time I've hurt myself in one of these blasted landings…!"
"Explain!" Knuckles barked, his mouth twisting into a fearsome scowl.
The woman let out an epp as she jumped back, waving her arms in warding gestures. "Sorry, sorry! It's just… oh dear. The island must have fallen into the ocean again!"
As if summoned by her words, the light from the sky above suddenly dimmed. An enormous deluge of water suddenly fell from the cloudless sky, a furious rainstorm appearing from nothing and disappearing just as quickly.
Knuckles was taken aback. Island? Fallen? Again?
"Fixit!" The woman cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted. "Oh Fixit, where are you?"
"What do you mean, the island fell?!" Knuckles demanded. "How does an island fly in the first place?!"
The woman looked back at him, startled. "Um, er… Well, with the power of the Master Emerald?"
"The Master –" Knuckles choked. "What was the Master Emerald doing here?!"
After he and Sonic had retrieved it from the underwater ruins in which the owls had hidden it, it had remained under their protection! At what point had someone used it to make an island float?!
"Knuckles, dear, are you alright?" The woman reached out to touch him, but backed off when Knuckles growled at her. "You're acting like you don't know where you are!"
"I don't!" Knuckles retorted.
The woman blinked, clearly started at his exclamation, then began to squirm under his furious gaze.
"Knuckles… this is Angel Island." She eventually said. "Your peoples' ancestral home?"
Knuckles opened his mouth to respond… but no words came out.
He had been naught but a young child when he had left his home on his quest to find Sonic the Hedgehog and reclaim the Master Emerald, and time had dulled his recollections of his home. Had they lived on an island? Honestly, he could not recall.
But even so, what madness was happening here? Had he entered, as Sonic's beloved talking-people-box put it, the Twilight Zone? The Master Emerald had been stolen from his people shortly after its creation. Before then, had they used it to elevate their home above the clouds?
Abruptly, he realised the woman was still talking. "…don't actually know why Altar Emerald harnesses power in that manner – Tikal was lovely enough to confirm for me that the altar was still earthbound when she was alive, so the floating nature of the island must have been something that happened after –"
"Tikal?" Knuckles interrupted, latching onto the first question to come to mind. "Who is Tikal?"
"Uh…" If anything, the woman looked even more lost by the question."Chief Pachacamac's daughter?"
…did his chief have a daughter? Knuckles was ashamed to admit that he could not remember one way or another. …wait. "When did you speak with her? My people are dead."
"Yes, I know, I… well, I spoke to her spirit?" The woman said, hesitantly.
"Ah." Knuckles nodded, accepting the answer easily. "Yes, that makes sense."
The woman stared at him. "It does?"
"Madam Relic! Guardian Knuckles!"
Letting loose a mighty cry of battle (and definitely not one of surprise, a true warrior is never surprised!), Knuckles spun around and punched the head clean off the mustard-yellow robot floating up behind him.
"Fixit!" The woman – Relic, apparently? – screamed, running over to retrieve his dented head. "You brute! He's actually, properly ancient, you know! You can't just –!"
The robot's head let out a sound like static for a moment, before their synthesised voice cleared up. "Oh, don't worry about me, Madam. It was my fault for sneaking up on him."
The robot had a round head with two large, green 'eyes' set into it and an orange protrusion that looked something like a hat that the Earth fighters of fire wore. Their body – now fumbling around blindly for its head – was a floating torso with a large box attached to its back.
Frantically, Relic picked the robot's head off of the ground and handed it to its torso, which put it back in place and started welding its own neck on with a small welding torch emerging out of one of its fingers.
"Why is there a metal man in my people's ancestral lands?" Knuckles demanded. Then he paused. "Why are you in my ancestral lands?" He turned to demand of Relic. "Who granted you permission to trod on our soil?!"
"You did." Relic retorted shortly, still fussing over Fixit. "And Fixit here dates back to the Fourth Great Civilisation – and whilst I can't be certain that that was an echidna civilisation, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest –!"
"Uh… ma'am?" Fixit interrupted. "Shouldn't Guardian Knuckles know this already?"
Relic shot Knuckles an angry glare… then slumped over, releasing her frustrations in a long sigh. "Yes, well, I'm… not exactly qualified to say this, but I'm starting to think he may have hit his head on something… harder than his skull, for once."
"No substance is harder than my skull!" Knuckles objected, insulted.
Fixit finished re-attaching their head, scratching it with their other hand. "He seems the same to me…"
A great unnatural sensation gripped Knuckles then, a numbness of the flesh that caused him to flinch at its strangeness. He heard Relic give a cry of surprise, but his eyes had closed reflexively and he did not see the moment that his body shimmered and waved like a mirage in the desert.
"My goodness!" Relic cried. "Knuckles, dear – are you all right?"
When Knuckles opened his eyes again, they were spinning in their sockets. "Oh, man!" He cried, grabbing his head with both hands. "What on Mobius was that?"
Relic once again found herself staring at him. "What on… what?"
There were more reasons for here to stare, beyond the unfamiliar name he had invoked. As long as she'd known Knuckles, he'd always carried himself like he was ready to fight. While not overly muscular, he was very fit; especially by the standards of Earth's non-human peoples.
The Knuckles before her… had a paunch. And there was a… a softness around his face that made him look younger than he had before.
The fact that his voice now sounded like it hadn't dropped yet most certainly didn't help that impression.
Knuckles straightened up, then filched back in shock, one arm behind him. "Wait! The island fell out of the sky? That means the Chaos Emerald must have been stolen!"
"Yes, that's what I've been trying to…" Relic's voice trailed off, as what Knuckles had said sunk in. "Chaos Emerald?"
"There's no time to waste!" Knuckles turned around, sprinting out of Launch Base Zone in the direction of Altar Emerald. "Chomps! Here boy!"
Relic and Fixit shared a look of utter confusion.
"Fixit, did you just see Knuckles… well, change?" Relic asked, nervously.
"Oh, you saw that too?" Fixit said, carefully twisting their neck this way and that. "I thought I'd just crossed some wires while putting my head back on."
"Chomps!"
"Oh dear…" Relic fretted, but turned and ran after Knuckles; Fixit following after her.
"Chomps!" Knuckles cried out again, looking around in search of his pet. All he saw, however, was the machinery, and he frowned. "Who put all this here?"
"Eggman did." Relic wheezed, winded already even after such a short run.
Knuckles blinked. "Eggman? Who's Eggman?"
Relic's sweat-streaked face became very concerned indeed.
"Dr Ivo Robotnik?" She tried.
Knuckles recoiled. "Robotnik put all this here?! When?!"
"Back when the Death Egg crashed. That was… well, I don't think you've ever said when exactly, but it was well before I arrived here." Relic put her hand over her chin, looking thoughtful. "He built this place to get the Death Egg back into the… well, 'air', so to speak."
"And I didn't stop him?!" Knuckles said, disbelief stretched across his face.
"I, um…" Relic winced. "I believe you were fighting Sonic at the time." She simplified.
Knuckles growled "Of course it was Sonic…" which made Relic sigh with relief "Well at least he remembers Sonic…"
A low growl was all the warning they got. Suddenly, a red form charged out of the bushes, tackling Knuckles to the ground. Taller than Knuckles and Relic despite walking on all fours, the lizard had a ferocious snarl, lined with teeth the approximate size and shape of steak knives.
Relic let out a shriek…
…but Knuckles just laughed, flat on his back, as the lizard licked him all over. "Ch-chomps! H-heh heh! C-cut that out! We've got work to do!"
"Chomps… is a dinosaur?" Fixit's voice expressed the confusion that their fixed-position face wasn't able to. They looked to their side, noting with a jolt a distinct lack of Relic.
"Ooooh, who's a good little miraculously preserved piece of history?" Relic coo'd, fearlessly scratching Chomps under the chin. "You are!"
Chomps turned to face Relic, whining with confusion.
"He he… heh… that's weird. Chomps usually doesn't like strangers." Knuckles admitted, wiping slobber from his face.
Relic continued scratching Chomps under his chin. "Aw, I wager he's a huge softy underneath, aren't you boy? I don't recognise his genus, but I suppose that's not my area of expertise anyway… what period does he hail from, do you know? Triassic? Cretaceous?"
Watching Relic fawn over what looked suspiciously like the Biolizard's smaller cousin, with no worry at all about the teeth or claws, Fixit decided then and there that they would never understand organics.
"Er…" Knuckles slowly pushed Chomps off him, getting back to his feet. He looked completely lost at the reaction of Relic and Chomps both. "I… don't know that kind of stuff. If you really want to ask, I'm sure Great-Grandfather Athair would know?"
For a moment, Relic looked almost breathless with giddy anticipation.
But then the light in her eyes died, and her eagerness with it. Her shoulders slumped, and she started fidgeting anxiously.
"Knuckles…" She said, reluctantly. "I… I'm afraid you're more than a little confused right now. You see… your family…"
"Confused?" Knuckles echoed back, blankly, before slamming a hand into a palm. "Right! Of course! I've gotta find out what happened to the Chaos Emerald! C'mon, boy!"
Without warning, Chomps's head suddenly shot out underneath Relic and Fixit, tossing the pair into the air and onto his back.
Ignoring Relic's panicked cry of surprise, Knuckles pinwheeled his arms in the air so fast they blurred into disks. With a wordless shout, he ran forwards, his spinning arms leading the way. It looked like a rather silly way to travel, Relic thought, even as she was distracted by violent shaking as Chomps ran after Knuckles.
"Knuckles…!" Relic cried, but bit her lip.
Oh dear… how on Earth am I going to tell him that his family… She fretted. That's he's the last echidna?
The rag-tag group sped off, out of Eggman's machinery and into a forested area. Chomps's heavy footfalls shook the ground, causing leaves to fall and spooked animals to flee from the path of the large carnivore.
It didn't take long for them to burst out into a clearing near the edge of the island, in full view of Altar Emerald.
The majestic, ancient stone altar where the Master Emerald was supposed to be, but wasn't.
And the squads of dingoes in military uniforms crawling all over it.
Relic gasped, hand over her mouth, but when she turned her attention back on Knuckles she could see his face twist in confusion, completely surprised by what he had found here… but before he could say anything about it, his outline was fluctuating and wavering again, snapping back into place into a shape she found reassuringly familiar.
The full head of steam he quickly built up was also familiar, but less reassuringly so.
"THIEVES! GIVE ME BACK MY EMERALD!" Knuckles roared (his deeper voice also having returned), leaping bodily into the air and landing, fist-first, in the middle of the off-guard dingoes. He impacted with such force that not only did the ground crater under him, but the ground shook hard enough that half the dingoes fell over.
"It's the Guardian!" One of the dingoes still standing yelped, fumbling at his waist for a holstered blaster, but Knuckles had fought far too many Eggrobos and Egg Pawns for that to scare him.
Barrelling forwards, Knuckles charged the poor dingo who'd spoken up, grabbing him by the front of his shirt and using him as a flail to knock down the dingoes next to him. Hearing the discharge of a blaster behind him, he jumped high into the air, over the shot. Curling into a ball, Knuckles bounced off the faces of several more dingoes, who didn't seem to have been expecting that at all.
"Stop!" Yelled a powerful, commanding voice. Knuckles turned around to see a tall, muscular dingo with a cloak drifting in the wind behind him and a black eye-patch over a scarred eye-socket. The commander of these dingoes, or Knuckles would eat his gloves. The general(?) also had a blaster, pointed square at the centre of Knuckles's forehead.
"Why should I?" Knuckles demanded, lifting another sweating dingo up by his collar.
The general(?) stepped to the side, revealing Chomps was now surrounded by dingoes with blasters aimed and ready. Chomps snarled at those encircling him, but Relic's eyes were frightful; and Knuckles could see sweat rolling down her face as she nervously swallowed around the blaster pressed into her throat.
Knuckles growled, his fists vibrating with rage. "Monster."
"I warned you we would be back." The general(?) growled right back.
The dingoes around Knuckles – the ones not out for the count, anyway – suddenly realised that he wasn't moving, and all made sure they had their blasters aimed squarely at him.
"What?" Knuckles blinked in confusion for a moment, having no idea what the dingo was talking about; before shaking his head to clear it. "Nevermind that! Let Relic and Fixit go!"
Chomps whined in slight confusion.
"Certainly." The general(?) snorted. "Just leave the island to us, and I'll let your new friends go. A bargain, wouldn't you say?"
The general(?) knelt down to stare Knuckles in the eyes. "Or have you really given up on finding your old friends so quickly?"
Relic could feel Knuckles's response coming; knowing without needing to look that Knuckles's face was quickly turning as red as his fur. So she winced and braced herself, and surely enough…
"You can have my island over my dead body!" Knuckles roared.
The general(?)'s face twisted into a snarl, and he lowered his blaster for just long enough to fire a warning shot into the grass before centring it on Knuckles's head again.
"That's hardly out of the question." The general(?) noted coldly.
"General Von Stryker!" A dingo wearing a headset and a large backpack with a satellite dish on the top spoke up.
"Yes?" The general (Knuckles felt a surge of petty satisfaction at having guessed his rank correctly) acknowledged, not taking his eyes off Knuckles for a moment.
"Survey teams delta and epsilon report more unexpected terrain. Three more incapacitated by traps." The radio dingo relayed. "Still no signs of any other inhabitants."
Knuckles snarled. "There's nobody here to find!" Knuckles's incisors were on full display. "This island belongs to me! To my people! If I find anyone else here, I'll kick them off just like I'm gonna kick you off it!"
An odd look came over Von Stryker's face, somewhere between fury… and disappointment.
"You know," he growled "once, I thought you might have actually been better than that trash you had for a family."
Relic was sure she could see actual steam erupting out of Knuckles's ears, so she knew Knuckles had taken that personally; even though she herself was completely lost as to what the general was talking about.
"Tie him up." Von Stryker ordered, standing up. "He makes a fuss, put him on a boat and shove him into a current." He suddenly spun around, his cloak dramatically fanning out behind him with the movement. "We've got bigger problems than some echidna."
Knuckles yelled, wordlessly, at Von Stryker's back, but the dingo general ignored him. He calmly walked off to a waiting jeep, door held open by a subordinate, and the subordinate walked around into the driver's seat, driving off without another word.
For a moment, all was still; the remaining dingoes looking at each other somewhat uncertainly.
Then Relic suddenly let out a cry, hugging herself and squeezing her eyes shut as her body wavered towards transparency and back.
Startled by the sudden movement, one of the dingoes holding her at blaster-point panicked… and fired.
Now, Relic was just short of intangible at this point, so the shot passed through her.
Into Chomps.
The dingo who'd fired stumbled backwards as Chomps roared with pain. Chomps reared up on his hind legs, nearly throwing Relic and Fixit clear, before slamming down on all fours again. The heavy impact shook the ground much like Knuckles did earlier…
…which said echidna took as his cue.
The dingoes who had been distracted by Chomps suddenly swung their attention back to Knuckles… and then looked down, to find that Knuckles had curled into a ball yet again and was currently spinning in place, making vree-vree-vree noises… and then Knuckles launched forwards into a Spin Dash that knocked dingoes over like they were bowling pins.
Chomps, now sporting a smoking, burned patch of hide on one leg, barrelled forwards though the crowd of dingoes behind where Knuckles now was, knocking them aside with hefty swings of his neck.
Relic and Fixit (mostly Relic) made various panicked noises, covering their heads with their arms. But the scattered blaster fire mostly went high, as the dingoes were caught off guard by how fast Chomps could move.
Some of the dingoes, seeing where this was going, elected to turn around and jump off the island… into the ocean waters now surrounding it, swimming away as though their lives depended on it.
"And stay out!" Knuckles roared after them, punching out the last dingo standing near him.
"I think I need my gyroscopes recalibrated…" Fixit swayed on Chomps's back. Being a floating torso without any legs, he'd been clinging to Relic's back this whole time to avoid falling off, but now he was hanging by only one arm. Chomps turning back around to face Knuckles again made him swing widely to one side.
"If that's your way of saying you feel queasy, then yes I feel I must agree." Relic's eyes spun around in their sockets.
Knuckles opened his mouth to say something, but was rudely interrupted by another glitching fit.
Once it cleared up, he didn't look any different to Relic's eyes… but when he straightened up again, the recognition in his eyes was gone. Relic could tell without asking that she, Fixit, and Chomps were all strangers to him again.
Knuckles grunted, turning away from Relic's worried gaze. "Somebody here is going to tell me where the Master Emerald is!" He shouted at the assorted dingoes strewn across the stone and grass like rag dolls. Picking the nearest dingo up by the front of their shirt, Knuckles started shaking them violently.
"Er… Knuckles?" Relic nervously spoke up. "Not to interrupt your, er, 'fun', but I think you may have knocked them all unconscious."
Knuckles looked at Relic, and then down at the dingo he was holding. His eyes were blank, his tongue was hanging out of his mouth, and drool was dripping down his chin.
"Peh." Knuckles made a disgusted noise, dropping the dingo to the ground.
"Madam Relic, I believe I have formed a hypothesis as to Guardian Knuckles's current situation." Fixit interjected. "May I share it?"
Relic blinked, looking over her shoulder at the robot. "Um, certainly?"
"You may recall that, some time ago, Doctor Eggman used a phenomenon known as a 'Genesis Wave' to split our planet into seven separate dimensional pockets." Fixit began.
"What?" Knuckles squinted.
"Remember?" Relic tried. "That was also the time that Eggman made that copy of that robot from the Fourth Great Civilisation? The one who now lives with that delightful family of rabbits? What was their name… oh, darn it…"
"Gemerl." Fixit helpfully provided. "Eggman's attempted reconstruction of the Emerl the Gizoid."
"Oh, that!" Knuckles smacked a fist into his other hand. "I remember that… dunno about this 'Genesis Wave' thing, though. I thought he just used plain old Chaos Control."
Relic stared at Knuckles in exasperation. "At what point exactly did the fundamental manipulation of the very concepts of time and space become 'plain old'?"
"Regardless, I believe something similar has occurred with Guardian Knuckles." Fixit interjected. "In that he has been split up into several versions of himself, switching between them at random."
"I… suppose?" Relic put a curled-up finger over a worried grimace. "But if you are right, then to put him right again, we'd need what we used to solve this mess the last time."
"The Master Emerald." Knuckles grinned. "Two birds, one stone!"
"Yes, but we don't know where the Master Emerald currently is." Relic pointed out.
Knuckles's grin quickly turned into a glower. "Those dingoes must have taken it somewhere else!" He declared, marching off in the vague direction of Angel Island's centre. "And I'm gonna get it back from them!"
Chomps made a barking noise that sounded suspiciously like a cheer, and happily started stomping off after Knuckles.
"Knuckles – oof." Relic bounced up and down as Chomps clambered over a rock in his way. "Knuckles, can I assume that the Master Emerald isn't close enough for you to sense it?"
"Nope, but that doesn't matter!" Knuckles jumped over a pit. "I'll just search the whole island until I find it!"
"That's all well and good, but can I suggest that we save ourselves some time and instead of that, check the monitors at one of the command hubs?" Relic offered.
Knuckles suddenly came to a dead stop, and Chomps frantically peddled backwards with his legs – sliding across the dirt – to avoid running into him. In a textbook example of momentum, Relic and Fixit slid forwards on Chomps's back to slam into the back of his neck with a comical bonk, pushing Chomps forwards just enough that Chomps skidded to a halt not even a hands-breadth behind Knuckles.
Headless of the slapstick going on behind him, Knuckles spun around to stare Relic in the eyes. "What command hubs?"
"Er… like the one you showed me?" Relic tried not to squirm under the intensity of Knuckles's stare while she rubbed her bruising nose. "The ones that control most of the traps on the island?"
"Controls the traps?" Knuckles looked at Relic like she was an idiot. "The traps don't have controls!"
Fixit raised a hand. "Pardon me, sir, but if the traps don't have controls then how have you been switching them off?"
Knuckles blinked.
Fixit stared back.
Chomps stared at the ground beneath his feet, and nervously took a step back.
Relic buried her face in her hands. "Knuckles, please tell me the traps are off."
"What good would the traps be if I turned them off?" Knuckles seemed genuinely puzzled.
Relic groaned. "Just… there's one in this cave here. If you follow the left wall for a bit…"
Completely befuddled, Knuckles followed Relic's directions and together the odd group travelled into the mountain, following a narrow tunnel. Knuckles's confusion only grew when they emerged into a small room filled with…
"What on Earth?" Even Relic, who had guided the group here, seemed surprised by what they found.
Three entirely different architectures clashed horribly in the small room. Ancient stonework – so weathered and worn it was crumbling apart – sat side by side with toggle switches and screens that looked like something out of an early sci-fi B movie, but half of those were smashed apart and sparking. Around and between the two was a strange crystalline architecture with glowing orange lines and green hexagonal panels.
"This wasn't here last time." Fixit observed, dropping down from Chomps. Chomps sat down on his haunches, looking curiously at the mismatched machinery, and Relic took the chance to gingerly slide down from Chomps's back.
"I had no idea this was here…" Knuckles breathed. "Is this something the Ancients left behind?"
Relic, who thought that Knuckles meant 'ancients' as an adjective instead of a noun, did her best to answer. "Well, that is neoclassical echidna stonework." She pointed at the crumbling stone. "I have no idea what it's doing here, but the crystalline machinery I'm fairly certain is troll work, from back in the Second Great Civilisation. Back when they controlled the area which included what would later become Angel Island. The toggle switches…" Relic bit her lip. "That doesn't look like anything I've ever seen before."
"Pretty sure it's what's left of Haven II."
"Ah, thank you dear. What's left of Haven…" Relic trailed off. "Who said that?"
She, Knuckles, Fixit and Chomps looked around wildly.
"Down here."
Chomps lowed his head down, whining in confusion, and looked down his nose to find a 6 cm (2 inch) fire ant standing on the floor wearing a cowboy hat and a brown vest with four arms threaded through it.
The ant put one of his left arms on his hip, while his other left arm propped up his head with an elbow on Chomps's snout. "Hey, Knuckles. Where'd you find the dinosaur?"
Strangely, despite being so much smaller, his voice was just as loud as Knuckles, Relic and Fixit's was.
Chomps reared back wildly in panic, making a sound somewhat like a horse's whinny, and chrashed into the wall behind him.
With a sudden burst of smoke, a noise like a bamf,and the smell of brimstone, the ant disappeared from the floor and reappeared on Knuckles's shoulder. "Whoops. Sorry little guy," he said, despite Chomps being far larger than he was "didn't mean to spook you like that."
"And who are you?" Knuckles demanded, twisting his head around to look at the ant perched on his shoulder.
The ant looked visibly taken aback.
"Sorry, I don't believe we've met." Relic broke in, nervously trying to head things off. "I'm Relic – Relic the Pika. I'm an archaeologist that Knuckles has very kindly allowed onto the island to study the fascinating ruins here…" She trailed off, seeming to realise she was going off-topic. "Are you a friend of Knuckles?"
Relic was loosely aware that Knuckles had several friends that she had never met. Sonic, for example – though that one was mostly a case of bad timing on her part, as she always seemed to be on whatever part of the island the world-famous hedgehog wasn't visiting. It was only very recently that she'd been introduced to the delightful Miss Amy Rose.
Thus, the idea of Knuckles having a friend that she'd never met seemed entirely sensible to her – it wasn't as though she and Knuckles were childhood friends or fated lovers or anything so close. Honestly, Relic considered it somewhat amazing (and flattering) that Knuckles trusted Fixit and her enough to watch over Angel Island when he wasn't there, given how little time they'd properly spent getting to know each other.
With another bamf and cloud of smoke, the ant disappeared from Knuckles's shoulder and reappeared on the mismatched control panel, looking rather flummoxed.
"Not as good of a friend as I should have been," the ant admitted "but still… Knuckles, it's me. Archimedes the Fire Ant?"
Looking very annoyed, Knuckles opened his mouth to respond –
flicker
– but instead ended up wavering and changing once again.
"Uuuuurrrrrr…" Knuckles moaned, his eyes closing and his whole body swaying on his feet.
Once again, his body had changed to a shape Relic wasn't familiar with. This one wasn't pudgy, like the one that had called out for Chomps. If anything, this was the opposite. This Knuckles was noticeably taller than the Knuckles that Relic knew, and considerably broader of chest; even compared to the Knuckles who had been with Relic when the island fell. He also wasn't wearing gloves, wearing in their place sports tape that wrapped around his hands and arms.
Archimedes stared. "Knuckles? Are you alright?"
Knuckles's eyes snapped open, and he started down at the tiny fire ant…
…and screamed like a young girl, jumping into Fixit's arms.
While Fixit's arms shook under the weight, his servos making worrying straining noises, Knuckles nervously chewed on his fingertips while his other hand pointed at Archimedes.
"T-t-t-talking animal!" He stammered out.
There was a moment of abject silence.
"Um, Knuckles?" Relic eventually broke the silence. "We're all talking animals. Well, except for Fixit there."
Knuckles blinked. "Oh yeah." He said, like that was a novel idea that had only just occurred to him. His face brightened up like a light bulb, a vapid smile plastering itself across his face.
With a mechanical whrrrrr, Fixit's grip finally gave out, and Knuckles tumbled to the floor with an oof.
"Has… he been like this for long?" Archimedes asked Relic in worry. "I know the kid's really been though the wringer lately…"
Relic grimaced. "I think he must have hit his head when the island fell… and that's on top of…" She gestured vaguely at Knuckles. "Whatever's going –"
Relic didn't get to finish her sentence, because a wave of glitching passed though not only all present (barring Knuckles), but also the very walls of the cave themselves, shifting and rearranging the mismatched architecture into a new, just as bizarre configuration.
Seemingly blind to the strange events around him, Knuckles sat up, hand on his chin, looking pensive. "Which island was that again?"
Archimedes shook himself to try and banish the sensation of pins and needles that the glitching had induced. "Angel Island, Knuckles. The island you're on?"
Knuckles blinked. "Wait, really? Wow, man. I haven't been back here in…"
He paused, and before the disbelieving eyes of Relic and Archimedes started to count on his fingers.
After a second, he tiptoed over and stage whispered to Relic, hiding his mouth from Archimedes with one hand. "What's the number that comes after five?"
Relic's mouth fell open. "…six?"
"Thanks!" He tiptoed back to his starting position. With a big inhale, he proudly declared: "Four years!"
Relic and Archimedes both had to catch themselves from slipping and falling.
"Knuckles, there's no way that's true." Archimedes protested.
"What about your duty to the lands of your people?" Relic added on.
"Uh… what about it?" Knuckles scratched his head. "They're all…" He slumped forwards, his smile disappearing for a moment. "Y'know…"
Archimedes and Relic's gazes both softened at the same time.
"Knuckles…" Archimedes reached out with both of his right hands.
"It's scary, you know?" Knuckles wrung his hands. "That I'm the last. I… I don't like thinking about it. So I don't. …I don't think about a lot of things, honestly."
Knuckles straightened up. "But hey!" He said, his darkened expression vanishing like it had never been. "That's what friends are for, right? To get all that tricky 'thinking' stuff out of the way!"
He slapped Relic on the shoulder, seemingly oblivious to the way this completely bowled her over.
Behind this, Chomps let out a long groan as he slowly rolled over onto his legs again. The wall he had crashed into let out a groan of its own, then a crash as the brickwork collapsed, revealing another room behind it.
"What are we talking about, by the way?" Knuckles asked, casually ignoring the cacophony.
"We're trying to find the Master Emerald?" Relic reminded him, slightly out of breath as she climbed back to her feet on shaking legs.
"Oh right, yeah!" Knuckles brightened.
Then he looked confused. "Wait, is the Master Emerald that guy who keeps formal events running on time?"
"No, that's the Master of Ceremonies." Relic corrected crisply, brushing dust off of her jacket.
"That piece of paper Eggman needed to call himself a doctor?"
"That's a Master's Degree, and he'd still need a PhD after that."
"The oldest console that can run our games without modding?"
"That's the Master System." Relic blinked. "Wait, what am I talking about?"
"The Master Emerald's missing?" Archimedes cut in.
Relic winced, turning back to Archimedes. "Right, sorry, yes, should have said something sooner. We were hoping that we could use this room to find it, but now…" She glanced up at the mismatched machinery and winced. "Maybe Fixit could do something with it?" She suggested weakly.
After a moment of silence, Relic blinked. "Fixit?"
She turned around to find said robot slowly floating over remains of the wall that Chomps had broken down. The room beyond had apparently had its ceiling cave in at some point in the distant past – the stone blocks strewn across the floor were covered in moss. Sticking out of the rubble, lichen of its own growing thickly, were the bent and twisted limbs of several metal figures.
Fixit made a noise like a long sequence of rapid clicks, their head tilting strangely to one side.
One of the artificial hands sticking out of the rubble twitched.
Slowly, letting out a long and tortured groan of motors that hadn't been maintained in far too long, the hand closed, then opened again; beginning a long series of taps in response.
"Oh, oh!" Knuckles excitedly clapped his hands together. "I know this one! Uh, four words… first word… 'Rhubarb!'"
"Model number confirmed." Fixit said, in a voice far more mechanical then they had been using before. "Downloading schematics… complete. Beginning priority repairs."
"Is that normal?" Archenemies asked Relic, slightly worried.
"Fixit?" Relic tried again, gingerly touching Fixit on the shoulder.
Fixit's body suddenly jerked backwards, the light in their eyes flashing for a second. "Reboot!" They said, their voice back to normal. "Apologies, madam." Fixit said, turning to face Relic. "I've received a priority repair request from these guardian robots, and I need to get started right away."
"Guardian robots…?" Relic echoed back, but Fixit had already turned back around and started carefully shifting stone off of the buried robots. Chomps whined, wriggling his body around to get a better look.
Archimedes jumped down from his spot on the control panel, bouncing off of several buttons in his descent. On the way down, though, one of the toggles let out a spark, and one of the screens on the wall changed from an empty field to the inside of a dimly lit cave.
One currently filled with dingoes searching every nook and cranny.
"What on Earth?" Relic blinked. Were those the 'survey' teams the dingo general had mentioned?
Archimedes spun around, seeing the altered screen. "Huh…? Wait, that's Hidden Palace Zone! What are the dingoes doing in there?! The Master Emerald hasn't been hidden in there in ages!"
"Maybe they didn't mean to go there." Relic suggested.
Archimedes turned to Relic with a confused expression. "Come again?"
"I'm not the best with geography, dear, but I think Angel Island is a bit scrambled." Relic put a hand on her chin thoughtfully. "There's this room, and when Knuckles was leading us to Altar Emerald he looked surprised when he got there. I think he intended to go somewhere else."
Archimedes looked back at the screen. "Blistering – you're right! That feed isn't supposed to show Hidden Palace Zone, it's supposed to be showing Hydro City!"
Relic blinked. "You mean Hydrocity Zone?" She said, pronouncing 'hydrocity' like 'velocity'.
"Ah-hem!" Knuckles objected with a cough. "I'll have you know it's pronounced Zee-on-ee!"
"But now that the dingoes are there, why haven't they left? Are they still looking for something? Someone?" Archimedes ignored the other two. "After Enerjak –"
He flinched then, shooting a worried glance back at Knuckles… who just nodded at Archimedes with the same vapid smile. "The worst of all breakfast cereals!"
"Enerjak?" Relic asked, very interested.
"That's… a long story." Archimedes hedged. "And not really mine to tell. But there shouldn't be anybody here on the island besides Knuckles, his friends, and the dingoes. Not anymore."
Relic blinked. "Hold on. Are you saying that the dingoes are supposed to be here?"
Archimedes grimaced. "That… really depends on who you ask. See, the dingoes… they're the original inhabitants of the land that would become Angel Island."
Relic had never heard any of any stories of dingoes settling in this area, but like a good archaeologist she pulled out a notebook anyway and quickly started jotting down the story Archimedes was telling.
"The echidna settlers and the dingo natives… really didn't get along."
That part at least tracked for Relic. Pachacamac's attack on Altar Emerald had been the final straw for echidna civilisation, but even before then the Knuckles Clan had lived as a tribe of raiders and bandits; surrounded by other nations also led by warlords. None of the surrounding people had been sorry to see the Knuckles Clan perish at the hands of Perfect Chaos.
"And by that I mean the dingoes have been trying to force the echidnas to leave – or, preferably, die – for centuries. Up to and including stealing echidna-made superweapons called 'nuclear missiles'."
The tip of Relic's pencil broke off, and she stared blankly at her notebook.
Archimedes winced, completely misunderstanding the cause of Relic's stupification. "Even with, erm, everything that happened, I guess… Knuckles…" For some reason, he seemed to hesitate on using Knuckles's name here. "…couldn't bring himself to kick them off the island."
Slowly, Relic raised her gaze enough to look Archimedes in the eyes again.
"I…" she started, but found herself stumped. Where did she even begin with a story like this? One that apparently involved a tribe still mastering bronze tools building nuclear missiles? Rather than tell Archimedes to his face that his story made no sense, Relic tried to think of anything else she could say. "So, these dingoes… have a settlement of their own, somewhere?"
"It's more of a camp these days, and I imagine it's empty at the moment." Archimedes answered, seemingly not detecting the scepticism in Relic's tone. "Dingoes fight in packs, and always have. Every dingo on the island will be out now, ready to fight."
"Well, not all of them." Relic objected before she could help herself.
"Hmm? What do you mean?" Archimedes blinked.
"They can't all be out looking for a fight." Relic clarified. "Not if they've been fighting the echidnas for as long as you say."
Archimedes stared blankly at Relic. "Miss, I've got no idea what you're on about."
"Hey look, those guys are having a dance rave!" Knuckles pointed cheerfully.
Once again, Relic and Archimedes turned to look at the screen. The dingoes were still on screen, but now they were hiding in cover, blasters out and firing at somebody off-screen. As they watched, a blue bolt hit one of the dingoes, encasing them in an energy field that froze them in place.
Somebody wearing mechanised wings swooped across the monitor's field of view, raining down plasma as they flew, and a grey mech-suit about three time the size of the dingoes around it stomped its way into view. Immediately after that, a stray blaster bolt took out the camera.
"Oh, oh! I know those guys!" Knuckles pointed at the static-filled screen, smiling widely.
"Oh, really?" Relic looked at Knuckles, relieved. "Who are they?"
Knuckles stared at the screen for a moment longer. "…I can't remember." He slumped over.
"Knuckles, I apologise if I come off a bit cross, but you currently have the memory of a goldfish." Relic said, her arms folded, coming off as more than a bit cross.
Knuckles beamed. "Thanks! I worked hard to get it up that high!"
Then he frowned. "Wait, which one of us is Knuckles again? I forgot."
Knuckles lapsing into a glitching fit at that point was probably for the best.
When the glitching cleared up, the sports tape was gone and his gloves were back, and his proportions were back to the ones Relic was familiar with. But she could still tell straight away that this wasn't her Knuckles. Instead of a white crescent mark on his neck like the other Knuckles's had had, this one instead had a silver necklace in the same shape hanging in the same place.
Said necklace jangled as Knuckles suddenly clutched his head. "What am I saying?!"
This Knuckles also had no accent – or, Relic conceded, to put it in a less subjective way: he had same accent she had, not the one more common in the United Federation.
"Master Emerald missing, dingoes in the Hidden Palace?" Archimedes quickly prompted.
Knuckles's expression hardened, and he growled angrily. "I've had enough of vandals and thieves on my island! Robots, with me! Let's give these scum the old Floating Island unwelcome."
"Robots?" Archimedes and Relic asked in puzzled unison.
Behind Relic came the whirring of hydraulic limbs flexing and straightening, and she turned to see that the figures that Fixit had found buried in the rubble were now on their feet. There were three of them, all spindly black limbs attached to large, spherical heads.
None present had any way of knowing this, but it was the same model of robot that Dr Zachery was currently using in the Twilight Cage.
Fixit was still holding onto the head of the front-most Guardian Robot, welding something in the back, but the other robots paid him no mind as they assembled themselves in front of Knuckles. Chomps let out a worried whine as he scurried out of the way.
"We will aid you, Guardian." The front-most robot said, its synthesised voice free of any emotion or inflection. "Caution: navigation systems in an error state. Unable to calculate path to the Hidden Palace."
Knuckles growled. "We'll just have to take the Zoom Tube and hope for the best."
Archimedes, still down on the floor, shook himself out of his stupor. "Forget about the Zoot-chute, Knuckles. I can get us there much faster."
With a loud bamf sound, a huge cloud of smoke, and an intolerably strong smell of brimstone, the party of four robots, a dinosaur, a fire ant, a pika and an echidna were teleported into the narrow stone corridors of the Hidden Palace.
Knuckles looked left and right, impressed despite himself. "Wow, you really teleported us all the way here."
Archimedes, standing on Knuckles's shoulder, panted with sweat, worry on his face. "I only meant to take us as far as the entrance! How did we get inside? I'm not powerful enough to cross Zones!"
"Well, that seems like a very strange limitation." Relic looked confused. "Is it the biome change, or does your power somehow respect the lines on a map?"
The somewhat distant roar of blaster fire reminded the group that they had other priorities right now.
"With me!" Knuckles roared, pointing towards the sounds of the kerfuffle. The Guardian Robots followed after him without a word, and Chomps let out a roar as he charged forwards alongside him.
Fixit welded one more patch into place before letting go of the Guardian Robot he had been working on and dropping to the back of the group with Relic.
"I'm starting to get the distinct feeling I should have asked to stay behind." Relic fretted, nonetheless jogging around the corner of the tunnel to face the Hidden Palace's main chamber.
The room was dominated by massive walkways stretching across the huge, empty space; accessible only through springs, warp points, and for those of the faint of heart: stairs. The centrepiece of the room was a series of large murals on the wall (though one of them was glitching into a tapestry as she watched), depicting a blue hedgehog engulfed in golden light fighting a giant floating torso for the Master Emerald. Right beside it were eight pedestals where the seven Chaos Emeralds and the Master Emerald could be placed, mirroring Altar Emerald above them.
Relic had made examining this room her very first priority upon being allowed on the island, and had begged Knuckles on bended knee to be allowed inside. She had a theory (one that was sadly problematic to test when the island was in the air) that Altar Emerald extended underground into this room, and that's why Angel Island could fly if the Master Emerald was placed into either altar.
Looking at it now, some of the same mixing effect that had affected the rest of the island was definitely in effect here. The chamber was smaller than Relic remembered (though still larger than a sports stadium), with the blue crystals in the walls competing with the earthy stonework she'd seen back in the mismatched command hub.
Dingoes were scattered mostly around the lower levels of the room, hiding behind what little cover there was (mostly the stairs) and trying to fend off attacks from the upper levels. The person they'd seen with the mechanical wings was laughing maniacally as they soared through the open space. It was a woman's laugh, and Relic thought she could make out goat horns as the woman banked around, blasting an unfortunate dingo caught out of cover.
Most of the blaster fire was however focused on the mech-suit stomping around one of the mid-level walkways. Even though the mech was shielding its chest with one hand, its other hand was spitting out beams and blaster shots that were more than enough to keep the dingo troops at bay.
"Get off of my island!" Knuckles roared, startling Relic out of her observation. Knuckles charged ahead of the pack, roaring towards the nearest group of dingoes. With a spoing! he was unexpectedly catapulted into the air as he stepped on a hidden spring, but he adjusted to the situation quickly and started gliding menacingly towards a group higher up. Chomps and the Guardian robots all split up, each charging towards a different squad.
"I think it's best if we stay back here for now, ma'am." Fixit firmly suggested, pulling Relic away from the tunnel entrance she'd stopped in.
"Yes… quite right, Fixit." Relic conceded, but couldn't shake the feeling that something was very wrong here.
While the dingoes were certainly putting up a strong fight, the blaster fire seemed… weaker than it should have been. Now that she was looking, not every dingo had a blaster out. The ones who didn't were being covered by their squad-mates as they either huddled in place, or…
Relic squinted. It had been a long time since she'd been on a proper dig site, but… "Fixit, do my glasses need changing or are those dingoes carrying geological equipment?"
Up on the levels above, Knuckles was thinking much the same thing. "Are you here to dig up my island?!"
Ducking under a panicked blaster shot, Knuckles shot forwards, wrenched the blaster rifle in question from its owner and smashed him across the face with it, sending him sliding across the walkway.
That left just one dingo in the squad with a blaster – the other three members were carrying what looked to Knuckles's inexpert eye like some kind of sensor get-up and blasting explosives.
Side-stepping the last dingo's stream of plasma shots, Knuckles sent him flying as well with a brutal uppercut. "If you're looking for buried treasure, Sandopolis Zone is that way!"
Two of the upright dingoes looked terrified as Knuckles stomped towards them, but the final one was defiant. "You think we're here for something as petty as treasure?!"
Knuckles picked that one up by the collar and hurled him into another of the still-standing dingoes, leaving one of the frightened ones as the last man up. "Well, why are you here then?!"
The dingo he addressed was desperately holding onto something like a metal detector, holding it out as though to hold Knuckles at bay with it. He looked left and right, desperate to find somebody else to answer the question. When he realised that Knuckles was, in fact, talking to him, he went so pale it could be seen even though his fur. He gulped, tears of fear in his eyes…
But even so, he frantically shook his head, lips shut so tightly they were turning white.
Knuckles growled angrily, grabbed onto the end of the dingo's detector, and wrenched it upwards so that the handle smashed its owner in the jaw and sent him to the floor, out light a light.
"...that's strange." Archimedes commented, still standing on his shoulder (and still looking rather tired). "If they've already got the Master Emerald, what on Mobius could they still be looking for?"
For the life of him, Knuckles couldn't figure out what was going on here.
He was no stranger to the idea of people intruding on his island, but in his experience those tended to come in one of three varieties:
That idiot Sonic, or one of his dumb friends; here to bring up the troubles of the planet below and make them his problems.
That madman Robotnik and people like him, who wanted to steal the sacred emeralds (or in the case of Zachary, them and theisland itself) for their power.
Common criminals like Captain Plunder or those four who had hitched a ride with D.R.A.T. that one time, who just wanted to steal the ordinary riches of the island.
He'd never seen a group so… desperate to be here. Even those refugees Sonic had guilted him into putting up in Mushroom Hill Zone had been more grateful than anything else, and he was pretty sure they would have left if he'd asked them. Even before Robotnik had been overthrown.
Obviously, there was something here that they couldn't leave without. But what?
There was the sound of an explosion up above, and Knuckles briefly saw the mech-suit fall past his walkway on its way to the floor.
Groaning, Charlie the Desert Rat let go of his mech-suit's controls for a moment to feel his forehead. It was going to bruise, he could feel it. Apparently, Ancient-built mech-suits did not in fact come with airbags, an omission he was finding rather lacking right now. If he ever unearthed an Ancient internet server, you better believe he was leaving a one-star review!
"Goodness, are you alright?"
Charlie stretched his arms back out into the controls – the fact that his mech basically required him to t-pose constantly was another thing that earned it that one-star rating – and placed his mech's hands on the ground to push it back on its feet.
A rabbit-like woman with teal fur and a floating torso robot was standing nervously just to his side, face worried.
"Fine." Charlie growled, but the frustration was audibly leaking out of him.
The woman gave a strained smile. "That's… that's not a G.U.N. mech, right? And I rather doubt it's the work of that nasty Eggman either."
"Hmm?" Charlie blinked. "No, this is an Ancient mech. I reassembled this this myself, actually! …well, after I excavated it."
Relic's eyes went wide, and her nervousness abruptly vanished. "Excavated, you say? By any chance, would you be an archaeologist?"
Charlie blinked. "Are you?"
"Yes!" Relic clapped her hands together excitedly, seemingly oblivious to the blaster shot that sailed high over her head and exploded against the wall behind her. "Oh, it's been so long since I've had a chance to talk shop! Did you notice that while the first and second levels use the same patterning, they actually use different underlying stone-cutting techniques?"
Charlie's curious expression contrasted quite strangely with how he was being back-lit from an explosion somewhere behind him. "Wait, does the first level not use trabeated systems?"
Relic giggled, smiling widely. "Nope! It's cyclopean masonry!"
"But that would imply that the two sections were constructed decades, even centuries apart!" Charlie's eyes widened at Relic's comments (and not, as they probably should have, from the screaming of a dingo as a Guardian Robot tossed them high into the air).
"I know!" Relic's eyes sparkled. "Isn't that fascinating? In all probability, entire generations worked to build this chamber, one level at a time!"
"And those brutes wanted to blast open the walls!" Charlie angrily gestured behind him, just in time for a dingo to go flying past with a scream.
Relic gasped. "They did not!"
Charlie clenched his mech's fist angrily. "If there's one thing I hate more than anyone else, it's people who think that history doesn't matter!" He declared. "No way was I going to let them destroy a chamber like this!"
The goat woman with the mechanical wings swooped past, cackling madly as she rained down fire.
Charlie sweated a little. "Oh, and of course my wife has always said that I need to assert myself more."
Relic clasped her hands together, seemingly oblivious to the way that Fixit was hurriedly pulling her to one side so that a blaster bolt missed her. "Good sir, you are a saint." She swore. "Knuckles and I will be forever grateful for what you've done here."
Charlie's face froze.
"Knuckles?" He said, deceptively calmly.
Relic blinked. "Yes? This is Angel Island, his home."
"Sure." Charlie's mech-suit clenched its claws into pseudo-fists. "There's just one problem."
"…what's that?" Relic took a cautious step backwards.
"If there's one thing I hate more than people who think that history doesn't matter," Charlie roared, the arms of his mech glowing brightly as the canons charge up "it's Knuckles the Echidna!"
"Relic, look out!"
As Fixit tackled Relic to the ground, she strangely found herself looking up at Knuckles, suspended in the air as he glided down towards her. She would have thought her eyes would have been locked on Charlie's mech-suit as its arms spat out massive globs of plasma at where she'd just been standing.
This strange mismatch in visual priorities is why she saw Knuckles tackled out of the air by a cackling goat woman with mechanical wings.
"Knuckles!" Relic screamed in fear, even as her body hit the stone floor with a painful thud; not made any less painful by the way Fixit fell on top of her right afterwards.
"Knuckles, Knuckles!" Charlie mocked, turning his mech around. "Why does nobody care about Charlie, huh?!"
Off to the side, Knuckles and the goat woman wrestled with each other on the ground. Knuckles, being stronger by far, threw the woman off of him – but she just snapped her mechanical wings open and flew away with a witch-like cackle.
"What did Knuckles ever do to you?!" Relic cried, crawling away from Charlie even as he stomped after her.
"Me? Nothing." Charlie's voice was casual for a moment, before dropping back into a growl. "Unless you count costing me my job, my home, and my wife!"
Despite herself, Relic paused her desperate crawl for freedom. "Wait, is the woman with the wings not your wife?"
"Oh, she is." Charlie happily confirmed.
"We got back together!" Charlie's wife yelled as she flew back around, raining down plasma on Knuckles's location.
"Turns out she's really into villainy." Charlie confided.
"I love watching people cry as I crush their most precious dreams!" The flying goat woman cooed.
Charlie frowned. "Maybe a little too into it."
"What was that, honey bun?" His wife responded, dangerously.
"Uh, nothing, Belinda dear!" Charlie covered up hastily, his mech's arms lifting up to make warding gestures.
"That's right!" Belinda (his wife) smirked evilly. "We're the biggest power couple on Seaside Island! And there's nothing zany enough to stop us from finally crushing you, Knuckles!"
Down on the ground, surrounded by dozens of small craters where Belinda's shots had blasted apart the stonework, Knuckles growled. While he could glide through the air, he could not fly – and the nearest spring was too far away.
But then his eyes flicked down, to something behind Charlie.
"How about a dinosaur?" Knuckles said.
"What?" Charlie frowned.
And was caught completely off guard when Chomps roared and crashed intohim from behind.
Charlie's mech-suit was about three times as tall as Knuckles (currently) was. Far taller than Chomps was, but Chomps walked around on all fours. Reared up on his hind legs, he was about the same size – and a fair bit heavier. Charlie's mech was sent stumbling forwards, teetering on its mechanical toes…
…which Knuckles lunged forwards to grab. "Sorry, but I'm afraid I'm calling an end to the honeymoon!"
Face straining with effort, Knuckles swung around, spinning Charlie's mech up and around, the sight made absurd by the sheet size disparity between them. One revolution, two… and Knuckles let Charlie go, screaming as he flew through the air.
Right on track to slam into Belinda.
"Ack!" "No!"
smash
Charlie's mech suit – with Charlie still in it – hit his wife like a meteorite, not even slowing down. The pair continued to fly through the air until, with a mighty crack, they hit the stone wall on the other side of the chamber.
Even as the pair groaned and slide down the wall, cracks continued to spread throughout the wall. Then…
crash
Relic let out a little wail as about a three-meter wide section of the ancient stone wall came crashing down, burying Charlie and Belinda. (Fortunately for them, Charlie's mech-suit was lying face-down over the top of Belinda, shielding both from the rubble.)
But, for the second time that day, on the other side of the new hole… lay another chamber.
Another, much larger chamber.
Knuckles, Archimedes, Fixit, Chomps and Relic (wiping her tears on the back of her gloves) all stared in stunned silence. Even the Guardian Robots stopped chasing down the few dingoes still standing, both chasers and their targets stopping to stare.
The chamber of the other side of the wall looked nothing like the echidna stonework of this side. No artistic patterns. No decorative crystal. Just bland, functional grey walls lit by dim, flickering artificial lights.
And inside that miserable chamber… were dingoes.
Hundreds of dingoes.
But unlike the soldiers that had been fighting in the main chamber, these dingoes were different. Wearing simple grey dresses and cloaks instead of military uniforms. Their fur was far, far paler; and they were all flinching back, shielding their sunken eyes from even the moderate lighting of the Hidden Palace.
More importantly, nearly all of the newly-revealed dingoes… were women and children.
Archimedes found his voice first. "I… I don't understand."
Relic sagged forward, pushing her glasses back up her nose as they started to slip down.
"You said they had been fighting the echidnas for centuries." Relic reminded him, letting out a sad sigh. "For that, they'd need…" She gestured vaguely towards the crowd, looking very uncomfortable.
Families.
They'd need families.
Relic didn't say the word out loud, but Archimedes still felt it pounding in his chest all the same.
It was such a simple, obvious idea.
So why had he never thought of it?
Even as the roar of an engine sounded out from behind them, rapidly getting closer, none of them turned around. Their gazes were stuck on the cowering dingoes before them. They didn't turn around, even as the vehicle(?) slowed to a stop.
"So," a familiar voice growled from behind them "that's where they were."
General Von Stryker strode out into their field of view, hands clasped behind his back. He was followed after him by his driver, another dingo wearing a cloak over his head and body.
Knuckles glitched, the crescent-moon necklace becoming a mark on his chest again. He glared at the back of Von Stryker's head. "What are they doing in the Hidden Palace?"
"Oh, they're not supposed to be here, I assure you." Von Stryker said without turning around. "Far too close to echidna territory. This bunker was originally hidden deep under what used to be Cave Canem – far deeper than any of our other bunkers. A secret that any dingo would rather die than give up."
"But then Angel Island got scrambled." Relic nervously rubbed an arm.
"Precisely." Von Stryker continued to stand ramrod straight. "And thus, our greatest secret is now exposed."
"But…" Archimedes seemed at a complete loss of words. "Why?"
Von Stryker finally turned around around. There was a quiet fury in his eyes. "How very much like a fire ant. Always taking the echidna's side, without question. Did you really think we'd forget? About what happened to the Tasmanian Devils?"
"But…" Archimedes seemed to deflate, all energy leaving him. He finally started to seem like the size he actually was. "But that was…"
"Centuries ago?" Von Stryker mocked. "When the Hyper Zone Projector failed, which city was destroyed?"
He took a firm step forwards, the thud of his boot against the stone floor echoing in the massive chamber. "When we defended Echidnaopolis against the Dark Legion, were we thanked for our help?"
One more loud thud echoed out. One more step. "When Enerjak cast us out into the wilderness, did he spare this bunker out of mercy, or simply because he did not know it was there?!"
"Knuckles wasn't responsible for that!" Archimedes shouted. He'd apparently found something he could argue back for.
Von Stryker snorted. "Of course Knuckles wasn't responsible for that. Finitevus was."
Archimedes apparently hadn't been expecting that answer.
Von Stryker walked right up to Knuckles, leaning over to stare Archimedes in the eyes. "The monster who cared only for advancing science and nothing else. The man who unleashed a god because he wanted to watch as it ended the world. He's personally responsible for more dead echidnas than the dingoes ever managed."
Von Stryker let out a cruel smile. "The perfect paragon of the echidna race."
Von Stryker straightened up. "Knuckles fought with his heart and his fists." He lifted his gaze to meet Knuckles's eyes. "You were born the wrong species, boy. You've got a dingo's soul."
And with that, Von Stryker turned around, and walked away. Walked towards the exposed bunker of his people watching on in fear.
Chomps whined, his voice conveying almost as much upset confusion as Relic's face. The assorted robots couldn't emote, so they simply looked between Knuckles and the departing general.
Archimedes…
Archimedes didn't know what to think.
For all that he wasn't an echidna, he'd been raised in the traditions of the Brotherhood of Guardians just as much as Knuckles had. He'd done what was expected of him, mentored Locke in the ways his ancestors had mentored Locke's… and had started to mentor Knuckles as well, when it was time.
Had kept all the secrets from him that he'd been expected to.
It had taken… far took long to realise that those traditions weren't working anymore. In all likelihood, they hadn't really been working in a very long time. If they ever had.
When Knuckles had headed down from the island, to stay and fight on the land below, he'd stayed behind. He'd had an inkling that it was best that he stay away from the lad for a time.
The next time he'd seen Knuckles, he'd been looking at a wholly different kid.
Maybe it was the stress of dealing with all the lies and deceit that had forced the change, but the Knuckles that Archimedes had met in the desert had never had a problem controlling his temper. He'd always carefully watched any situation before jumping in.
But, in the world down below… Knuckles was free. Free to feel things, hotter and stronger than before. To not hold himself back for the memory of a father he thought long dead. Knuckles's patience wore so thin that he stopped thinking before charging in… But at the same time, he also stopped talking to himself, desperate for somebody – anybody – to talk to.
With the Freedom Fighters, freed from the Brotherhood's molding, Knuckles had found himself.
And it turned out that he was nothing like the kid his father had wanted.
That Locke had thought that he had already had.
Locke had never paid much attention to the world beneath Angel Island. None of the Brotherhood had. That was why Locke had been so caught off guard when he'd commanded his son obey… and for the first time, his son had refused.
The traditions of the Brotherhood were rigid. Inflexible. They didn't allow for original thought. For dissenting opinion. The Brotherhood acted as one because they thought as one.
Was that why Archimedes had never realised something as simple as the idea that the dingoes must have had families back home?
"Stryker!"
The general paused at the sound of Knuckles's shout.
Archimedes stumbled and fell as Knuckles suddenly strode forwards, quickly catching up to the much larger dingo. "Hit me."
Von Stryker spun around. "Say that again?!"
Knuckles thumped his chest. "Hit me!"
Von Stryker growled, but happily swung his fist back and punched Knuckles right in the cheek, sending him flying backwards onto the stone. The Guardian Robots took a step forwards, but Knuckles quickly stood up on his own.
"Did that feel good, Stryker?" Knuckles growled.
"Not nearly as good as it should have." Von Stryker growled back.
"Tough." Knuckles brushed his injured cheek with his glove. "Because I'm the only echidna left. If you can't feel happy getting your revenge on me… you never will."
Von Stryker snarled at Knuckles for a moment, one hand switching towards his holstered blaster…
…before letting out a cry of frustration, and spun back around to resume his walk away.
The dingo in the cloak – Von Stryker's driver – didn't immediately follow after his general. "Things won't be that simple. You know that."
Knuckles snorted. "Then I'll make it simple. Get your people, and get…"
For a long moment, Knuckles paused. "…out of here." He eventually said.
Relic stared at Knuckles in quiet amazement.
It hasn't escaped her that he hadn't told the dingoes to get off the island this time.
The driver let out a quiet snort. "Same old Knuckles."
He seemed to know Knuckles from somewhere, but this version of Knuckles showed no signs of recognising him.
"Yeah, well, I was never going to be anyone else, was I?" Knuckles stamped his foot. "Now. Where have you hidden the Master Emerald?!"
Behind him, Archimedes gave a quick start. "He's already back on that?"
"It could be worse." Relic muttered quietly. "Before, he seemed to think the island was held aloft by a Chaos Emerald."
"Well…" Archimedes hesitated. "I don't want to split hairs, but technically the Master Emerald is just 13 Chaos Emeralds fused together."
Relic looked down, thoroughly nonplussed. "What." She said, flatly.
"Incorrect." Buzzed one of the Guardian Robots.
Relic winced as Archimedes looked offended. "I wouldn't have put it quite that bluntly, dear…" She said gingerly.
"Only two Chaos Emeralds were fused to create the Master Emerald." The same robot continued. "And they were one emerald to begin with, before they were split in half."
Relic look up at the robot despairingly, before shaking her head. "I give up."
The whole time this conversation had been going on, Knuckles and the dingo driver had been staring at each other.
"Knuckles…" the driver said, slowly. "We don't have the Master Emerald."
Knuckles reared back as if struck. "What?!"
"Kage only wanted it so he could hand it over to Eggman." The driver shrugged. "What on Mobius would we do with it? We don't have the tech nor the talent to use it."
Knuckles's eyes went as wide as dinner plates. "But… but then… if you don't have it, then where is it?! WHERE IS THE MASTER EMERALD?!"
Once, Eggman Nega had created a special camera that could turn objects into cards.
"Knuckles? Knuckles, are you there?!"
In the future – his present – he'd turned the Master Emerald into a card, and then travelled back in time 200 years, to the era of Sonic and friends.
"Knuckles, our shields are almost down and… and our power is draining fast!"
Because the Master Emerald was so powerful, there could only ever be one of it in existence at any given time. When Nega had come back from the future with the card with the Master Emerald trapped inside, the Master Emerald of Knuckles's time had vanished – displaced until its double had been returned to its own time.
"Please, Knuckles!"
No matter how much it wanted to, the Master Emerald could never be in more than one place at a time – not while intact, anyway, and unlike the Paradox Prism the Master Emerald had very little power while shattered. So it had to decide where was most important for it to be.
"S-sonic and the others… I c-can't find them anywhere…!"
So rather than an ancient altar of stone, the Master Emerald currently sat on an altar of steel and copper wires.
"Knuckles!"
Beneath the Master Emerald, great drops of water coalesced into a pool of water.
Almost like the gemstone itself was crying.
"Knuckles!"
Inside the small engine room, a bright light shined.
AN: Knuckles. Ho boy.
Okay, so, A Certain Archie Author loved writing convoluted echidna lore (apparently he just loved writing convoluted lore in general, it's just that when he pitched crazy stuff for Sonic he got told 'no', but when he pitched a similar idea for Knuckles (or Sally) he got told 'sure, whatever').
Though in fairness, he's not the only culprit to making Knuckles so varied across the different versions of Sonic. The Boom and Paramount versions are both deliberately quite different from the games/IDW/Prime version, he's weird in Underground but so is everyone else… but even compared to them pre-SGW!Knuckles's story is… a hot mess.
(I didn't even get into most of it! But, considering Julie-Su's already had two chapters, and this chapter was getting pretty Archie-heavy as it is…)
I'm not the first person to notice that we never saw any female or child dingoes in Archie (in fact, the ThanksKenPenders blog was the one who pointed it out to me, and I think someone else pointed it out to them), but I'm pretty sure I'm the first person to try and explain why – at least like this.
Relic and Fixit are from post-SGW Archie, the Dingo Regime is from pre. Charlie and Belinda are from Boom, and Chomps is from Underground. The Guardian Robots are from Fleetway. The assorted versions of Knuckles were from Paramount, Underground, post-SGW Archie, the games/IDW, Boom, then Fleetway.
Apologies if the archaeology talk comes off as nonsense to people who know better.