Anonymous Review Replies!
Guest: What fortunate timing! Glad it was an extra birthday present for you :) And yeeessss, slow friendship and family growth! Let's just hope all of them survive this chapter alive...but thanks very much for your comment!
DEV:Ahaha, ja, eine Freude bei dieser fic ist es, die ganzen Logiklöcher vom original entweder zu reparieren oder zumindest n großen Lampenschirm dran zu hängen (bevor ich dann eigene Kogiklöcher aufmache XD) Amy ist in meinem Headcanon auf jeden Fall irgendwo in den Top-Tier Kämpfern dabei (wenn auch nicht ganz auf Shadow/Sonic/Knuckles-Level) aber für die Babylon Rogues reicht's auf jeden Fall, besonders wenn im Rage-Modus.^^; Was Maria und Amy jetzt allerdings machen, nachdem sie checken, dass sie sitzen gelassen wurden - nun, wir werden es herausfinden! :D Die Level in dieser Fanfic sind zum Glück tatsächlich etwas verkürzt dargestellt, ich erinnere mich noch ans detailgetreue aufschreiben bei der Secret Rings story, das war ein Aufwand, uff! Es fühlt sich auf jeden Fall immer sehr kathartisch an, wenn ich ein Level kürzer schreiben kann, weil andere Charaktere geholfen haben, tho :3 Und jooo, Shadow hier seine Charakterentwicklung aus 'Life Could Have Been So Different' weitermachen zu lassen, ist immer einer der schönsten Teile beim Schreiben von ihm - wenn ich Sonic nicht gerade zum Protagonisten einer Parallel-Dimension-Mittelalterlichen Love Story mache, dann hat er meistens nicht annähernd so viel zu lernen wie Shadow, er ist einfach schon von vornherein ein ziemlich cooler und entspannter Typ :P In dieser Story clasht er natürlich mit seinem Ethik-Verständnis mit unserem Protagonisten, mal schauen, wo das noch hingeht...auf jeden Fall wie immer megavielen Dank für deinen fantastischen Kommentar, die sind immer mein Highlight wenn die in der Inbox landen :) Hoffe, das neue Kapitel gefällt auch! :D
Wirewolf: Aw, thank you! Yeah, I'm also surprised myself how much I adore the Shadow/Sally pairing, I hadn't planned on including it, that's for sure! The setting is also just so much fun to write, it just combines everything and everyone I love about the various continuities :) As for printing out the stories, of course, please do! I'd be honored and very happy if a physical copy of the stories existed in the world :D It's fun to share your writing if you get this kind of comment for it!
CursesRevenge: Aaaah, thank you so much for all those comments! :DD I like Shadow with quite a few characters together, and Shadow/Rouge, be it a friendship or pairing is one of my fav dynamics - it's a shame they don't get to have much time together in this fic, but I was able to write a lot of them in my other stories :) Silver seems to be the perennial favourite in this fic, and it's hard not to feel for him, the poor guy XD And no worries, there will be more ;P I'm very glad you like this amalgam universe, I had a lot of fun crafting it and it's my fav world to imagine stories in :) As for Infinite or Scourge showing up...weeeell, Scourge is my third fav character after Sonic and Shadow, so that might give you a hint ;P as for your other (very good) questions, only one way to find out - hope you enjoy! :D
Firefly: Thank you! I try, even if the updates take a while, haha...hope you like the new one, though!
Long time reader: Thank you! I love hearing about re-reads, really makes you feel like your work stays in good memory if people read it more than once and come back :D
Kit: Aw, thanks :D And no worries, I take all compliments :D
Starlightskywolf: Yup, obsessed with Shadow as well, I getchu. Glad you enjoyed, thanks for the comments!
Last Time On Shadow the Hedgehog: First Class: Well, when we last left our heroes, even though they were in shock about Robotnik p...blowing the moon away, Tails and Maria had just finished up their copy of a Chaos Emerald, indistinguishable from a real one, except for its power level. And with that, Shadow basically just immediately teleported Sonic and Tails away for a boys' trip to Pyramid base where they suspect Robotnik's secret hideout, leaving Maria and Amy home at the lab. According to about 27 missed calls, Amy isn't taking it well, probably. The trip to Robotnik's base goes surprisingly okay, until...well, a certain golem showed up and almost killed the cutest member of their team. Fortunately, Knuckles also happened to be here, and now it's TIME TO ROCK THIS PLACE like you can only do with Chaos Powers...
OoO
Chapter 29: Let Me See What (Meteor) Fall Is Like
Smashing into the golem's control unit and letting it explode in a giant fireball was so satisfying.
Just a second before, the fabric of reality had dissolved around Shadow as he initiated the Chaos Control, as it always did. Next, there was the by now familiar feeling of turning non-corporeal and being yanked through a hole in the cosmos by a hook inside your body, the world blossoming into being around him again only a nanosecond later, the glass dome on top of the golem's head looming large in front of him.
For anybody else, reacting in the split second after being put together again like the world's squishiest puzzle, might have been too much.
Anybody else, having materialized in nothing but thin air, might have just started falling.
But Shadow could feel his senses taking everything in, processes in his brain calculating the exact trajectories of everything moving around him, the pull of gravity from below, and his body moved without a moment of delay.
With a grin, he twisted into a spinning kick that shattered the entire glass globe and all the fizzing components within it, setting off a chain reaction that exploded the statue's upper body. Shadow caught the wave of the explosion with muscle memory born from their battle with the Kukku army, letting the force turn his body into a mid-air backflip, elegantly landing on the walkway as the golem slumped backwards and collapsed into the pit again, holding the fake Emerald needed for the maneuver, Tails and Sonic cheering.
"Wow!" Tails enthused. "That was so cool!"
"It, uh, well." Shadow coughed as he stored the Emerald again in his quills. "It was the most tactical decision." Thankfully, the alarms and sirens seemed to have stopped blaring now, the dust slowly settling as Tails and Knuckles stood up again.
Shadow levelled a gaze at the echidna, clearing his throat. "I…appreciate you saving the fox kit. But why are you here?"
"Same reason I'm anywhere," Knuckles dusted off the fur on his arms, shrugging. "I'm looking for shards of the Master Emerald."
"For the…" Shadow narrowed his eyes. "Okay, you have been looking for these shards around the forests of Soleanna, Vector said something about an underground mine, in station square you emerged from a *sewer* and now you're looking for them in an ancient Egyptian Pyramid?" Shadow stared at Knuckles. "Do these shards have legs?"
"Beats me," Knuckles grunted. "Personally I think they're such a nightmare to find because the Master Emerald is still mad that this is the second time it's been broken in twelve months."
Shadow decided to let the personification of a large crystal go because there was little surprise what living alone on an island with a rock would do to you and decided to focus on the next important bit. "So you're here because Tails' radar told you there would be more of them here?"
"Yeah. I think I've gotten all of them now, just wanted to check out the last, central room of the pyramid before I left. What are you three doing here?" He cocked his head to one side, a small smirk pulling at his lips. "Isn't it a school night for you guys?"
"Hardeharhar." Sonic rolled his eyes. "No, y'know. Trying to save the world from Robuttnik's new planet-busting laser cannon in Space, the ush," Sonic commented with a shrug, abbreviating 'usual' to just the first syllable in a way that let Shadow feel more like 60 than 6, "Speaking of which, the door to the secret base entrance is still locked, even though we defeated the golem, which is pretty unfair. Either of you wouldn't happen to know how to get inside...?" he asked, glance darting from Tails to Knuckles and back again, hopefully.
"Ah. Yeah, actually," Knuckles said, reaching into his dreadlocks. "I have the key. Had to fight tons of ghosts for them, though. And then the Ghost King, of course."
I'm not going to ask, Shadow thought, I'm not, I'm not, *everything* about this is stupid, I won't - "...did you say ghosts?" he croaked, his treacherous, hopeless curiosity forcing the words past his teeth despite his best attempts.
"Yeah, I told you, pyramids usually have a huge ghost problem, remember?" Tails piped up as they walked toward the entrance door of what had to be the central room. "So it's super helpful that Knuckles already defeated the Ghost King of this pyramid, otherwise ghosts would bouncing around everywhere!"
"Yeah," Knuckles said, rubbing his face and actually appearing a bit knackered. "Pumpkin Hill had even more, actually. Even the trains were ghosts. But at least they didn't also bounce," the echidna added, as he took out the key and opened the door while Tails and Sonic nodded at this explanation as if this conversation were even remotely sane, and then the door opened.
Xxx
"Oh. Wow," Tails breathed, and even if Shadow had grown up on a space station in a laboratory, a part of him definitely agreed.
Inside what had possibly once been the King's Chamber of the pyramid, was now an array of screens, robot building bays, consoles, idling hologram projectors, plans and papers strewn around and a large chair in front of an even larger control desk as well as a glowing teleporter pad behind it, the various screens and LED's of the electronic equipment bathing the high-ceilinged stone cavern in an eery, incongruously futuristic light.
No Robotnik, though.
"Yeah, okay. This definitely has to be the relay station where he transmitted his grand bla-bla from this time," Sonic said, walking forward and looking at the various screens tuned into world news currently.
"Uh-huh. And….Shadow, there is also a lot about you here," Tails said, scrolling through the tabs on another screen, this one showing various pages and diagrams of Shadow in different stages of his growth.
The stolen files.
Shadow could feel his stomach clenching up - these had to be the papers stolen by Rouge, specs about his creation, his abilities, the experiments done on him and the things he had been subjected to. He didn't want Sonic and the others looking at those, even if he noticed that this time, the fear and anger that others would start seeing him as an animal, a test subject instead of a person if his status as an experiment was driven home like this, was less acute - they all already knew he had been artificially created.
But for none of them it meant that he was less.
No, this time it felt more like someone looking into your room uninvited, and Shadow stepped over to Tails on reflex, closing that window.
"Yes. And I'd appreciate some privacy for what is basically my medical records, thank you." Bad enough they're available to half a dozen government or military scientists.
"Oh. Sure. Sorry," Tails winced, stepping back. "I could…try and delete them from Robotnik's servers…?"
"He's probably got back-ups somewhere," Shadow grumbled. "No, better find out how we can get to where the Doctor is. Then I'll just take care of that problem…personally…"
Knuckles nodded. "I'd also like to personally see to it that that human doesn't threaten the Master Emerald again."
Shadow threw Knuckles an appreciative glance. "Ah. Very good thinking. Yes."
"Okay, can we tone it down with the murder talk?" Sonic asked, eye ridges raising at there now being two Mobians with worryingly violent tendencies from his point of view. "Tails? Is there any way we can get that transporter working?"
"Um," Tails said, left incisor biting into his lower lip. "Unfortunately…I think it's hardwired to only be unlocked by biometric input, so that's a no."
"Damn it." Shadow's hand clenched around the fake Emerald - if he had the real one, he could attempt to do a Chaos Control onto the Space Station itself - Yeah, and probably wind up at half the distance and kill myself, an unbidden thought commented in his head. "So now what? I suppose my creator the Professor might have a way to get up there…or we hitch a ride with GUN," he said, though his lip curled at the idea of having to ask them of all places for help. Even with Wachowski probably mediating.
"Isn't Maria's grandfather holed up in his office and refusing to talk to anyone?" Tails asked. "No, maybe I can take the teleporter apart and rewire it from scratch-"
"Or," Sonic said, suddenly appearing and stretching in the doorframe at the back of the room and jabbing a thumb over his shoulder into the chamber behind him. "We could always take the space shuttle."
Shadow blinked. "The what now?"
xxx
Shadow guessed it made sense. After all, the Doctor was a Robotnik, and Robotniks hardly ever went without back-up.
Or without overkill.
Still, it was a thoroughly weird feeling to be strapped into a 90-degree-angled seat in a vertical space shuttle which had been hidden inside a pyramid, now watching the top of said pyramid slowly slide open to reveal the vast desert sky overhead, all while Tails was now going through various pre-launch checks.
Tails, who was their almost-nine-but-actually-eight-year old pilot, who also had to sit on various pillows on his seat to actually reach the controls.
"And you're sure you can fly this thing?" Shadow kind of wished he'd sound less squeaky.
"Seriously, yes," Tails said, also sounding like he was rolling his eyes - not that Shadow could see his expression, seeing as Tails and Sonic were in the two front seats, him and Knuckles in the two behind them. "Chaos, you sound like Sonic when I took his modified bi-plane into planetary orbit the first time."
"You were four, and the planetary orbit in question also contained the Death Egg," Sonic pointed out. "It was not weird to ask that question."
Well. Shadow supposed that meant that Tails at least had about four years of experience of flying in orbital heights-
"Also," Sonic said, making a throwaway gesture with one hand, "I remember that particular flight ending with you getting shot out of the sky almost immediately."
"Um," Shadow started, but by then Tails was already going "3, 2, 1, HOLD ON TO YOUR SEEEATS-!" and the latest leg of their journey had taken off like a rocket.
xxx
"I want to check on my Emerald shards."
"We've been over this, Knucklehead. Tails says they interfere with the instruments, so they stay in the cargo hold."
"They'll get cold."
"They're shards."
"That doesn't mean they don't have feelings."
Shadow wanted to curl up and bite into his seat cushion. What nobody told you about space flights was that outside of Star Trek, just getting to the moon took three days, and apparently, even to the Space Colony ARK it would take them over twenty hours.
Well. Depending on how things would go aboard the ARK, they could still be just in time, but if they weren't, Shadow hoped nobody was too attached to Liechtenstein.
"That is exactly what it means."
They had been able to spend some of them sleeping after being up for longer than a day, but there was still plenty of flight left - which meant, the biggest strain on his nerves was currently not the worry about unusually small European monarchies, but rather…
"Give me one reason why I don't put you into the cargo hold."
"I will kill everyone aboard this vessel if you don't stop this argument now," Shadow gritted out, thoroughly tempted to follow through on exactly that. "You've been at it for hours."
"Yeah, some quiet would be really helpful," said Tails, voice slightly strained. "I've had to switch back to manual control because we're right now flying through this meteor field and I really need to concentrate-"
"Well, if Knucklehead would stop insisting he needs to 'mAke suRe His EmErAlds arE sAFe'-"
"That is NOT what I sound like!" Knuckles was balling a fist into Sonic's face, the blue hedgehog still busy rolling his eyes and making air quotes with his index-fingers, when they were all interrupted by a small, unassuming, bonk.
"Uh," Knuckles said. "Did you hear that? What was that?"
"Oh. Um. Oops," Tails said.
"What? What 'Oops'?" Knuckles asked. "Tails, 'Oops' is not what you want to hear from the pilot of your space shuttle-" he said as he was already unbuckling himself and striding over to the window on the side where the bonk had come from, Sonic and Shadow quickly following at his heels.
"It, er, it might've only been a really tiny asteroid strike-," Tails said quickly, but was then of course interrupted by Knuckles' much louder
"MY EMERALD SHARDS!"
as he, Sonic and Shadow all watched the dented cargo bay door loosely float away from the shuttle, a brilliant trail of green gemstones following it like crystal stars.
The next few minutes that followed were very violent.
xxx
"That," Shadow said, "was insane."
"No," Sonic said with a shrug. "That was just Knuckles."
"He tried to crash our space-ship."
"Well, land it on that super big meteorite rock with the mining operation on it," Tails corrected. "Which makes sense considering in this meteorite field that would be the celestial body with the highest gravitational pull-"
"He tried to crash our space ship," Shadow repeated, only slightly higher-voiced now. "And then he jumped out of it. Into space."
"Well, yeah," Tails said, and was now also starting to sound like someone trying to gently explain something to a slower student, "But see, because of that highest gravitational pull thing that means that he is going to be pulled toward that meteorite, too!"
"How is he not dying in the process."
"Eh, the meteorite thing itself likely has like an artificial oxygen dome thingy," Sonic waved a hand, "Seeing as there's a mining operation on it. And he should be fine getting there, Chaos usually sorts things out in space, somehow."
"None of this makes sense."
"Yeah, I know, right?" Tails asked cheerfully. "Anyway, when we're done aboard the ARK we can pick him up on the way back. Can't be that hard finding his shards aboard a single meteorite, right…?"
xxx
It was another hour, but then, the ARK came into view.
Shadow could feel his throat constrict, hit by memories, emotions and things he couldn't name as the first spherical Bernoulli space colony rose up into their field of vision from behind the earth, looming in the black, star-dotted emptiness of the universe like a mechanical dream. His birthplace. His childhood home.
Almost his family's tomb.
No. Maria and the Professor are safe on Earth. Have to remember that.
Shadow tried to swallow as Tails was steering them toward a docking bay, brow creased in concentration, while Sonic was mainly looking at the colony without any particular emotion discernible on his face.
"Almost…almost…there!" Tails exclaimed in triumph as the docking procedure seemed to work, the space shuttle perfectly and airtightly fitting into the opening of the bay. There was a pumping noise indicating the airlock was working, creating a safe space to open the door and step outside.
"Do you think ol' Egghead already knows we're here?" Tails asked, the three of them gathering to watch the shuttle door slowly slide open to reveal….
An empty, dark cargo bay.
"No welcome committee," Sonic surmised. "Maybe not."
"Can we just Chaos Control to wherever Eggman is or the Eclipse Cannon's engine core from here?" Tails asked. "That would mean we have surprise on our side for sure."
"Hm," Shadow narrowed his eyes, weighing the fake Emerald in his hand. "To be honest, I'm not quite sure where the Eclipse Cannon's engine core is or what it looks like, and I'd need at least one of those things for Chaos Control. As for the Doctor, the ARK is over 15 kilometres wide. I don't know how far I can actually teleport with this fake Emerald, especially if I am going to be transporting all three of us."
"Hm, yeah, that distance might be bit wider than from your basement to street level," Tails scratched his ear. "We really should have done a bit more experimentation with the Emerald, probably."
"So we'll go on foot, no big deal," Sonic shrugged. "Where do you think Eggman would set up base on the colony, Shads?"
"My guess is that the Doctor is on the bridge," Shadow said, moving to walk toward the exit of the cargo bay. "I know the way."
"Cool," Sonic said, the other hedgehog and Tails falling into step next to Shadow easily. "So, any plan in particular when we get to him, or…?"
"Actually, on second thought I suggest we split up," Shadow said, abruptly coming to a halt and offering the Emerald to Sonic. "You two take the fake Emerald and try to find the engine core where you can disable the Eclipse Cannon. I'll distract the Doctor."
"And by 'distracting' you mean 'separating his head from his shoulders', I suppose," Sonic said wryly. "Yeah, no. We go together or not at all."
"Fine," Shadow grunted, storing the stone in quills while rolling his eyes and reluctantly starting to move again. "In this case, this way. We're going to be heading through the engine room to avoid detection. Layout is somewhat Crazy, Gadgets often don't work, but don't let that worry you. Maria and I played here a lot."
"Uh-huh…." Sonic commented, as the two of them followed him though the first pair of swooshing doors into the bowels of the ARK. Lighting down here was red emergency strips on the walls only, plus the green glow from the circuits in the ceilings and doors, really giving the strangely-angled corridors a feeling like you were in the insides of a mechanical beast.
"We will need to be quiet, though," Shadow added, voice low. "When the ARK was still active, the professor had created these Artificial Chaos creatures in another line of his experiments. They're translucent blue jellyfish creatures with mechanical skulls and they're programmed to be absolutely deadly predators. Some of them escaped to the engine room corridors in an accident. They might still be alive."
"And you played here?" Tails shot back in a whisper.
"Yes."
"So cool."
"Oh, so how come I get hounded by the CPS each time I take Tails to some alternate dimension to fight robot pirates or something, but this stuff is apparently okay-" Sonic started grumbling, but Shadow hushed him.
"Quiet now. I need to concentrate or else we'll take a wrong turn and end up in one of the electric acid pits."
Sonic threw him a bit of an alarmed glance. "In one of the what now?"
"You heard me."
"Oh yeah, I read about those!" Tails exclaimed in an excited whisper. "It's really fascinating, but for the proper functioning of the Bernoulli-type space colonies, it's actually vital to have an engine room absolutely filled with electric acid pits, bottomless chasms, super many sliding doors, tubes and grinding rails. Also giant colourful lego blocks in outer space."
"Right," Sonic said, appearing a bit overtaxed as they entered into another room, large and high-roofed, briefly coming to a stop before three big switches embedded into the ground in front of another door.
Shadow glanced surreptitiously upwards. No bottomless overhead chasm there, just a few dormant Artificial Chaos stuck to the ceiling, their translucent bodies camouflaged against the dark green of the plates. They had been an old line of Professor Gerald's experiments, long before he had started focusing on hedgehog designs, and had at some point escaped into the engine rooms - Shadow and Maria had had some run-ins with them previously - and apparently, some of them were still alive and well. Sonic and Tails didn't appear to have noticed them yet, the two of them still caught up in a conversation about the relative sense and nonsense of space colony engineering.
"Yeah, so, anyway," Tails was just finishing up, "seeing as the engine room of the Bernoulli space colonies usually get the award for as Deadliest Engine Rooms of the year, it would actually be great if instead of having to find the power core ourselves we could just deliver the fake Emerald straight into Eggman's hands!"
"Okay, why is there- no, you know what, nevermind," Sonic said, tone and air that of a hedgehog who had long since stopped asking certain questions. "More important for us is probably whether there's anything in particular that we should watch out for?"
"Well," Shadow said, eying the switches. "Actually, there's one thing Tails forgot to mention."
"Oh?"
"The gravity modulators," Shadow stated, at the same time flipping the switch with the arrow pointing upwards and also holding onto the handle of it, because Sonic and Tails immediately went flying screaming toward the ceiling.
And then screamed some more when the Artificial Chaos on there immediately attacked.
"Right," Shadow grunted, then tensed his core muscles to swing himself through the door (now upside down) that had just opened in front of him, heedless of Sonic and Tails' screams and yelps. They'd be fine.
Landing in a crouch inside the next room where gravity was once again normal, Shadow straightened up again and broke into a dash. The door behind him hissed closed, but even when Sonic and Tails got it opened again, there would be a labyrinth of corridors waiting for them.
In his hand, Shadow twirled the fake Emerald as he skated toward the bridge, using all of the shortcuts through the completely nonsensical (and verging on non-euclidian) layout of the ARK's corridors he knew intimately. Tails' plan to deliver the copy to Robotnik hadn't been a bad one, even.
Except that all Shadow would deliver was a bullet to the Doctor's head.
xxx
"Rouge! Will you come in! Where the devil are you?!"
"Ah, Doctor? Yeah, sorry. I am off on a little…sidequest, actually. Just something that caught my eye."
"In space?"
It was perhaps twenty minutes later or so, that Shadow was standing in front of the door to the main bridge and observation room, the voices of Robotnik arguing with a static-distorted Rouge faintly coming through the metal gate.
"Yes, actually." And she still sounded amused.
"I swear, working with you is like herding bats," Robotnik grumbled from the inside. "For your own sake you better not be in the way of the Cannon when it fires, you hear me?"
"No worries," Rouge replied - before actually switching tone for once, adding with some slight concern, "You're…not actually going to blow up Lichtenstein, though, right? With the Emeralds I brought you? That was mainly just a threat, wasn't it?"
"Go do your sidequest, bat girl," Robotnik replied instead, the static cutting off as if he had just pressed a button, grunting, "Getting distracted now. I swear I should've stuck to robots."
"You will wish you had," Shadow, recognizing when a good entry line presented itself, said as he stepped through the door sliding open, enjoying the second of shock on Robotnik's face as he whirled around.
"Wha - what are you doing here?" the man then grunted, "I thought I told you to patrol the corridors until I get the surveillance system fixed."
Shadow just about stopped himself from blinking. The realization of He thinks you're the copyflashed through his mind, accompanied by a wave of fury that anyone could confuse him and the other impostor, but he managed to keep it from showing on his face.
No. Let his hubris be his downfall, he thought viciously. He would enjoy seeing the man's shock when 'his creation' shot him in the face.
"Corridors have been checked. Nothing to report," he therefore said, keeping his face expressionless as he walked forward. Robotnik was standing behind a control board, hands flying over the key- and switchboard with remarkable speed now, typing something on a screen Shadow couldn't see. The bridge room was mostly like he remembered, observation windows, tactical stations and large video screens hanging high on the walls, now once more alive and lit up like it had been before the massacre. Bullet holes in some of the stations and the screens remaining black told of what happened, though. In particular the surveillance console was still a mess, screen shattered and buttons covered up and caked with the blood of whoever had been shot over it.
"Good. Good," the human grumbled, "What about the ping on the Emerald radar for the missing yellow one? Could you find out where it originated from?" Robotnik was moving on from the console now, a remote in his hands, and annoyingly positioned himself in front of a window, his back to Shadow, face mirrored in the glas.
This would not do.
"Yes," Shadow therefore said, diverting his route but still steadily coming closer. He wanted Robotnik to turn around. He wanted to see every inch of the white, terrified eyes behind those dark glasses when he struck.
"Ah? So where is it now, Shadow?"
Robotnik's voice was still eerily calm, but the address, Maria's cousin even having stolen his name for the copy he made, let an uneasy quiver slip down Shadow's spine. It was wrong.
He reached into his spines, found what he was looking for and came to a stop now just two yards behind the human. "Right here, you failed maniac."
The expression of Robotnik finally turning around and coming face to face with the barrel of the gun in Shadow's hands was priceless.
Or, well.
It should have been priceless.
But what actually happened was Robotnik not doing so much as raising an eyebrow at the weapon, only saying: "Really? From my grandfather's creation, I would have expected more."
This time, Shadow permitted himself a moment to blink, but his arm didn't waver in the slightest.
"It'll be enough to kill you for sullying the family name and threatening to blow up the planet Maria wants to live on. I don't need a Chaos Emerald for that."
"Ah, but you have it with you? Possibly even came aboard with Chaos Control, didn't you," Robotnik's eyes seemed to gleam behind his dark glasses, teeth exposed in a shark-like grin beneath the bristling moustache as he bent forward, not rising to the insult and still infuriatingly unphased by the gun pointed at his head.
Shadow bared his teeth in turn. "Wouldn't you like to know before you die."
The scientist's lips pulled in an unsatisfied moue.
"Rude. But then again, my grandfather never had a particularly good hand when it came to raising his creations, did he."
"I don't know," Shadow said, thumb cocking back the hammer. His lips pulled into a smirk. "I'd say I turned out fine."
"Just not particularly intelligent, I fear," Robotnik said, sighing and pushing a button on his remote - Shadow gasping as suddenly, an all-too-horribly-familiar escape capsule materialized around him.
"What?!" Shadow abruptly stumbled a step backwards, but only felt his back hitting glass, an awful, terrifying feeling of déja-vu coming over him, trapped in a pod, helpless - he raised his gun on instinct, about to shoot his way out -
"Ah ah ah, I wouldn't do that," Robotnik sing-songed, grin sliding across his face like an oil spill. "The glass of these capsules is re-inforced. Shooting at it will only get you killed by ricochets. I hope you are properly impressed by your creator's invention, by the way - these auto-materializing rescue capsules are a work of art, I merely finished up and activated the prototype he left behind up here. Of course, I also modified them to explode once they've left the station. Thank you for giving me the time to set them up while trying to pretend you were my own Project Shadow, by the way."
He knew. "I will get out of this," Shadow said, even if he could hear his own heart pounding, blood rushing in his ears as the capsule started to move, sliding across the floor toward one of the escape chutes, perhaps powered by antigrav or magnets or actual magic invisible mice in a harness, Shadow didn't care at the moment, he just needed to get out of this, "Because yes, you bastard, I did bring this," he said, reaching with his free hand for the Emerald in his quills and feeling the Chaos Energy pulsate inside it. "Chaos Control!"
But the world didn't dematerialize. Instead, he was still stuck in the capsule and it had just slotted into the holding mechanism of the chute, ratcheting into place with an awful sound of finality.
Also, the feeling of wrongness and of being trapped was just suddenly a hundred times worse than it had been, the situation the same as it had been in that Prison Island cell. And with Maria and Amy stuck on Earth and Sonic and Tails still likely helplessly lost in the engine rooms, there would be no one coming to help him soon.
"Oh, perfect. Thank you so much for the demonstration, Shadow," Robotnik purred.
"Of what, your Chaos containment field?" Shadow snarled. "Well, congratulations. And now you better stop the escape capsule launch, or else the Emerald you're so desperate for will be shot into space and explode with me."
"Ah, no, you don't understand," Robotnik replied serenely while Shadow could hear the expulsion mechanisms powering up, his heart rate skyrocketing. "I meant a demonstration of the falsity of this Emerald."
"...what?" Shadow managed, throat abruptly dry. This was too much. This was exactly like the time Maria had been shot, and he was exactly as helpless as back then.
"You see, Shadow, I figured either my grandfather or that fox brat would try and dupe me with something like this," Robotnik said, a passing burning meteor fragment in front of the window briefly illuminating his face in a hellish red glow, glasses like black holes where eyes should be. "A false Emerald, almost impossible to tell apart from the original, but constructed to wreak havoc upon that beautiful instrument of destruction aboard this station, the Eclipse Cannon," he spoke like giving a lecture, grandly gesturing over to the screen where the countdown was running toward Liechtenstein's demise, 33 minutes currently remaining.
"But of course, no simulacrum could ever possess quite the amount of power a real Emerald could hold - hence, the only way to tell them apart is to subject them to a test of strength. If that were a real Chaos Emerald, you could have teleported out of that pod and the stone would not have been lost," Robotnik explained, sounding as satisfied as any psychopath explaining how their latest death contraption worked. He stroked his moustache while regarding Shadow with an overbearing smugness. "My own version of you equipped with a real Emerald managed it just fine."
Shadow only stared back at him, motionless. There was no point in fighting. He would go up in flames even before Liechtenstein did, or whatever country or Zone Maria's cousin would decide to hit next. He would die before even having his seventh birthday - or, for Chaos' sake, graduating High School. Before ever having taken Sally to Prom.
Die and never see Maria again.
And he hadn't even managed to protect her.
Shadow fixed his gaze upon Robotnik, refusing to not at least face his death. "I should have shot you the first second I ever laid eyes on you."
"Yes," Robotnik nodded. "You should have."
And he pressed the button for launch.
To be continued…
Well, it's been ages again, but that's unfortunately working life - but hey, I finished my Pokémon/Sonic crossover in the meantime, so that means the intervalls might decrease just EVER SO SLIGHTLY (I try, lol). That said, this chapter was super hard to write, but I really hope you enjoyed it - would love to hear what you think! If you read, please review :D