Chapter Text
Prologue
An alarm went off.
Dr. Eggman, dressed in his Egg-PJs, looked up from his computer (this one was actually
not
an Egg-Computer, the only one in his whole lair!) and to another screen, where the reason for the alarm was displayed.
R
EMINDER: Adorable Evil Niece
“You have a niece?” Orbot asked. He folded his hands together, completing the PB, J, and white bread sandwich. “You have a…” he paused, tilting his head. “Brother? I didn’t even know.”
Eggman stood up, and clicked a few buttons on his wrist controller, in the direction of the screen. In a flicker, it went from ‘REMINDER’ to security camera footage of the front base. Sure enough, there was his brother’s ground effect vehicle, bobbing up and down in the ocean besides his base.
“...That should have set off alarms,” Orbot noted. He set the sandwich down on a plate and reached into the potato chips cupboard.
“You’re just full of insight,” Eggman groused, stretching. His back cricked, painfully so, and he slouched forward in recoil. “I turned off the alarm so
Sonic
wouldn’t notice.”
Orbot leaned forward. “You don’t want him to know about your… brother?”
Eggman adjusted his glasses, and straightened his moustache. “No. My brother’s barely even evil—he’s only an accountant!—and Sonic would probably make him cry. Which is hilarious, but, bad example for my—”
Someone got out of one of the GEV’s two seats. A little girl with messy hair, blonde, and an orange jumpsuit.
“Adorable evil niece!” Eggman squealed. Suddenly, he was running, and in moments he arrived at the elevator. His wrist-computer sent the order: Ground floor!
Orbot, just barely, squeezed between the slamming-shut doors. “But, Dr. Eggman, how can you set a bad example for your
evil
niece?” he asked, earnestly.
Dr. Eggman only hummed in response, looking around the lift.
Cubot… was
already
in the elevator. He was holding a present larger than his head, with black paper and red ribbon.
…Eggman gave that a double take. “Cubot, why do you have…” he pointed, vaguely.
“For my aunt!” the robot answered. Whatever passed for a brain couldn’t consider the insanity of
that
statement.
“...Okay.” Dr. Eggman said, flatly.. Then, he reached down and took the gift for himself, because he couldn’t just
not
have a present for his niece, could he?
Eggman resumed his humming, and then the lift stopped; ground floor. Doors open, and out he went, again running as fast as he could to the main entrance… which was all of twenty feet away. Still, by the time he reached, he was panting, groaning, and the only thing that kept him from complaining to his bots were his struggling lungs.
As always, he took the time to compose himself, before touching the panel and opening the door.
The enormous slab of metal slid into the ground in a quarter second, somehow silent despite its
vast
momentum, and left the island around Eggman’s lair entirely exposed.
And there she was.
Tanya Robotnik blinked repeatedly, sleepily, up at her new uncle.
Behind that, Jimwell Robotnik’s GEV started up, skimming over the waves forward. It turned a full 90 degrees, then accelerated to full speed, and
vanished
across the horizon.
“He doesn’t like me,” Eggman mused, watching him leave in such a hurry.
“Then how come he gave you his daughter?” Cubot asked, looking up.
Sounds of shearing metal distracted the robots from his conversation—but not Eggman, who plowed ahead regardless. “Evil-Child Protective Services came in and saw that he wasn’t teaching her to be
evil
enough.”
Orbit’s hands clasped each other again. “And you were worried about setting a bad example.”
Eggman scowled, and looked away. “Shut it, defect.”
A rectangular metal panel from the seventh floor of Eggman’s lair fell, and a corner of it took Tanya on the top of the head. She fell to the ground in a heap. The panel, though, it bounced, and landed atop her, curling her arms up and making it look like she was cuddling it.
“Uh oh.”
I fought to open my eyes. Oh, did I fight. They
really
didn’t want to open. But I managed it.
…white room, sleek, metal. A modern-looking hospital bed and gown, but the building around me? Not modern at all.
The
Future.
I guess I did end up dying, then.
Sorry, everyone
.
I
probably
died, that is. This body—it wasn’t quite like Tanya Degurechaff’s. Too short,
somehow,
but it still seemed to have a little bit more weight. Overall… I looked pretty healthy.
Except for my head. It
hurt
.
“Look at that!” someone said to my right. And I did, I looked over.
It was more like a great effort that managed to make my head flop to the side just barely, but I did manage to look.
…a couch? This isn’t a hospital. There’s only the one bed—this room is
massive
—and there’s a couch facing an enormous holographic (future!) screen. On that screen is a… brain scan?
I shifted under my sheets, and felt something shoved up against my armpit. Looking over revealed a small,
very
soft plushie of a maid.
“The cerebral cortex!” the mad scientist man said aloud. “Look at it. It’s hyper developed, especially in the long term memory areas. Hypothesizing: Tanya—”
He knows my name?
“—has probably woken up with an entirely new set of memories in her brain. A new life.
What.
“Is that really possible, Dr. Eggman?” said another voice, robotic, coming from too low on the couch for me to see.
Dr. Egg—?
“Well, yeah, anything’s possible. I wrote a paper about people being reincarnated once. We’d need to do a full brain scan, but it looks like she
kept
her memories instead of overwriting them. How interesting!”
…and he was right, too. I remembered… god, remembering
hurt.
I remembered an… evil… orphanage?
What kind of world is this?
I blinked, and the conversation jumped ahead, and I had rolled on to my side, squeezing the plush up against my chin.
Did I just… fall asleep?
The screen wasn’t a brainscan anymore, but pictures of—of me, yes, I remembered…
I winced.
“I wonder what she’s like. Jimwell kept telling me that Tanya was
boring
. And he’s an accountant! He probably just didn’t know her well.”
Hurting or not, I had to figure out a plan, not just drifting through the moment. What—who is this Dr. Eggman?
Ivo Robotnik. Mad scientist, engineer, CEO, world-class villain.
Evil must mean something different in this world…
He fought Team Sonic, and the names of those irritating rodents—
Animals? Literally? Like cartoons…
—flickered before me.
I’ve got it,
I realized.
The perfect plan. I’ll help Ivo defeat Sonic once and for all, and then, I can betray him and steal the family fortune. Then I can live a quiet, peaceful life.
“I make the best plans,” I mumbled aloud, by mistake, muffled by the maid’s hair pressed against my mouth.
Dr. Eggman yelped, and turned. “She’s awake!”