Chapter Text
Knuckles found himself in a mysterious void with none other than the Master Emerald staring him in the face. Its light was all he saw in the seemingly endless blackness. The last thing he remembered was being in bed, so that meant he was dreaming? It didn’t quite feel like a dream, though. He felt awake and lucid.
A peach-colored, teenage echidna girl emerged from the darkness on the opposite side of the gem. He stared at her quizzically as she approached the Emerald and spoke. “Last survivor of our clan, brave guardian, it is time for you to return to your duties and keep our most sacred possession safe from those who would abuse its power.” She was looking at him, but he couldn’t get a read on how much she actually saw him.
“I don’t understand,” he nervously told her. “The Master Emerald is gone. No one can reach it.”
She shook her head. “It is perhaps the most vulnerable it has ever been since we first sealed it away.”
Knuckles couldn’t help but be skeptical. “How can that be? Last time I saw it, Eggman nearly got it. Sonic used it. It’s more vulnerable than that?”
“It is still difficult for me to reach you,” she explained as her voice started fading and she and the Emerald started to turn translucent. “Answers can wait, but now you must prepare!”
As soon as she was gone, he found himself jolted awake in his bedroom. But it felt like he had already been awake? In all his years, he couldn’t recall a dream that had felt like that. He checked the time to find that he had slept somewhat later than usual, but all of Team Sonic’s sleep schedule was pretty informal anyway. He anxiously got up and went about getting ready for the day. After an abbreviated version of his morning exercise routine, he hastily made his way over to the kitchen for breakfast, hoping to talk to the others about his strange experience.
He arrived to see that Sonic and Amy were just cleaning up after their own meal. Or rather, that’s what it appeared that they had been doing before whichever one of them had interrupted so they could intimately huddle together. As they heard his entrance, they turned to greet him, with Sonic keeping an arm around Amy’s shoulder.
The blue hedgehog nodded to him. “Morning, sleepyhead.”
The pink hedgehog waved cheerfully. “Morning, Knux!”
“Good morning,” the echidna replied halfheartedly. He wasn’t exactly a fan of the awkward feeling of disrupting them at the best of times, and currently his mind was still hung up on his unusual dream.
“Did you happen to see if Silver’s up yet?” asked Amy. “I don’t know if he remembered to set his alarm, and we should be leaving pretty soon to get there in time for his appointment.”
“In time to get there and wait for an hour,” Sonic snarked. “Doctors are always behind schedule.”
“That’s why you get an appointment early in the day,” said Amy. “Like we did.”
“I didn’t even pay attention to Silver’s room on my way here,” admitted Knuckles.
Amy looked over at Sonic. “Dear, could you go knock on his door?”
“C’mon, Ames,” Sonic whined. “We can let him sleep another 15 minutes.”
She removed herself from his embrace and glared at him. “You just want us to try and finish-”
“We were at the final boss when you made us stop last night,” Sonic pleaded. “Don’t you want to see the ending? You’re the one who picked it. We’ll beat it in one try, and we can skip the credits, and-”
Amy shook her head in frustration. “It can wait until after we get back. Silver is more important.”
Knuckles started to tune out their argument. After spending so much time living with Sonic, Tails, and now Amy and Silver, as well as having fully settled into life outside Angel Island, he had started to slowly come to the realization that… the blue hedgehog could be really grating sometimes.
Of course, when facing down powerful threats with countless lives on the line, Sonic was a brave, cunning, and capable hero that Knuckles unquestioningly trusted with his life, but there was a lot of time in between facing down such threats. During that time, Sonic could be lazy, childish, and unfocused. It hadn’t felt like much of an issue at first, but it was starting to feel as if milestones like moving into their HQ building and cementing his relationship with Amy had somehow only worsened his behavior.
“...Silver can just lift your car over the traffic,” Sonic was saying. “You can get to Station Square way faster than the app says.”
“I’ll check on Silver,” Knuckles offered. He resigned that he wasn’t going to be talking about his dream until Silver and Amy were out the door. He’d probably be better off waiting for Tails to be up anyway.
“Nah, fine, I’ll do it,” Sonic relented. With a blur, he disappeared from the kitchen.
“So, how are you today?” Amy tiredly asked the echidna.
He shrugged and made his way over to the freezer to start preparing his meal. “Ask me after breakfast.”
He’d barely opened the door when he heard Sonic announce his return. “I think I woke him up. He should be heading over.”
“I should go get ready and meet him out front,” said Amy. She started to leave, but ran into the youngest team member in the doorway. “Oh, Tails. You’re up early.”
“Morning, Amy,” the fox replied with a yawn. He looked around and gave similar greetings to Sonic and Knuckles before explaining. “I was running some analysis algorithms overnight and I guess I was eager to get back to them.” He held up his tablet. “I started the final compilation first thing when I woke up, and it should be finishing up any time now.”
“You working too hard again?” asked Sonic teasingly.
Knuckles placed his frozen pancakes into the microwave and started the timer.
Tails shook his head. “This might be really important. It might also be nothing. That’s why I’m so eager to find out. It’s-”
Before he could get into his explanation, Silver groggily arrived and tried to politely scoot past the fox. “Morning, guys.”
“Morning,” everyone replied.
The psychokinetic hedgehog went over and opened the freezer himself.
“What are you doing?” asked Amy impatiently.
“Making breakfast?” Silver answered in confusion.
“You’re supposed to fast because they’re probably going to have to put you under,” Amy explained. “Don’t you remember that your appointment is today?”
“Well, yeah. Sonic mentioned it when he woke me up, but I guess I forgot about the fasting part.”
“Didn’t he remind you last night?” She turned to Sonic annoyedly, who looked away in shame. “Didn’t you?”
“I, uh, thought one of you was going to do it.” the blue hedgehog nervously scratched his head.
“So I’ll have to eat afterwards?” asked Silver.
“We’ll stop for ice cream on the way back,” explained Amy. “You won’t be up to solid food for a little bit.”
“Oh, right,” said Silver. “So…?”
“We’ll head out in a few,” said Amy. “You can wait for me by the car or we can head down together after I finish getting ready.”
“Thanks again for doing this for him, Ames,” Sonic told her as Silver weighed his options. “I know we dump a lot of this ‘responsible adult’ stuff on you on top of all the admin and logistics work you do for the team.”
By now the echidna was digging into his breakfast. “I would’ve been happy to do it if you’d had me get up earlier.”
Amy waved him off. “It’s fine. I like having a break from the admin and logistics stuff. I’ll take getting an excuse to just hang out with any of you over day-to-day paperwork any day. This’ll be fun. I’m not the one having a tooth pulled. It’s just driving and being there to make sure Silver’s a good patient and takes his-”
“Whoa!” Tails exclaimed as he stared at his tablet. “Sorry to interrupt, but I think we definitely need to go figure out what’s going on with these energy readings in person.”
“Something big?” asked Sonic.
The fox rushed over to the cupboards and grabbed a protein bar. “I need to start doing pre-flight checks. I’ll explain on the way. How soon can you guys meet me in the hangar?”
Sensing genuine urgency in the fox’s tone, Knuckles clumsily started shoveling the rest of his breakfast into his mouth. “Just give me a few.”
Sonic nodded. “I’m ready to go whenever. I can go help you out with the-”
“I’m good,” insisted Tails, understandably reluctant to have Sonic attempt to contribute to technical matters. ”It'll be at least five minutes before we’re ready for takeoff. Just take your time guys.”
“Should we cancel my appointment so I can help?” asked Silver.
Tails shrugged. “I still don’t really know what exactly this is, but I doubt it’s something the three of us can’t handle if we’re careful.
“OK, guess we’re leaving HQ empty for a bit,” said Amy. She and Tails went out to the hall together while Sonic, Knuckles and Silver lingered in the kitchen. “So where exactly are you guys going?” she could be heard asking the fox as they moved away.
“Just over to Seaside Hill,” Tails explained. “Won’t take long to get there at the speed we’ll be going.”
“Alright, so what’s the deal?” Sonic asked once they were airborne.
“Well, yesterday the global sensor network started picking up anomalous energy signatures,” the fox explained. “Even with all seven Chaos Emeralds accounted for and captured, it’s not uncommon for strange signatures to pop up from time to time. They usually go away pretty quickly, but these were sticking around long enough to start an analysis to try and pinpoint their origin and nature, so I figured I probably should.”
“Would G.U.N. have also been doing that?” asked Knuckles.
“I’m sure scientists from all over had their eyes on this, but if G.U.N. found what I did, they didn’t seem to have mobilized to do anything about it last I checked.”
“Well, what did you find?” asked Sonic anxiously.
“There were seven energy signatures that all popped up at once, scattered all over the continent. They seem to have properties similar to Chaos Emeralds, but they’re different enough that the specific calibrations to track Chaos Emeralds weren’t picking them up.”
“So we’re going to one of the spots?” Sonic indulged Tails, knowing him well enough to expect that there was going to be more to it.
“One of the spots, yes,” replied Tails. “The last one that hasn’t been… collected yet.”
“Collected?”
“Having isolated the anomalies’ energy signatures, I mapped out their locations over the course of the time they’ve been here. It looks like two separate entities have been gathering them up, and as of now, they each have three.”
“Entities? How do you know they aren’t just converging on their own?” asked Knuckles.
“The way they move; they navigate the terrain like they can think. One set of them flies low and weaves through mountains and optimizes wind currents, and the other set… well they move on the ground sort of like Sonic would.”
That got an eyebrow raise from the hedgehog, and presumably the echidna seated behind him as well. “Like me, how?”
“Moving along at super speed, using roads and paths to keep momentum up, that kind of thing.”
“And we’re going to beat these two… people? to the last energy signature?” asked Sonic.
“That’s right. They both seem to know where the energy sources are, but don’t know the geography of the land. They try to go between them as the crow flies and adjust course when they find obstacles. Given that and our starting location, we should barely beat them to Seaside Hill at this rate.”
“So we get there and we need to be prepared for-” Sonic found his two companions finishing his sentence with him in unison. “-anything.” He smiled at the pleasure of being on the same wavelength as the people he cared about. “So what’s the E.T.A. then?”
“If we’ve got time,” Knuckles interjected, “I also wanted to ask you abou-”
“Uh, we’re here,” Tails announced as he slowed the plane to a hover and began descending onto the expansive beach.
The trio hopped out and Tails led them to the treeline just a little ways inland. In a small clearing they found what they were looking for. It was a turquoise gem, of a similar size and radiance to a Chaos Emerald, but shaped differently. Sonic didn’t know the proper terminology, but the Chaos Emeralds were more… gem shaped? While this was more rectangular.
Sonic excitedly raced ahead to pick it up. “Don’t-” Tails tried to say, but Sonic was (of course) too fast. He held the gem in his hand and turned back to see the fox had set his backpack down. Tails then pulled a hazmat suit halfway out of it and defeatedly pointed to it.
“Well, it seems safe,” Sonic sheepishly pointed out as he inspected the jewel. “Doesn’t seem to be letting me do Chaos Emerald things though.” He raised it to his face for a closer examination. “Whatever energy it has, I don’t feel much of anything.” He tossed it to Tails, who nervously caught it. “So what do you think? Now we wait for whatever’s coming for it to turn up?”
Tails shook his head. “We should take it back to HQ. It’ll be easier to defend on our own turf, and it’ll buy me some time to experiment with tapping into its energy.”
The fox had barely finished his sentence, when a lavender-colored blur rushed out of the foliage and knocked him down. His attacker paused just long enough to swipe the gem and give a menacing glance at Sonic and Knuckles. The hedgehog was caught off guard when he recognized what he saw. It was the cat they had briefly met when they had journeyed to another dimension to stop Solaris. Blaze the Cat: Silver’s closest companion that was believed to now be forever unreachable back in her home dimension.
But curiously, she showed no sign of recognizing Team Sonic. She hadn’t been part of the timeline alteration, so her memory should’ve remained intact, but that was clearly not the case. As she tried to run off, Sonic’s instincts took over. She had attacked his little brother, and without knowing what she wanted with the gem, he couldn’t blindly trust that she’d had a good reason for doing so. He didn’t personally know her like Silver did.
With a quick glance back to make sure Knuckles was tending to Tails, Sonic was off in pursuit. She was indeed fast, but he was faster if he pushed himself to his limit. Her meager head start was erased within a few hundred yards and he called out to her. “Hey, what gives?”
“Back off!” she snapped. “Leave the Emeralds alone!”
After another stretch of sprinting through the trees, he was within reach of her. “If you’d asked nicely and explained yourself, we’d have probably just given it to you.” He tackled her to the ground. “But I can’t just let you hit and run like that.”
He felt a sudden burning next to his chest that forced him to push away from her. She sprung to her feet and took a fighting stance as fire emitted from her fists. “Don’t test me. These gems don’t belong in your world.”
Sonic prepared himself for a fight, but didn’t want to escalate any further if he didn’t have to. “Maybe not, but why take such a violent approach to getting them out of it?”
She studied him nervously. “You… really aren’t after them?” She unlit her fists and relaxed her body slightly, but was still clearly on edge.
Sonic raised his hands. “We just wanted to see what they were. We didn’t expect an angry princess from another dimension to jump us for one.”
A scowl returned to her face just before she lunged at him. Sonic realized his mistake as he began dodging her rapid, fiery blows.
“Who are you really?!” she demanded. “You’re from my world aren’t you?! Are you with the pirates?! You almost managed to trick me!”
“Yeah, she really has no idea who I am,” he thought. “So from her perspective I shouldn’t have known who she was. Good one, Sonic.” He continued to dodge without striking back as he tried to calm her back down. “Look, I can explain. I think this is all just a big misunderstand-”
She managed to land a hit on the side of his torso and as he was knocked back, he found that he was on fire. He quickly put it out by spinning at high speed, but realized that he wasn’t getting through to her any time soon. “Guess I have to fight back. I’ll try not to hurt her too much, but I need to get her to listen.”
And so the battle began in earnest and Sonic found himself gaining the upper hand after an exchange of speedy blows. While the cat was fast, a competent fighter, and her fire made every potential hit extremely dangerous, he had still faced tougher opponents like Shadow and Metal Sonic. With a decisive strike to her chest, he had her winded.
“Can you please just hear me out?” he asked. “I’m telling you, that-”
Suddenly, a green blur came flying in and dragged Blaze up against a nearby tree. Her attacker was a humanoid robot that looked like some kind of mash-up between a shark and a torpedo. She struggled briefly before her assailant knocked her unconscious with a blow to the head. Sonic rushed in to try and spin attack the machine, but it evidently had some kind of shielding that deflected him away.
As Sonic recovered, the robot quickly retrieved the gems Blaze was carrying. Like the Chaos Emeralds, they all had a uniform size and shape, but varying colors. Sonic quickly sized up his new opponent for any signs of weakness, but didn’t immediately spot any.
The robot turned to him and spoke. Its masculine voice barely sounded synthetic, and its cadence and inflections were natural. “This doesn’t concern your world. Stay outta this.”
Before Sonic could respond to the machine’s apparent sentience, Tails and Knuckles arrived on the scene. His relief at having backup was short-lived, however, when the robot immediately spotted them and charged the echidna before they could act. Knuckles was sent flying, but it looked like the kind of hit the super-tough warrior could brush off. Tails frantically took aim with his disruptor, but the robot dashed around too fast for the fox to track.
In spite of its early advantage, the robot didn’t seem interested in pushing his luck. “Sorry guys, I got places to be.” The mysterious assailant went back to grab the unconscious cat and sped off with her using a jet engine on his back. As Sonic gave chase, the robot addressed him once more. “Heh, you’re pretty fast. Not fast enough, though.” He pulled out the three gems that he’d been holding, then created some kind of portal with the combined power of all seven.
The robot paused at the opening and Sonic tried another desperate attack. He was once again deflected, which bought the robot enough of a window to enter the portal and close it behind to avoid being followed. The hedgehog grunted in anger at the loss before racing back to his companions.