Wow, most of the Kintobor/Robotnik lineage and the add-ins via marriage are deceased. that's...actually kinda sad really.
Kinda explains why Robotnik/Eggman is so focused on building his own giant theme park, homeboy probably never got to experience one with his parents.
Well, the best Google comes up with is a Japanese exploitation movie, a ton of normal people or family tree websites, or the above with slightly altered names. Lessee...
Grotesque Kintobor: The aforementioned gore-sploitation movie.
Stella Bromberg: Tons of normal people hits.
Jessica Fair: Nasa astronaut or British physicist?
James Kintobor: James Barry?
Theodore Kintobor: The eponymous Renaissance "Prince of all Doctors"?
Venus Bludhorn: Keep getting results for "Bluhdorn", no idea.
Zaxxon Pavlov: You gave that one away as a freebie.
Naomi Kintobor: The conspiracy theorist?
Wanda Kinpraw: Scarlet Witch?
Steven Kintobor: Steven Strange?
Nemo Kinpraw: Doctor Warpnik. AKA: The guy even the Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog version of Robotnik found confusing and insane.
Ehh, I think it's more likely that he never got to go to the theme park and got a complex about it because his parents were bad people. While I can't directly substantiate that theory, I'd like to think that a decent set of parents would notice the gigantic red flags.
Well, the best Google comes up with is a Japanese exploitation movie, a ton of normal people or family tree websites, or the above with slightly altered names. Lessee...
Good job on trying! However, out of those, only Nemo was correct. "Bluhdorn" was the correct spelling there, not "Bludhorn".
Don't beat yourself up over not getting them. I imagined these would be rather difficult without doing the amount of research into SEGA history as I have. A couple are also just based on word association.
Here's a simple* answer key:
Grotesque Kintobor: Grotesque (or "Grotty") was the name of Ivo Robotnik's fraternal twin in the pitch bible for an unmade Sonic spinoff TV show, Sonia the Hedgehog. Sonia's character was eventually recycled for Sonic Underground instead.
Stella Bromberg: "Stella" is a character from Alex Kidd. "Bromberg" was from Irving Bromberg, one of the founders of Standard Games. That company was later known as Service Games... which was later shortened to SEGA!
Jessica Fair: Jessica was picked to go with James. Jessie & James! "Fair" was the maiden name of Chris Thorndyke's mom and Sam Speed's surname before he changed it.
James Kintobor: The one and only Jim Carrey!
Theodore Kintobor: Named after Theodore Roosevelt, whom Eggman owes his signature looks to.
Venus Bluhdorn: "Venus" was the prototype name of the SEGA Nomad. SEGA liked to name their projects after stars and constellations. Charles Bluhdorn was the CEO of Gulf and Western, a conglomerate that owned both Paramount and SEGA.
Zaxxon Pavlov: ZAXXON was a SEGA arcade game. Thought it'd be funny if Zaxxon was the Overlander version of Jackson.
Naomi Kintobor: The NAOMI (New Arcade Operation Machine Idea) was a SEGA arcade board with many similarities to the Dreamcast, which made porting games between them a breeze!
Wanda Kinpraw: To go with Warpnik's fish theme, "Wanda" is derived from the comedy A Fish Called Wanda.
Steven Kintobor: "Steven" was a play on Steve Eggman from Sonic Boom, who was actually a robot named Morpho.
Wow, most of the Kintobor/Robotnik lineage and the add-ins via marriage are deceased. that's...actually kinda sad really.
Kinda explains why Robotnik/Eggman is so focused on building his own giant theme park, homeboy probably never got to experience one with his parents.
According to some side stuff in Sonic Frontiers, his parents were more focused on his dead cousin Maria for some reason. Also his brother Colin was a dick, from what we see in Archie.
According to some side stuff in Sonic Frontiers, his parents were more focused on his dead cousin Maria for some reason. Also his brother Colin was a dick, from what we see in Archie.
Here's what the memo said: [I never really knew my cousin, Maria. Everyone spoke of her like she was very special. All that love for someone who was gone when I was! Right! There! But I have to wonder. Back then, was she anything like Sage is now?]
My interpretation was that everyone in his family was in a very long period mourning over Maria's loss, to the extent that Ivo was (or at least felt like he was) being emotionally neglected. It was a surprisingly revealing memo when SEGA usually stays away from that sort of thing.
Here's what the memo said: [I never really knew my cousin, Maria. Everyone spoke of her like she was very special. All that love for someone who was gone when I was! Right! There! But I have to wonder. Back then, was she anything like Sage is now?]
My interpretation was that everyone in his family was in a very long period mourning over Maria's loss, to the extent that Ivo was (or at least felt like he was) being emotionally neglected. It was a surprisingly revealing memo when SEGA usually stays away from that sort of thing.
Eggman being Eggman, that midline of "I was right there" can be interpreted sympathetically or negatively AFAIK. That he feels neglected, or that he was being a selfish attention-hog when his family was in mourning. Then again, Frontiers Eggman gets unusually introspective whenever he's alone.
Eggman being Eggman, that midline of "I was right there" can be interpreted sympathetically or negatively AFAIK. That he feels neglected, or that he was being a selfish attention-hog when his family was in mourning. Then again, Frontiers Eggman gets unusually introspective whenever he's alone.
Eggman never once mentions his parents, but brings up the grandfather he probably never spent much time with as someone he greatly admired. That's telling, I think.
Here's what the memo said: [I never really knew my cousin, Maria. Everyone spoke of her like she was very special. All that love for someone who was gone when I was! Right! There! But I have to wonder. Back then, was she anything like Sage is now?]
My interpretation was that everyone in his family was in a very long period mourning over Maria's loss, to the extent that Ivo was (or at least felt like he was) being emotionally neglected. It was a surprisingly revealing memo when SEGA usually stays away from that sort of thing.
He really is a sad, lonely man when you think about it. Isolated by his family, Isolated by his intellect, Isolated by the fact that his efforts to just be recognized as existing has ended up making him Public Enemy #1 as far as Mobians are concerned.
Eggman being Eggman, that midline of "I was right there" can be interpreted sympathetically or negatively AFAIK. That he feels neglected, or that he was being a selfish attention-hog when his family was in mourning. Then again, Frontiers Eggman gets unusually introspective whenever he's alone.
On the other hand, most of those memos have him being a lot more introspective than usual, and it might be him poking at the reason he's as attention grabbing as he is. It's almost certainly not totally that, but...
What's your opinion? Vote now: Silver's Spring [Silver the Hedgehog SI], Birdland [Battle Bird Cockatiel SI], Valtron Child [Moebius SI], Wango Tangle [Tangle the Lemur SI], Hyperst...
strawpoll.com
Silver's Spring -In the year 3437 PXE, Silver the Hedgehog is the last hope for his doomed timeline. After scouring the ruins of Mobius for clues as to the location of Little Planet and the Seven Time Stones, Silver performed chronos control to travel over two hundred back into the past, at the tail end of the First Robotnik War. More even-tempered and pragmatic than the Silver of the Prime Zone, this psychokinetic Knight of Chronos will do whatever it takes to change the course of Mobius from a bad future into a good one. Even if he must reach beyond the boundaries of time itself to make his dream come true.
Birdland -Fritz the Cockatiel is among the flying elite of the Battle Bird Armada, a militant order whose wings of terror spread across the skies of Mobius! Taken away from his family at a young age due to his high potential as an asset to the Armada, Fritz grew up knowing that his only desire was to break free from his cage. While outwardly espousing a loyalty to his Battle Lord and his desire to reclaim the lost glory of their Babylonian ancestors, Fritz thinks the Battlekukku XV a bit too coo-coo to be calling the shots. He and his esteemed Flying Circus Squadron remain loyal for now, but their maverick strikes against the nominally-allied Robotnik regime has put them all on the propeller's edge of being declared Babylon Rogues.
Valtron Child -On the opposite end of the Cosmic Interstate from the Mobius we might recognize lies its grim counterpart, a zone where good is bad, and right is wrong. Virtue is vice, and vice is virtue. The era of the Great Peace, a temporary break in what has otherwise been a history plagued by ceaseless strife, was shattered by the destructive acts of one Sonic the Hedgehog and his Suppression Squad. The Principality of Mercia in Eurish employed draconian laws and shows of force against the populace to weather the waves of anarchy that Sonic had left in his wake, only for Prince Robert to be overthrown in a peasant revolt led by an enigmatic revolutionary named Jean Valtron. Chances of reform and liberty under his sapphire blue banner were quickly crushed, as Valtron tightened the noose around the very concept of hope and instituted a reign of terror worse than anyone could have ever imagined.
Wango Tangle -Unexpectedly dropped into the Great Forest with the body of Tangle, this SI has been rolling with the punches and punching the clocks of badniks with the gigantic fist on her stretchy tail! Going by a tweaked alias to go with the new identity and playing coy with her (somewhat convoluted) origins, Jeanne the Lemur has nonetheless turned into a core member of the Knothole Freedom Fighters. Being much older than the others in the group, if only in the mental sense, Jeanne finds herself becoming a rock of stability in a group of child soldiers going through puberty. If that wasn't difficult enough, that damn skunk is one more ill-conceived pass away from Jeanne getting court-martialed for breaking his nose.
Hyperstone Rhapsody -At the juncture zone between the Cosmic Interstate and a multiverse in which it's ninja turtles all the way down, an oddball everyman arrives in late 80s New York with nothing but an alien artifact and the clothes on his back. Shoved into the Technodrome's waste disposal by an over-eager Bebop & Rocksteady, the SI is submerged in ooze within close proximity to alien spores and a broken set of the Shredder's armor. Reanimated as a shellshocked, arboreal mutant with dominion over the plant kingdom, John Evergreen's only goal is to protect the Earth against the myriad threats pointing daggers at it from Dimension X. If anyone want get in his way, then COWABUNGA IT IS.
The closing date for voting is when Chapter 31 is posted.
hmm between wango tangle or hyperstone rapsody....but I think i'll go with...
Wango Tangle -Unexpectedly dropped into the Great Forest with the body of Tangle, this SI has been rolling with the punches and punching the clocks of badniks with the gigantic fist on her stretchy tail! Going by a tweaked alias to go with the new identity and playing coy with her (somewhat convoluted) origins, Jeanne the Lemur has nonetheless turned into a core member of the Knothole Freedom Fighters. Being much older than the others in the group, if only in the mental sense, Jeanne finds herself becoming a rock of stability in a group of child soldiers going through puberty. If that wasn't difficult enough, that damn skunk is one more ill-conceived pass away from Jeanne getting court-martialed for breaking his nose.
Wango Tangle -Unexpectedly dropped into the Great Forest with the body of Tangle, this SI has been rolling with the punches and punching the clocks of badniks with the gigantic fist on her stretchy tail! Going by a tweaked alias to go with the new identity and playing coy with her (somewhat convoluted) origins, Jeanne the Lemur has nonetheless turned into a core member of the Knothole Freedom Fighters. Being much older than the others in the group, if only in the mental sense, Jeanne finds herself becoming a rock of stability in a group of child soldiers going through puberty. If that wasn't difficult enough, that damn skunk is one more ill-conceived pass away from Jeanne getting court-martialed for breaking his nose.
As an update, I am calling the vote early because my muse did a thing and wrote over 3000 words in a day again, for the second time this month. Readers will be recieving Wango Tangle in the near future and one other What If Bonus I finished yesterday, before resuming our regularly-scheduled Ruby Haze.
This Bonus Bonus Chapter will be posted tonight, pending the accessibility of beta readers looking it over for typos and errors.
It was a cool, quiet night in the African shrublands when we stopped the Neutrinos' flying convertible over a blighted hole in the ground that was once a major mining complex. At least, I had to assume it was fairly quiet, until a bright red hotrod burst through it with a radical roar of its engines and a transwarp vortex from Dimension X killed the silence.
"What the @#$% is that!?" I heard one of the mine workers called out from below.
The mine worker that was still working.
I frowned. Not that anyone could tell with my wooden faceplate on.
"It's a flying car!" shouted another one of the miners with grossly inadequate protection.
"And it's full of freaks!" shouted one of the many armed guards in military fatigues with Null Corp insignias. "FIRE! FIRE!"
I had to assume they were speaking French, Swahili, or any of the other local languages, but after being exposed to transwarp particles it all sounded English to my ears. That was convenient, certainly, but what wasn't convenient is that this allegedly abandoned mine was still in use. 'Arisianal' nothing, this was an industrial-scale operation to extract raw uranium out of Central Africa and into the international black market.
"Are you sure this is the mine we're seeking?" the vocoded voice of black and gold robot in the driver's seat tiredly intoned next to me, loud enough that he could be heard over the bullets bouncing off the hovercraft. "It appears to be occupied!"
For all of his mechanical aspects he'd taken on after his incident with the mentawave, Professor Honeycutt's weariness about engaging in violence was all too genuine.
Our entrance was anything but subtle. I thought subtlety would be redundant, what with us being too odd and too noisy to benefit from stealth for more than five seconds. Honeycutt's mastery of transdimensional travel meant he'd triangulated a way straight to the goods. That way, we didn't have to wade through the Congolese army and hordes of suspiciously well-armed American tourists that happened to pick a classified uranium mine as their vacation spot. I'd overlooked the possibility that somebody else besides the United States got to it first, on the account that such an idea was patently ridiculous.
Yet here we were, being attacked by Cold War leftovers benefitting from Null's patronage. Clearly, the shadowy international conglomerate didn't know when to make way for the mutants and other strangeness.
"This is definitely Shinkolobwe!" I answered, as I uncoiled a long vine from my body onto a crane and swung down to the ground with a flying kick into the nearest mine guard.
"Then why are they here, shooting at us?"
I raised my arms and took down a corporate hatchetman with thorn flechettes.
"They're here for the same reason we are! Illegal extraction! Let's not waste any time for those of us with a low tolerance for radiation!"
The Fugitoid landed the hotrod in the nearest open area, from which the rest of our strike force disembarked. I'd have to thank the Neutrinos for the free ride some time, once I got them out of prison and gave them their homeworld back.
"Oh, dear!" Honeycutt tutted, switching his fine manipulators out for a pair of nonlethal stun cannons. "Please, do not resist!"
I felt bad dragging Honeycutt all this way to do something he wasn't comfortable doing, especially with this being his first experience visiting Earth, but you couldn't save the world without cracking a few uranium mines.
"Never thought we'd be headin' to Zaire!" the green frog man in a floral shirt, shorts, and shades commented with his typical drawl. He hopped out of the backseat and gave his amphibious legs a warm-up stretch by kicking the firearms out of the guards' hands.
I was going to correct the Punk Frog on the name of the country, but he was right. This country wouldn't be known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo again for a few more years. Besides, I had to fight off the Null mercs and miners armed with power tools first.
This scheme started when I'd accidentally introduced Krang to the concept of stealing from places besides New York City. Krang chewed Shredder out for getting sewer tunnel vision, and then he began breathing down my neck to find an energy source for the Technodrome from somewhere those turtles wouldn't even think of going to. Chernobyl was less than five years ago, and that made a raid on the USSR for plutonium less than smart. I graciously let General Tragg try his luck against Tomsk-7, which I predicted would get him and his Rock Soldiers crunched. Play my cards right, and this mission will leave me the only person that Krang can rely upon until his new body completes its repairs.
It's a shame the new model won't have extra armor plating around where I'm plotting to stab Krang in the back.
"Never thought I'd be back in Mother Africa!" the South Africa-born, Jamaica-raised wolfman in the other seat muttered. He was a mutant canid with red fur, a black muzzle, and thick dreadlocks with miniature skull accessories. I'd convinced him to switch out his old rags for a dark blue suit that retained his freedom of movement. When he found a target, the wolfman pounced out of the convertible and landed on a soldier of misfortune. "Not a whole lot of good memories, either! What's de orders, boss mon?"
"Dreadmon, slice the phone lines before they call in reinforcements! Honeycutt, fire up the portal generator for Stockman! Genghis, you're with the Foot and I on cleanup!"
Dreadmon took off on all fours, the cursed talisman that transfigured the man into a mutant granting him enough speed to make his task child's play. Genghis Frog pulled out his battle ax and gave it a practice swing through an emplaced gun turret.
"Can't say I'm a big fan of inviting the Shredder's people to this shin-dig, but you haven't steered us Punk Frogs wrong yet! Even if you still look like the jerk who took us for a ride!"
My continued physical deviation from Oroku Saki was doing wonders for my mental health. I began my second life a bloated mass of moss and flesh barely held together by Shredder's armor before the Hyperstone settled. Now I was a semi-stable chimera, more plant than animal, with ridged edges of steel bramble and echoes of Foot martial arts in my turgor memory. The increased mass from my mutation meant many of the techniques I inherited from him became worthless, so one of the first things I did when I got my autonomy back was rebuild my combat style with help from the source.
"We are not that obsessive fool's people," a woman sternly rebuked from inside the trunk.
With the trunk's 4D storage space kicked open, the shadows filled themselves in with the silhouettes of shinobi in black outfits treated to keep out radioactive dust. The ninjas clambered out the back like a multitude of rodeo clowns. Even with their intense discipline limiting their movement as they fought off the security corps, it was evident that these ninja were more lively than their mechanical counterparts in Shredder's employ.
In the center of the group, I could make out a young woman in a black suit, a purple vest, light armor on her joints, and two red sashes. One as a belt, and another as a headband wrapping around her dark hair bob. The woman's stance was imperious by default, and she bore a cool expression of keen, sharpened indifference.
"Karai," I greeted her calmly. "I hope your squad wasn't overly-affected by the--"
Karai cut me off.
"You, Evergreen, would do well not to leave a kunoichi waiting. In the trunk of a car, only to bring us out while we are surrounded by enemies!"
What'd she think I brought her here for?
I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that Karai not only existed in this universe, but could be of use to my plans. The ambitious kunoichi had no love for the man who had driven the Foot into the ground, tried to dissolve the clan out of spite after being sanctioned by the elder council, and replaced the Foot Soldiers of his New York branch with disposable machines. Karai was looking for any advantage she could get to put her Foot back on the map before the Dog Star Gang stamped them out, and that's exactly what I was offering to her. She scratched my back, and I scratched Chien Khan.
At the moment, however, I didn't relish being interrupted!
I identified the spike in rage and stopped so I could find my center.
Okay John, just breathe. Carbon dioxide in, oxygen out.
"We got held up." That was one way to describe a quantum drive-by from Dirtbag & Groundchuck. I brought my hands together and did a short bow. "My apologies for the inconvenience, Jounin-san. I'll make sure to add an extra zero to your paycheck."
Karai's anger was mollified, and she dropped the issue by dropping a gunman with a handful of shurikens. Dreadmon came to a stop next to us, a sour look on his face.
"De phone lines are cut, Evargreen. Ain't nobody's gonna be calling for backup now."
The wolf mutant spared a sympathetic glance to the workers we'd had to fight off with this mission, before using his speed to rush a soldier with a machine gun. Couldn't have anyone calling this in, a much less impossible task in this decade than mine.
Ahh, the wonders of a world predating the mass adoption of cell phones.
In case anyone tried to call them, an illegal uranium mine not picking up the phone was also a cause for alarm. So we had to work fast. Honeycutt attuned the transmatter projector on the hood of the car so that Stockman could egress from Dimension X next.
"You said the Earthlings used the uranium for fission plants?" Honeycutt said, scandalized.
Another vine extended from my shoulder to bludgeon a line of men with a sandbag. I was resistant to radiation, but I didn't want to risk any unforeseen side effects from rooting myself to the contaminated soil. Karai's choice to not wear a mask on a mission to the uranium mine that fed the Manhattan Project was questionable at best.
"Among other uses. Unfortunately, Professor, fission is the best energy production method we've figured out thus far. And many of them still burn coal because it's readily available."
"Simply dreadful. You don't suppose I could leave them the blueprints for cold fusion when we're done? Or perhaps another adjacent country?"
Dreadmon barreled through another soldier, applying slightly more force than strictly required to make them no longer be a threat.
"Maybe after some regime change," Dreadmon snarled. "If we were gonna give anybody de keys to unlimited energy, then Zaire and de RSA should be at de bottom of de list!"
For Dreadmon, whose late father died protesting against the still ongoing Apartheid, this mission cut geographically close to home. He had zero compunctions about helping me clean out a condemned uranium mine in Zaire if it meant I would use my resources to fund "policy changers" in South Africa. The fact that we were fighting Null here too was a side bonus.
"O-of course," Honeycutt said, taken off balance by the normally cool-headed Dreadmon's outburst. "This planet seems to have very different rules from D'Hoonib."
After a few minutes, the mine's security was completely overwhelmed. The workers and guards alike were knocked out and tied up in a corner. I had requested that the Foot bring a signal gun for use before we left, being well aware that the radiation levels in this place were too high for us to leave anyone here overnight.
How many of them signed up for this job without knowing that the mine was lethal?
Considering my previous interactions with Null, I had to guess that Shinkolobwe's extreme conditions were only mentioned in the fine print. Which was written in a language the miners couldn't read, because the miners were going to be paid poverty wages until they keeled over from radiation poisoning anyway.
And people have the nerve to say I'm evil.
One of the tied-down soldiers had enough fight in them to hurl a threat at me, the mutant clearly in charge of this strike. This one wore more badges and insignias than the rest, demarking him as some kind of captain for Null's troubleshooter corps in the Congo.
"When Mr. Null finds out about this, you gene freaks are dead! You hear me?"
I crouched down to stare the captain in the eyes, raising his chin up with the sharpened barb of a taloned hand.
"An interesting choice of words, for someone whose corporate raiders are in no a state to run if I was to begin slicing the throats of every witness here." The man went awfully quiet, becoming petrified as a trickle of blood slipped down his neck. "Like so."
He went from silent to screaming when a hungry vine branched off my arm and absorbed the blood, growing over his face until it wrapped snug around his eyes and mouth.
I cut the stray vine loose and stood up to my full height as I addressed the rest of them.
"Let that be a lesson to all of you! Speak of what you have witnessed at your peril."
There were no more outbursts from the captives after that.
Honeycutt backed the hotrod into the open pit area of the mine and pressed the button on the hovercraft to reopen the vortex. A purple fly man with four arms and a shock of red hair flew out of the portal, followed by hordes and hordes of mousers. These cheap and formidable drones were wasted on the war against Manhattan's rodent population when they still haven't tried putting their trash in garbage bins like civilized people.
By that metric, New York City wasn't a civilized society. Which completely checked out.
"Go, my prettizzz!" Stockman buzzed, a comically large remote control in one hand and a laser rifle he was firing into the air with in the other. "Siezzze the uranium from the minezz so that it can be mine! HEheHEH!"
I sighed, sidestepping a "Stocktech Atomic Mouser" that took a bite out of the ground to gobble up a uranium chunk. Once they'd chewed through the cement put in place when this mine was shut down, the mousers deposited their payloads into a hardened receptacle in the Neutrino car's trunk. We only needed to be here until we got enough raw material to make the reactor we were setting up back in Krang's slice of Dimension X viable.
"Baxter, did you take your medication today?" I asked the mutant fly man.
Dr. Stockman, though turned into a giant, mutated fly man with giant red compound eyes on an insectoid head, still had enough translatable facial features to look guilty.
"Yezzz?" Stockman lied.
"Do you want to take it as a pill or as a needle?" I offered to the destabilized mutant, shaping one of the thorns along my arm into a medicine-laced spike.
"Pill, pill!" Stockman squeaked, as he scrambled to open his lab coat and find his meds.
A few seconds after swallowing the serum capsule, his flight pattern became notably less erratic. He holstered the laser gun and used his two primary hands with full articulation to monitor the mousers on his control deck.
"Feeling better?"
He nodded, readjusting his bright yellow bow tie with the pair of pincered hands poking out of the sides of his lab coat.
"Thank you, Mister Evergreen. My brain chemistry izz approaching normal levelzz again."
Fear makes the medicine go down.
"You still have to take one a day until we work out the bugs in the retromutagen, Stockman. This night isn't going exactly as planned, but we don't need any unexpected incidents."
"Unexpect this, fertilizer breath!"
It was then that, if I was more cosmically aware, I might've started hearing theme music. Instead, my first three indicators that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had arrived were the insult, the bang of a five foot tall turtle landing onto the car hood, and a hardened bo staff thwacking me in the back of the head!
"OW!"
Alas, I had all the averaged-out reflexes of Oroku Saki and a potted plant. Turning around, I could see that the Turtles were well and truly here. Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelango, and Raphael had entered the fray, attacking all of my forces in sight!
There was probably a "TURTLE POWER!" in there, but I missed it due to the head injury.
"The Hamato Clan?! How did you even--?!"
"Cowabunga!" Michelangelo cried, as he swung his nunchucks towards an atomic mouser!
"MICHELANGELO!" the Fugitoid called out, and he used his telescoping limbs to shove the orange-clad turtle out of the way! "THEY'RE RADIOACTIVE!"
Any sense of levity the turtles had going into this died when he saw the ionizing radiation trefoils on the heads of the mousers. As well as the walls.
They were on everything, really. This place was kind of hazardous.
"Uranium!?" Dontatello read out, identifying the element the Mousers were carrying by the indicators Stockman put on them. "Guys, they're trying to make Krang an atom bomb!"
It was a fair assumption to make, but not an accurate one.
"Actually, it's for a--"
"Have you gone nuts?" Leonardo shouted in horror, both of his ninjato pointed towards me. "Nuclear terrorism is too far! Even for you, Eco-Shredder!"
I decided I didn't want to explain anything to them anymore.
"It's Evergreen!"
I let out a roar, and the irradiated ground broke up into flowering green tendrils! Being the closest to me, Donatello was immediately ensnared and hefted up into the air!
"You really had to set him off while I was in vine distance?" Donatello groused.
"Donnie!"
Leonardo did a flying leap so he could cut Donatello free with his ninjato, only to be cut off by Karai's identical set of swords!
"Not a step further, turtle!"
"Karai!? You're in on this, too?"
"You have no comprehension of what the true Foot Clan is involved with!"
Karai led Leonardo away from the main fracas to another section of the mine, presumably for an intense solo duel that'll be laden with romantic tension. With Leo distracted, the rest should be more manageable.
"Everclear over there's really trying to put the rad in radical, huh?" Raphael quipped, his head tilting at an angle towards an unseen audience as he slashed and pruned his way through my spontaneous jungle. "Topical target, too!"
Raphael was then met by a half-hearted ax swing from Genghis Frog, who smacked the red-masked turtle with the blunt side of his weapon.
"Sorry, Raph!" Genghis said. "We're less evil than we look!"
Raphael dodged the next ax swing and brought his sais down to hook around Ghengis' shirt, throwing him onto his back.
"I don't know what made you and the rest of the Punk Frogs throw in your lot with Krang, but hey! Keep fighting like that, and I think I can look past it!"
Michaelangelo drew the short end of the stick. He had to take a couple of Foot goons down on his own, and then had to tango with the Fugitoid.
"Professor Honeycutt!" the empathetic turtle pleaded with him. "You're one of the coolest guys we know from Dimension X! Why are you working with Krang and Evergreen?"
Honeycutt blocked the attacks, but he didn't have the will in him to hit Michaelangelo back.
"I'm sorry, Michelangeo! If only I could explain my motivations to you!"
I shot him an annoyed look.
"Whatever's going on, we can help you out, dude!"
Mikey was struck from behind with a high-speed kick to the shell from Dreadmon.
"No can do, blabba mout! You're only gettin in de way!
Seeing that Dreadmon had the party dude under control, I lowered the vines constricting Donatello down to eye level. The one with the purple mask was the smartest one, that one I knew for certain, so I got straight to the point with what I needed.
"How did you all even GET here?!" I shouted in exasperation. "We're in %$#@ing Zaire!"
"We have a giant, interdimensional cow head in our rolodex! What about you?"
I blinked, unsure if he was making that up. It sounded familiar. Shockingly, a teleporting cow head big enough to swallow the turtles at Point A and spit them out at Point B was the only way I could imagine them going from Manhattan to the Congo on such short notice.
Nonsense like this is why I grow my own stash on the Technodrome.
"…No cows that I don't intend to cut into prime rib later, but Groundchuck will have his time. Care to tell me who told you about this operation?"
"A little bird told us--!" I made the vines constrict harder. "Fine! They were a big and stupid pair of birds named Bebop & Rocksteady!"
Who was dumb enough to tell Bebop & Rocksteady?!
There was only one person who fit the bill.
"Oh, are you kidding me?!"
I could forgive them for turning me into a mutant abomination, considering the long-term benefits, but this is the last straw! Next time I see those two morons, I'm shoving them into the Transmat with the coordinates set to "Surprise me"!
I blasted Donatello's face with paralytic spores, causing him to hack and wheeze while I surfed through the contact list on my alien communicator.
The grotesque utrom warlord appeared on the rounded vidscreen of my comm seconds later, a robotic Foot Soldier holding the plastic handset for him.
"What is it? Krang burbled. In the background, I could see that he was watching that Dimension X wrestling channel. "I'm busy!"
"Did you tell Bebop & Rocksteady about the uranium extraction job?"
Krang lashed his tendrils at the camera with a guttural noise.
"Me, tell those imbeciles anything? Don't be ridiculous! I only told Shredder!"
Deep breath.
"Why, my Warlord, did you tell Shredder?"
Krang laughed, tossing spittle onto the camera lens.
"For the same reason I told him about how much you were cozying up to his old clan that kicked him out! How else was I going to rub in how much of a screw-up he'd become?"
Oh. So this was Saki trying to undermine me with sabotage, then.
Deep. Breath.
"The Turtles are here because they found out from them," I said slowly. "So thanks."
Krang rolled his eyes, one tentacle hovering towards the innumerable buttons on the communication array of the Technodrome.
"Then destroy them! Or figure something else out! But if you don't have enough fissile material to break even, then don't even think about crawling back here! I already have one Earthling failure begging me for extra chances, and I don't have room for TWO!"
Krang hung up, and I crushed the device in my hand.
Why would I kill one of my backup plans, when I still can't be one hundred percent sure that my usurpation will succeed?
It was time to exercise the better part of valor.
"STOCKMAN!"
Stockman flew towards me, trying to avoid the active battle the best he could manage.
"Y-Yezz?"
"Have the mousers take whatever they can and bail! We're returning to Dimension X!"
The startled fly man nervously put away his device and began refueling the uranium-enriched engines of the hotrod with neon green fuel tanks from the back. I brought Donatello closer so I could put him to sleep, but at the same time, Raph swept Genghis Frog's legs and lunged towards me with his sais bared!
"Get your hands off my brother!"
Dropping Donatello, I shot Raphael with a jet of all-natural pepper spray.
"MY EYES!" he screamed. He dropped his sais so he could clutch his face in pain.
"No more cheesy one-liners?" The flash of the portal opened behind me as I approached him, lifting my boot up so I could make certain the hotheaded Raphael would stay out of the fight. "Don't worry. I won't hold that Everclear joke against you when I rule the world!"
Michaelangelo got his nunchucks around my neck! With my leg extended and my body off balance, he used the momentum to fling me backwards!
"Don't you mean, 'when Krang rules the world'?" Mikey corrected me, both of his weapons spinning in his hands. "Or were you skipping a step in your master plan, dude?"
I landed on my feet and ran the numbers. The Hamato squad could only take on Shredder as a cohesive unit, and with only half of Shredder's experience, I should be capable of handling a singular ninja turtle on my own. However, Raphael and Donnatello could've gotten up again at any minute, and if Leo won that grudge match with Karai, then I was finished.
Work smarter, not harder.
"A slip of the tongue," I explained, before pointing at nothing in particular past Mikey's head. "LEONARDO'S DEAD!"
"WHAT?!"
Michelangelo spun around to confirm his brother's fate, and I used his distraction to throw my entire hand at him! The hand clutched onto his shell and rapidly grew outwards, the fingers and digits becoming snaring roots that trapped him in place!
"Evergreen, we're ready for liftoff!" Professor Honeycutt declared.
I walked towards the Neutrino car and entered the shotgun seat. Everyone else -- the mutants, the mousers, and the Foot ninja -- had already gone through the portal. Raising the stump on the end of my arm, I could see that a new one was slowly growing in its place.
"Where's Karai?" I asked.
"I have her!" one of the male ninjas who stayed behind shouted.
While they all wore the same uniforms, I recognized the shinobi by voice as Karai's second. Tatsu had carried the thoroughly beaten Karai on his shoulder and loaded her into the backseat of the hotrod.
"Then let's move!"
Honeycutt brought the car into the air. From the ground, I could see Leonardo chasing after us. He only stopped to look down at his hurt brothers before staring back at me with a determined glare. I had a bad feeling he was about to do something drastic.
"You're not gonna get away with this!" Leo cried, as he threw one of his ninjato straight into the alien car's fuel line!
For all of the added bells and whistles, a car needed fuel to run, and a ruptured plutonium fuel line meant our car wouldn't fly. The hovercraft made a sudden dip, and it looked like we were going to enter a nosedive!
"YES, we will!" I countered, and four massive tendrils whipped out of my back to carry the car the rest of the way through! "Adios, turtles! Don't forget your iodine tablets!"
The shrublands of the Congo vanished behind us, and we were once again in the colorful, star-studded expanse I'd grown accustomed to. They said the past was a different country, and after a few months on Krang's various interplanetary campaigns, Dimension X had become more like home than the Earth of forty decades ago could ever be.
The Fugitoid landed the hotrod on the outskirts of the Technodrome.
"That comment about ruling the world was a bluff, yes?" Honeycutt asked softly. "To sell your persona before later revealing our noble intentions?"
I stopped my evil laugh and cleared my throat. I'd prefer not to have this conversation while there were ninjas in the backseat, but it's not like anything I had to say conflicted with Karai's vision for the Foot. Whether she was even conscious back there. I turned on the "roof" of the flying convertible, covering the Neutrino car in a soundproofed bubble.
"Yes, of course it was a bluff. All of this world conquest nonsense doesn't make me happy, but it's what people expect to hear when they see a terrifying mutant. It's what Krang expects from his minions, press-ganged or not. You know how Krang buys the theatrics hook, line, and sinker. Tell him what he wants to hear, and he won't know what hit him!"
I told Honeycutt the truth. Kinda.
Taking over the Earth as a private fiefdom, taking Krang's place here would have never been satisfying to me. Never mind that the inhabitants of Dimension X were getting increasingly fed up with Krang's ilk. Krang was gradually losing more ground than he was gaining, to the extent that he was considering an alliance with Maligna or Dregg as a triumphant "last stand" for a dying breed of tyrant. I had a bit of a moment there where I thought becoming the next Warlord would make me happy, but the time I spent reconnecting with Oroku Saki's withered zen roots allowed me to clear my head.
Shredder's influence or not, being the ruler of any kind wasn't really my bag. If it was, then I could've gotten the uranium in a nastier, bloodier way. Which I didn't.
There was more to life than vain delusions of conquest, and that's why I wanted to become filthy rich instead. With all of the future AAA stocks I could invest in, and all of the alien technology I'd patent when Krang was dead, I could afford to retire from all of this mutant nonsense as a very happy plant man. Becoming the wealthiest man on Earth wasn't too much to ask for, in the grand scheme of things. If I ever needed to, I could then put my green thumb on the scale to alter this world's history in any direction I saw fit.
Now if that isn't a happy ending, then I don't know what is.
"I see my confidence is well-placed!" Honeycutt said. "Shall we tell Krang the news?"
"Certainly." I stepped out of the car. "Tatsu, the Foot Clan are permitted to stick around until Karai is prepared to make the journey back to Earth. The uranium's being enriched as we speak, and the energy demands for the transmat will no longer be an issue."
"Hai."
Tatsu gave a professional bow, and led Karai to the battlestation's healing chamber.
With that handled, Honeycutt and I helped Stockman unload the atomic mousers' payload into the new power plant. One that was being built outside of the Technodrome, because making it another component of the vessel would only ensure that the turtles broke it later. Besides, having a facility on this side of the gateway meant that we could quickly return it to Earth the next time somebody tried kicking back to Dimension X.
How Krang and Shredder got anything done without me would've been a mystery if Krang and Shredder had ever accomplished anything the second the turtles arrived.
As I entered the Technodrome, I all but pranced past a mourning procession of Rock Soldiers on the mend from their failed Soviet invasion. They were carrying wounds from armor-piercing rounds and a box containing the labeled remains of General Tragg.
I pat the gray stone man who replaced Tragg on the back.
"Congrats on the promotion, Granitor. My condolences."
The mutagen-enriched golem could do little more than grumble.
On the way to the command deck, I stopped and took stock of a mutant warthog and rhinoceros, the two of them taking turns at a pinball machine liberated from a movie theater arcade back in NYC. I patiently hung back and watched them play for my turn, until the last pinball fell down when their hands were off the table.
"Aw, man!" Bebop groaned. "Game over!"
I put my hands on their shoulders, the old one and the regenerated one, until they were too covered in spores and vines to run away.
"Bebop! Rocksteady! Just the two mutants I was hoping to see!"
- - -
Surprise!
When I saw that Hyperstone Rhapsody was going to be in second place for the What If vote, I drafted ideas for what that bonus chapter should be about. Same thing I did with Wango Tangle, which I hope will be done some time this month. Then I accidentally went and wrote the whole thing.
My original idea, which showcased the aftermath of a final showdown in the Technodrome, was rejected for being more talk than show. In the spirit of the TMNT Adventures continuity that this loosely takes place in, I ended up doing this scene in an unexpected part of the world in the cultural zeitgeist… circa book's time of publishing. For better or worse, Adventures wasn't afraid to have stories with an environmental or politically-aware focus. While a lot of these haven't aged well, I can appreciate the attempt to impart some sort of positive message to their young reader base.
(Let's just pretend that Tattoo and Charlie Lama didn't happen.)
While my chapter notes would usually include context on the featured setpieces, I am not qualified to write out a summary of the Democratic Republic of Congo or Zaire's geopolitical status during the Cold War. If you want to know more, you'll have to use Wikipedia and other online resources like I did.
As TMNT Adventures spun out of the 1987 show (not the original Mirage comic), all of the characters in this chapter are from the Fred Wolf cartoon, the Archie comic proper, the show's accompanying toyline, the loosely-associated family of contemporary video games, or somehow got grandfathered in like Karai in the DLC for Shredder's Revenge. Tatsu was from the 1990 film, but he gets a pass because he's the Foot Clan employee of the month.
That's all. Thanks for reading this offbeat chapter!
This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: Captain Nameless, C-Moon, Draconic Hermit, Dr.doom360, EndlessHope, Justquestin2004, ModeGone, and N'Oni!
This feels like some deranged combination of the original kiddy cartoon as a base, but with the 2003 show welded on and the other shows sprinkled in.
Pretty sure Evergreen's origin overlaps with, like, two other mutants. One's that mutated sewer worker, the other was some mutated/revived armor of Shredder.
I like the dip, and just a dip, into the geopolitics and more serious issues of an otherwise cartoony world. Yeah, the Technodrome exists and this is the world where Bebop and Rocksteady can barely tie their shoes, but it's still the 80s with the USSR in its last days, Apartheid still exists, and I don't even want to know if there's any shenanigans involving the Iran-Iraq war.
Yeah, that sounds like TMNT Adventures to me. That book was a bit of a rolllercoaster in terms of stories and tones. Sometimes you'd have a silly story with more grounded/"realistic" art or a dead serious story with the cartoonier art style. Or it'd zig-zag tones at the drop of a hat.
I like the dip, and just a dip, into the geopolitics and more serious issues of an otherwise cartoony world. Yeah, the Technodrome exists and this is the world where Bebop and Rocksteady can barely tie their shoes, but it's still the 80s with the USSR in its last days, Apartheid still exists, and I don't even want to know if there's any shenanigans involving the Iran-Iraq war.
I considered having other bits in there or featuring another country, but decided that was enough for one bonus chapter. Plus, while I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable about the subject, I'd want more time to be 100% sure I wasn't messing anything up.
We spent a whole day searching through the Sandopolis Desert until we could all say with something approaching confidence that Enerjak was dead. The nearby dunes were coated in hundreds of crystalline shards, a hazard I had to sweep up before anyone got jabbed, and not one of them had a shred of Enerjak in them. Knuckles handed me a spare ring so I could ask them flat-out if Enerjak survived, only to see a wall of green static in turn.
That takes care of that.
He was as good as gone. If we were lucky, then Dimitri was telling the truth about needing them to stay alive. Nevertheless, we won, and the Phantom Ruby healing my body back to normal meant that the only scars I had to mark the experience were the mental ones.
I almost died.
It's only been a day, and I could very clearly remember my body falling apart under the overwhelming pressure of the Phantom Ruby's power. I'd gotten accustomed to being beaten, broken, and mangled, but never severed. I couldn't describe what it felt like, because it felt like nothing. Whole one moment, dismembered the next.
Everything was supposed to be back to the way it was before, so why did I still have phantom pains along the fracture lines?
It's probably wrong that I was okay with dying at the time.
I opened my left hand. I closed my left hand. I moved every digit on my left hand, individually, as if they wouldn't be there when I closed my eyes again.
It will be there.
I opened my eyes, and my left hand was still there, along with the Phantom Ruby.
I was okay now. I was okay.
I am okay.
…
I think I was too okay with dying.
Going into the Phantom state was enlightening, to say the least. Forming a temporary union with the entity bouncing around in my brain told me that he was a person, or at least used to be one, but he hadn't said a word since. Enerjak's presence had dissipated, his evil stain scrubbed out, and the Ruby's voice retreated to the deepest recesses of the gemstone. I didn't change into a dragon again overnight, and I didn't know how to force it, but I had the sneaking suspicion that both the dragon mode and the voice weren't gone forever.
It's never that easy.
The whole event had made it clear how much the Phantom Ruby's energy demands were holding me back. It was the ultimate bottleneck on what I could do, more than I'd ever realized, with the second one being my mastery of the mystical energies the Phantom Ruby was throwing out. Phantom Scarlet was a terrifying balancing act between glory and oblivion. There was no way I'd try it again without more experience under my belt. Or a damn good reason on par with Enerjak to roll the dice for a second time.
Oh, who am I kidding?
If I was a betting man, I'd be broke. Obviously, I'd need to get used to using the Phantom Ruby to its fullest. There were a whole lot of other horrors out there besides Enerjak, and I couldn't trust Sonic to take care of everything for me.
"Friar Buck was to take Rosy to our distant allies in Northamer, but the High Sheriff has redoubled his forces at the edges of Deerwood Forest since your appearance in Mercia days ago," the memory of Rob's voice echoed back to me. To when we first met.
Cause and effect. My presence in Mercia meant that Amy wasn't sent to Knothole, because Mercia's resistance hadn't been crushed. I was the reason that Eurish hadn't fallen under the war machine. What would they have done without me? Flee? Get roboticized?
…They'd all die without me, wouldn't they? I think I understood that on a basic level, but seeing everyone who got hurt while I was in Leonus really drilled the fact into my skull. People were permanently injured as a result of my leave, even if it was the right call.
Who decided that I have to be so damn important?
Hell, Angel Island might've been lost if I wasn't here, because I couldn't know if Knuckles could've done all that on his own. I'd like to think he could, but how could I know?
I… Do I have a death wish?
Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw the mask I'd dug out of the sand dunes next to Morglay. It was a rounded shape in ebony and ivory, with two big ears like a jackal, and a 'Y' shape made of gold that was over the eyes. Unmistakably, eerily familiar to the one worn by Infinite the Jackal, this mask was what the entity wore when he took control of my body. There were gaps in my memory that I couldn't account for, adrenaline or not. At first, all I could do was assume that he was at the wheel while I was away and try to shake off the feeling that I had critical gaps in my memory.
Then I remembered that I didn't have to leave that to chance. I'd already become well aware that Phantom Ruby was always recording. My thoughts, my memories; everything that was happening around me were readily available for instantaneous analysis. In an instant, I was there again, in the maddening rush of power, where I confirmed that the other guy was still fighting for me after I'd gone into shock. Whatever he was, he was driven by single-minded determination to seize victory from the jaws of defeat.
While I, on the other hand, gave up the ghost.
I don't want to die. Right? Not after everything I've done. Everything I have to do.
Why is that a question I'm asking myself?
Why would I ask that? Why did I think that?
"Hey Scarlet!"
I made an illusion of being totally fine as I turned around to face Knuckles.
"Yes?"
Looking past the red echidna, I could see that Knuckles had been making adjustments to the new altar that the Master Emerald stood upon. The gigantic gem was nestled into a rocky base, wreathed by a ring of smaller, inert shards. The Master Emerald laid in a dazzlingly reflective cavern, the walls covered in peerless mirrors, and up until this point I was trying to make an effort not to stare.
"I gave the emerald a look-over. It's feeding a steady trickle of energy to the island."
"That's… good, yeah?"
"Depends on how you feel about going into freefall." Knuckles raised his hand away from the Master Emerald, turning towards me. My illusion must've cracked, because something on my face read as stress, or a general malaise to him. "Hey, are you doing alright?"
I tried once again not to focus on the Master Emerald, locking my tied eyes onto Knuckles instead. The Master Emerald was stronger than seven chaos emeralds, of which I had none. I got a taste of that infinite power, and it was intoxicating, but it almost killed me. Even when I could feel the limitless chaos fountain was on my side against Enerjak, I was a hair's breadth from not making it out the other side.
So why do I still want more?
That was an easy question. There was so much I could do if I touched it again, and the only person who could stop me was the last echidna.
This struggle would be much easier if I had something else to rail against. The only person telling me to grasp that power before it was too late was me.
No. No. Knuckles let me get this close to the Master Emerald after the danger passed. That's a show of trust, and I can't betray that.
I can't.
"Exhausted," I responded honestly, turning away from the glowing beacon of chaos energy. "The bright lights are giving me a migraine."
If Knuckles had any suspicions of my inner conflict, he didn't say anything about it.
"Then let's get out of here. We're almost done with damage control from Enerjak, and your warp spells came in real handy for that."
Once we ran out of grains to comb over, the next thing to do was take stock of how much damage Enerjak left in his wake. I used my portals to visit every settlement on the island, letting Knuckles and the others handle the hard part of explaining what had happened. There were a lot of questions, some explanations, and then guarantees from the Guardian that the Chaotix would help fix everything that was broken. I also made a brief stop by Sommersbys' home, but all they asked for was for new bricks to fix the hole in their wall.
Archimedes poofed in for a couple of seconds during our island tour to say that the Fire Ants were fine, and dropped off a somewhat battered-looking Mighty before poofing away. I didn't know what to say to Mighty after beating him half to death, so it was for the best that he turned in early before I had the chance to fumble it.
One thing I was keenly aware of was that my battle with Enerjak screwed up several of the ruin sites that Knuckles' people left behind. I knew that would've hurt him on some level, but the echidna didn't say a peep about it to me.
"Where to?" I asked.
"Isolated Island. It's where the whole team's meeting back up."
No complaints there. I didn't think I had it in me to withstand the temptation while I was near that almighty thing for another minute longer.
"You've got it."
I brought the purple-hued swamps we passed over during my last sweep of the island to the forefront of my mind. Rather than generate a portal for us to walk through, I simply closed my eyes and took us there in a flash of light.
Maybe distance is an illusion, too?
♦ 30
We were standing in front of Vector's bachelor pad seconds later. This Chaotix hangout spot was a jumble of beige quadrilaterals. No bigger than a shotgun house placed on stilts over the wetlands, crowned with brown roof tiles and a broken weathervane shaped like a rooster. The outline looked a lot like the home of the Chaotix Detective Agency in Sonic X. Identifying that somewhat familiar place put me at ease, because watching 4Kids every Saturday morning was a positive memory this world has yet to spoil.
At least until the Metarex showed up.
I shook off my more noxious thoughts and walked up to Vector's place, with Knuckles in tow. Which was still a weird experience that I didn't know how long it would take to get used to. I knocked on the door to see who was in.
"Anyone home?"
"Get in here, will ya?" I heard the crocodile shout through the door. "We've got an open-door policy for Freedom Fighters!"
Knuckles entered first, because I had hesitated at the entrance. I followed along, pushing past the first door and the pair of green saloon doors behind it. The interior of Vector's place was simple, with a wooden plank floor and green drywall riddled with cracks, but if he built all of this by himself then that was a lot better than I could manage on my own. As for furnishings, there was a brown couch, some scattered boxes, a stack of storage lockers, a hanging dart board, and a water cooler in the corner.
It wasn't only the house that was familiar, but the people inside it as well. Vector was taking it easy, feet propped up at his desk and bobbing his head to a big boombox. The track playing on the tape sounded vaguely like Passing Breeze from the OutRun soundtrack, but that could've been my imagination. Espio was quietly sipping tea, an uncannily sedate Charmy sitting next to him on the couch with the honey stirrer still in his cup.
"Howdy," I said awkwardly. Since we weren't in a crisis anymore, me being much older than everyone else here made these interactions way more strained.
Charmy and Espio gave muted responses.
"Hi."
"Greetings."
I almost killed both them and Mighty twice over! Of course they don't want to be near me!
"Hey John!" Vector said. He sounded unaware of the tension in the air, but I think he was trying to turn it around. "And Knuckles! Glad you two could make it! How's that jumbo emerald in the Chaos Chamber holding up?"
"It'll take time to get used to the new look, but the Master Emerald's here to stay."
"Groovy! Help yourselves to whatever you can find in the fridge!"
"Uh, sure."
Utterly bewildered at where my life has gone, where it is, and where it'll be going, I took a gander at what was in Vector's kitchen. It was cramped due to the space-economical dimensions of the house, but not dirty. Not too dirty, for a house used exclusively by a bunch of teenagers. I wasn't in an eating mood, so I borrowed some leftover coffee from the burner, a small carton of milk in the fridge, a dollop of sugar, and a spare mug.
"Do we have grape juice?" Knuckles asked.
Raising the temperature of the milk with my fire magic until it reached a scald, and not to a boil, I mixed it with the coffee to create my best impression of a café con leche.
"I'll check."
Confirming that yes, Vector had grape juice, I poured a glass for Knuckles and passed it to him when I got back to the main room. We sat in total silence for over a minute, the only noise being the boombox and the faint, but steady whirr of the ceiling fan.
"So," I started cautiously. "If we're all situated, I think I need to clear the air about everything that happened."
"What about it?" Knuckles asked. "We beat Enerjak and already did one of those after-mission report things."
"I don't think he's talkin' about a debrief, Knux," Vector replied dryly.
Out of the two, I could believe that Knuckles hadn't noticed there might be some hurt feelings after I'd savagely hurt his friends in the process of 'saving' them. If Vector's account was to be taken at face value, that meant Espio, Charmy, and Mighty would've remembered everything I did to them as well.
"Where is Mighty?" I asked, thinking it would be better if he was present.
"Talking with that ch--" Vector caught himself, visibly flashing back to the last time he called her a 'chick'. "That girl you brought along. They're chatting out by the ring lake."
"Noted."
You'd have to be blind not to notice the way Fiona glowered at the very mention of the armadillo's name. There was history there, and not the good kind. Unless that history spilled over into becoming my present, I wasn't going to stick my foot in it.
This, on the other hand, couldn't wait. I took a deep breath. Inhaled, and exhaled.
"I'm just gonna come out and say it. I'm--"
Perhaps not unexpectedly, Charmy was the first one to break.
"I'm sorry I stung you with my stinger!" Charmy said, tears gushing out his eyes.
"What?"
"I stabbed you really hard and th-thought you were gonna die!" he babbled.
Ahh.
I should've known better. Charmy was more shaken up about his use of lethal force on me than what I did to him.
"Charmy, it's okay. You didn't hurt me that bad."
The sting was agonizing, and the venom likely would've killed me without the Phantom Ruby.
"There was blood on my stinger," Charmy said, looking much smaller than he had before. "I didn't know how to wash it out until Mello showed me."
We were all shocked. I knew he was older in this universe than in the games, but that was a lot for anyone to bear. Vector sat up in his chair and shut off the music.
"Aw, Charms…"
It took me a second for my brain to register that his shrinking wasn't metaphoric. Charmy was buzzing around the shallow coffee table to try and work off his nervous energy.
"I stung a lot of badniks before, but I never wanted to sting a person!"
"You didn't have a choice!" Knuckles argued.
"I know that," Charmy stressed. "But it didn't feel like I didn't have a choice! It was like I wanted to do whatever Enerjak said, and that meant hurting anyone he wanted to hurt!"
"And you still hesitated when you thought I was really hurt," I pointed out.
Charmy stopped to consider what I said, before returning to his normal size. The bee rocked back and forth on top of the couch rather than on his prior spot.
"I guess."
"Charmy, there were parts of you that knew what you were doing was wrong, and that's what helped me break the hex around your mind. No one should judge you by what you did under Enerjak's influence."
"I wish I could say that I showed the same amount of contriteness," Espio cut in with a rueful murmur. "Or restraint when fighting my friends."
"What were those moves?" Vector asked. "I've never seen you do anything like 'em before."
Charmy excitedly tilted his head towards Espio.
"Yeah! I didn't see you throwing knives and doing crazy flips, but it sounded really cool!"
Espio set down his cup.
"They were techniques Valdez showed me, as a part of my training in… the ways of the chameleons. He thought I was ready for the responsibility. With my betrayal of the Rainbow Valley, that assessment was proven to be an incorrect one."
Charmy poked Espio in the arm.
"Espio, if me and Mighty can't beat ourselves up over this, then you can't either!" he prodded. "Whenever Enerjak asked us to do something, we did it!"
"That's the problem," the chameleon said, struggling to speak through gritted teeth. "The Botanic Base came into being centuries after Enerjak's time. He didn't have an inkling of our existence until I volunteered the information."
"What exactly happened to you three after I saved Vector?" I interjected, pre-empting the barrage of questions the others wanted to get out first.
Espio opted to stare into his tea as he provided his account.
"With Knuckles and Archimedes sent to the desert, Enerjak assumed the Floating Island to be defenseless. Our encounter with you made him reassess that assumption, and he forced us to speak of everything we knew about the island as it was in the present."
"You spoke with him for hours, then?"
It was phrased as a question, but I could see the answer in his eyes.
"Yes," Espio responded hoarsely.
"Espio's spent the most time exploring the island out of the whole team," Vector explained, for my sake. "Except for Knux, of course."
"As outlanders, Charmy and Mighty only had so much to reveal. No offense, Charmy."
"None taken!" Charmy lazily chirped, almost disarmingly so.
I had gotten so concerned for him after the blood comment that I had to make certain that Charmy wasn't going to have a mental health crisis. Careful not to cause him any more harm, I opened my mind's eye to discover the emotions he was feeling, but not telling.
I'm not better yet. But that's okay. There'll always be flowers, you know?
"There are always flowers for those who want to see them." - Henri Matisse.
I like the sound of that.
Charmy looked up, his eyes meeting mine for a fraction of a second. I disengaged my surface reading before I could happen upon anything deeper. I'd figured that the prince thing, if he hadn't told the others yet, wasn't my information to share.
"…Compelled or not, I was seeking to prove my loyalty to a monster!" Espio finished.
"It doesn't mean anything!" Knuckles shouted at him.
"How could it not!?" Espio shouted back.
Knuckles and Espio had, by this point, stood up and gotten in each others' faces.
"You weren't in control! Get over it!"
"Being unable to resist Enerjak's control proved that I am untrustworthy!"
"That's crazy talk!"
"Alright you two, break it up!" Vector said, having gotten up and pulled them apart. "We're all on the same team, so you two shouldn't be slugging it out!"
"A traitor who'll stab his friends in the back has no right to be on a team!" Espio spat out, the thing that was really bothering him made loud and clear.
I stood up, taking off my hat so I could run my fingers through my hair. Charmy was eying my magenta hat, so I passed it over for him to examine.
"Ooh, wizard hat!" Charmy cooed, trying it on over his helmet.
"Espio, I don't think any of you could've resisted Enerjak's mind spells," I articulated patiently. "I have… let's call it practical experience, so try to take me at my word?"
"I could reverse what Enerjak did to all of you because I could do the very same."
Charmy frowned. I had revealed this all before, but he wasn't listening last time.
"But you're a good guy," he said, sounding only mostly sure of the statement. "Right?"
"I try to do the best I can. It's why I don't use my mind powers to hurt people."
"Knuckles said he was able to resist you without issue," Espio countered. "Therefore, the failure was on me for not being strong enough to resist Enerjak's sway."
"That's because I was trying to calm Knuckles down, not break his brain," I clarified.
"Hey!" the red echidna protested.
I brushed off the bristling echidna. There was something odd about the way Knuckles reacted to my mesmerism, but I didn't have the time to dissect what it meant. Besides, having one less reason to whip out my most loathsome power was always a plus.
"The point stands, Espio. Enerjak could brute-force his way past any amount of 'willpower' or 'discipline' put in front of them. That doesn't make you weak, or unworthy of being trusted by others. If Enerjak had a mind to, he could've controlled us all with ease."
Espio crossed his arms, all but pouting like the little genin-in-training he was.
"So that's it? I give up, and accept that I was just a victim in an evil god's scheme?"
"Talk to Valdez about building up your mental resistance. Doing long hours of meditation under waterfalls and other esoteric stuff like that."
"But you said--!"
I held up a hand.
"What I said was that Enerjak was special. If there's other people with powers like mine, then Valdez might have ways to help you overcome them. Don't undersell the benefit of having friends, either. Last I checked, they helped you get your head back on straight."
"Removing the dark spell was mostly your doing," Espio said.
"And why can't I be a friend?" I offered lightly.
Espio stopped to ponder the conundrum, before accepting my point.
"I don't see why not," the chameleon ninja answered, after some hesitance. "You've earned that much by helping save us from certain doom."
Knuckles gave him a thumbs-up.
"That's the spirit!"
"Of course he's our friend!" Charmy belted out. "He gave me his cool hat!"
"Charmy, that was a loaner."
"Nuh uh!" Charmy flew away with it. "Thanks to this, I'm the wizard now, too!"
"Charmy, you don't know where that's been!" Vector called out, trying to chase after him.
We all laughed at Charmy's antics, and the tension inside the place slowly melted away. Before anyone could score the hat off of him, or I had the opportunity to cheat and make the hat reappear on my head, Fiona walked into the house.
"There you are!" the fox girl said to me. "The Mechanix gave me an update on the radio. They're bringing the plane around. We can warp back to Mercia whenever you're ready."
"Is Mighty still out there?" I asked.
"Yes," she said irritably, hooking a thumb towards the door. "Out where I left him."
I got up, not wanting to leave things unsaid between the armadillo and I.
"I won't take long," I said to her as I passed through the door.
"Whatever. Hey Handbag, you got any Chaos Cola around here or what?"
I exited Vector's dwelling, walking past colorful palms and mangroves to one of the wide marshes dotting Isolated Island. The white sparkles that danced across the ring lake's pristine surface marked it as unique amongst the other ponds, and that was where I saw Mighty skipping stones to pass the time. The armadillo had one heck of a wrist, because his rocks kept skipping past the ring lake and onto the shallow bodies of water beyond it.
"Mind if I sit here?" I asked, gesturing to the flat rock he was sitting on.
"Suit yourself," Mighty drawled.
I sat down next to him, admiring the view of the water.
"Not too injured after…?" I trailed off.
"Nah," Mighty said lightly. "Fire Ants said there shouldn't be any lasting damage."
"When I hit you against that rock, I thought I heard a crack," I disputed warily.
"My shell's a lot harder than a rock," he declared assuredly. "What you heard must've been the stone giving out. I haven't had any broken bones since I was a kid."
"Oh. Good. I was… worried."
"Don't be," Mighty remarked, his expression losing its dash of levity. "For years, I've been afraid that if I ever lost control, there wouldn't be anyone to stop me. You taking me down when I was a danger to everybody around me put some old nightmares to rest."
"You're welcome, I guess. I wish I could've been more gentle about it."
Mighty chuckled.
"Gentle? The name's Mighty, man! I'll bounce back from our brawl in a week, tops."
"Is that normal?"
"Normal for me, and it seems like you're already patched up."
"The magic heals my damage. Without that, I'd be more than out of commission."
Mighty skipped more stones as we chatted, the last one veering slightly.
"And from a dragon to an overlander?"
I shrugged.
"This is what I was born as," I clarified. "Still working out the details of the dragon thing."
"How's Mercia been?" he asked.
That took me by surprise. It seemed like a non-sequitur on the nose of it, but I had a hunch that this was something on his mind.
"Could be better," I understated. "You from there?"
He nodded, still staring at the lake.
"I lost the accent after a good decade in exile."
"Exile?" I echoed rashly, realizing that he would've been a kid at the time.
"Our parents were thieves. Not that Matilda and I knew that until they were arrested. By then I figured out that I was stronger than anyone I'd met, adults included. I tried to use that strength to break them free, but… all I did was cause people to run screaming. I was stopped, King O'Hedge banished me from the kingdom, and I never saw my family again."
Mercia was devastated by the occupation. His family had to be roboticized or worse.
"I'm sorry you had to go through that," I said in sympathy.
What else could I say? I thought I would've known these characters – these people -- better from my past life, but that wasn't the case at all.
"It's not your fault, and I'm not putting that on O'Hedge's son, either," Mighty said firmly. "Prince Robert's your leader now, right?"
"He's the current king. I'm not quite a Mercian citizen, but Rob leads the Freedom Fighters in Mercia, and I pitch in however I can."
"King Robert, huh?"
"These days, most folks call him Rob o' the Hedge."
Mighty was unimpressed with the title.
"Hmph. Catchy."
"Look, I've heard things about how the late Richard O'Hedge ran things, and I'm not planning to defend him, but Rob's not like that. I know that he'd lift your exile in a heartbeat if I told him about what his father put you through."
Mighty shook his head.
"Thanks for the offer, Mister Scarlet, but after a while I was strong enough to go back any time I wanted. There just wasn't anything for me to go back to, especially once I discovered a place where I could have a clean break from the past."
"Angel Island?"
"Knuckles mentioned the name for it a while back," he paraphrased. "Said it was a real old one, named after an old echidna saint or something. Using the old name instead of what everyone else called it might've bumped you up a couple points in his book."
Mighty stood from the shore with a pained grunt, his stance betraying the extent of his injury. Past his shoulder, I could see his red shell was discolored with splotches of purple.
Ouch. If I had a ring, I could--
Suddenly, a shimmering ring of gold floated up to the surface of the ring lake.
Huh. Good timing.
I extended my arm, and the ring was drawn to my hand like a magnet.
"Mind if I use a ring to patch you up? It's the least I can do."
"Knock yourself out."
Wanting to avoid that, I tried to conjure the same feelings that allowed me to heal Vector. Not anger, or fear, or shame, the emotion I settled on was my empathy for Mighty's predicament. While it wasn't an issue I would've ever imagined having in the past, I could more recently relate to the weight of feeling too powerful for your own good.
Your strength is more than physical, Mighty, but everyone has a limit.
Ring, let me lighten his burden.
⌾ !!
The ring boomeranged into Mighty's back, becoming a splash of light that caused his bruises to fade. What little damage remained was far less severe than before.
"How do you feel?"
"A lot better," Mighty said, stretching. "You and Fiona heading out?"
I saw Heavy & Bomb's hover unit flying over the bayous, Le Duck's biplane in tow.
"Looks like."
"Then I wish you luck. If you're heading back into occupied territory, you're gonna need it."
"Thanks."
"And could you tell Fiona that I'm sorry?" he added at the last moment.
"I'll see what I can do."
Mighty let his shoulders sag, as though a weight was taken off his shoulders.
"I'd appreciate it."
I made my way to where the hover unit landed, right outside of the house. Examining the biplane, I could see that they had to replace a lot of parts from the rusty warbird that was broken by Big Arms, to the extent that this might functionally be a new aircraft.
The chain gun mounted to the front, for example, wasn't there the last time I saw it.
"Tragically, we were unable to salvage the plane's original 7.82 millimeter machine gun," Heavy intoned sadly while going over the new changes with Fiona. "Alas, we had to replace it with a 25 millimeter autocannon we had lying around and a homing missile launcher. I hope that Le Duck fellow isn't too put out by the substitution."
"Ping!" Bomb concurred sagely.
"He'll cope," Fiona remarked, tone laced with more sarcasm than either could register.
With all the new bells and whistles, Le Duck's plane looked closer to the Tornado than not.
"We'll taxi it through the portal back home," I explained to her, before turning back towards the members of the Chaotix that had come out to see us out. "It's been fun, Chaotix, but I don't think we'll be heading back around these parts for some time."
"You weren't too bad out there, Scarlet," Knuckles said, offering his hand. "And some Freedom Fighters could stand to learn some manners from you."
I was able to locate our end destination within the interwoven folds of realspace in spite of being momentarily distracted by Knuckles' praise. I shook hands with him.
"Thanks."
His words meant more than I could ever say.
Not the manners thing. Sonic needed the lessons, but I wasn't the one to give them.
"Catch ya later!" Vector shouted, as I opened a pink vortex to Mercia.
♦ 25
"So long!" Charmy yelled.
Charmy tossed my wizard hat into the air, the accessory going wide. I caught it with a redirection of the wind that put it back on track to my hands.
The others said their goodbyes or waved as Fiona brought the plane through the gateway, taking us back to the snowy forests of Mercia.
"I can't believe we left empty-handed!" she groaned in frustration, once the plane had been parked at a covert landing strip within range of Sylvania Castle. "We went through all of that trouble for scrap metal and their 'thanks'? What a load of--!"
I opened my left palm and formed a miniature aperture into Null Space. From it, a fist-sized sliver of emerald green crystal slid into view.
"Who said anything about leaving empty-handed?"
A jolt of chaos energy ran through the gleaming emerald shard, flowing down my hand as green electricity that was sucked into the black and magenta abyss of the Phantom Ruby.
◊ ♦ 35
"How?" Fiona sputtered out, shocked at the reveal of my contraband or the sheer audacity of my crime. "The Guardian was watching the emerald like a hawk!"
"He was only watching the finished product. Not the pieces left on the cutting room floor."
During one of my 'replays' of my fight with Enerjak, I saw one of the eleven beams of light that came out of him breaking in two. The main beam went with the rest of them towards this world's equivalent of the Emerald Shrine, while a smaller one flew off course while everyone was distracted by the light show. Retracing its trajectory to a far-flung oasis, I collected one free Master Emerald shard that no one was looking for.
Fiona eyed the glowing shard, before setting her eyes on me again with a wide grin. She burst out into laughter, nearly falling out of her seat on the plane.
"Hahahahaha! I underestimated you, overlander! You had us stick around another day to make friends with everybody so they wouldn't notice it was missing!"
I wanted to help repair some of the damage done by Enerjak, too, but she was right. Kinda.
There was an ulterior motive to me watching the Master Emerald with Knuckles: I had to ensure that there were no visible gaps in the gemstone before making amends with the Chaotix and making a clean getaway. After all, how could Knuckles notice that it was smaller than average if he'd never seen the Master Emerald before?
It didn't count as stealing if it was unattended, right?
Eh, @$&* it.
I had power now, and could return it after I saved the world.
- - -
Thus ends the Enerjak arc! This chapter was on the longer side because I wanted to say everything left I wanted to say about Angel Island before returning to Mercia. Which included allowing the SI to talk to the members of the Chaotix he wasn't able to before.
"I can't believe we left empty-handed!" she groaned in frustration, once the plane had been parked at a covert landing strip within range of Sylvania Castle. "We went through all of that trouble for scrap metal and their 'thanks'? What a load of--!"
I opened my left palm and formed a miniature aperture into Null Space. From it, a fist-sized sliver of emerald green crystal slid into view.
