They hadn't long got back home.
Rouge sat in her chair, sipping tea and watching Knuckles as he ferreted about the place, fetching his wife an assortment of treats. Peace-offerings, she thought in her head. After all, it was always the guy's fault when these things happened, wasn't it?
Logic wouldn't explain why, but apparently it was.
They had gone for another test and the doctor seemed almost certain that Rouge was carrying a baby echidna. She had been expecting Knuckles to kick his heels and go skipping down the hallway and whistling like she saw people do on their way home from work on a Friday.
Instead, he had kept up an extraordinary poker face and hadn't let slip the tiniest emotion.
Typical Knuckles. It was starting to make her nervous.
"You happy?" she asked quietly as Knuckles plumped her heart-shaped pillow and squashed it behind her back.
"Well," Knuckles admitted, "seeing as you live here as my married wife, I no longer have to worry about the Master Emerald being taken by you so... OW!"
Rouge had some sharp claws on her hands so when she slapped anything, there was always a 30% chance that you got scratched as well.
"Are you happy?" she repeated, cuddling herself back down. Knuckles rubbed his smarting bicep.
"What after being slapped?"
"Are you happy?" Rouge's tone of voice was serious so Knuckles bit his tongue and left his 'wound' alone.
"...Are you happy?"
The bat's teal eyes faltered and she stared into her tea.
"...Truthfully?" she squeaked.
Knuckles said nothing in reply to that. He knew that when she was younger, Rouge had turned her nose up at the thought of having children and the thought of being a mother wasn't one that she even considered. Had this... 'accident'... not happened, Rouge would likely have remained child-less and Knuckles had accepted that, bottling down his hidden paternal feelings.
"...You know when you listen to a new song or eat something new for the first time and you kinda hate it? Then, after a while, you keep trying it and trying it until it... doesn't seem so bad?" Rouge sipped the tea again and then, to Knuckles' enormous relief, started to smile. "I guess I'm starting to think that the idea of a baby isn't so bad," she admitted, "Plus, I get to help out with preserving the echidna species so there's that. D'you think I'll get rewarded for that?"
Knuckles rolled his eyes with a smile and went into the hallway.
"...I think you definitely will," his voice spoke from the archway.
"Yeah?"
"Mm-hmm."
The red guardian returned with a small box, dumping it unceremoniously into Rouge's lap. The bat's eyes glittered excitedly as she drained her cup and tore through the ribbon like a predator with a carcass.
For someone so graceful, Knuckles had thought, she's certainly a carnivore when it comes to shiny things. Inside the box, you see, rested a ruby necklace set on a polished silver chain.
Rouge's eyes softened.
"Knuckie!" she crooned, "You little red, grouchy, mean-faced brute, you!"
Knuckles twitched his nose. "...You're...welcome?"
Rouge had immediately put the necklace on and was now jutting out her chest to admire her new adornment. Her brief pleasure was short-lived as she then realised her previous question had been left unanswered.
"...So... are you happy?"
Knuckles folded his mighty arms, arms that could snap a train in two with hands that could bend a steel pole into the shape of Perfect Chaos and yet were gentle enough to pluck a grape from a vine without crushing it.
"Yes," he answered, "Just so long as you are too."
The soon to be expanding family were interrupted, however, when the whole place gave a tremour. Knuckles' immediate thought was the Master Emerald but, then again, the vibrations were gone a moment later. It was as though a low-flying plane had just cruised over Angel Island and shaved the top of the shrine.
"What was that?" the echidna growled, dashing for the door with Rouge hot on his heels.
They made it outside just in time to see a fleet of large tank-like robots vanishing into the distance, heading straight for the mainland.
"...That doesn't bode well," Rouge muttered, flitting back into the house and sinking in front of her computer. Three clicks later, she had answers. "My radar identifies them as Eggman robots."
Go figure.
"So he's making his move, is he?" Knuckles snarled, punching his palm with his fist, "Wait until Sonic's out of the way and then - wham!"
"Deja vu, much? Makes you wonder what the intentions are..." Rouge swallowed.
Absent Sonic alone was bad enough but if the good doctor, not satsified with his current catch, had considered the hedgehog as simply an ingredient for something else and had sent his swot bots out on a hunt...
"Stay on the radar and keep an eye on them," Knuckles told her, "I'll bring Angel Island inland and go warn the others."
- - - - -
The menacing rumbles of the approaching robots had alerted Tails as well, poking his head from the top window and spying the dots in the sky.
"Zooey!" he had called, "Get down in the basement and stay safe! Look after Rosemary!"
Then he was gone.
- - - - -
Big the Cat's sensitive ears flattened as the first robot thundered overhead.
"That doesn't look like a plane to me," he pouted.
Shade, who had been watching him fish, narrowed her eyes. "Yeah and neither do the rest of them."
The sky literally darkened for a moment as the rest of the hoarde followed suit after the first.
Where Flickies were singing before, now they huddled on their branches, trembling.
- - - - -
Silver and Charmy were flying through the air, on their way to meet with Vector, when they were suddenly confronted with the notion that they weren't alone in the sky.
The silvery hedgehog glided gracefully to a stop in mid-air, turning elegently in his aura of aqua blue to glance behind.
"Uh-oh."
Charmy, grunting from the effort of slowing down which pulled painfully at his lace wings, managed to manouver his proportionately large body in a 180 turn to see what it was that had elicited such a negative response from his older companion.
"Woah."
The fleet of oncoming robots were threatening enough if you happened to be a lucky fella walking about on good old planet Mobius, but to those who oft found themselves cruising the Mobian atmosphere it was a downright sinister view.
It was testemont to Charmy's courage that he drew up alongside Silver, folded in his legs and cracked a smile that fell nicely into the 'panicking but I'm hiding it nicely' catagory.
"Busy skies today," he nervously chuckled.
Silver swept him under one arm and made a divebomb for the ground, just as the robots blasted over their heads. They were on the edge of an open plain, where the wild meadow met the first trees of the forest behind them. A stone's throw from the Mystic Ruins.
"Silver! Charmy!" Tails called, flitting through the trees, panting from his lengthy dash.
"What are they here for?" Silver asked, a little concerned when the robots took it in turns to pause in the sky, standing upright and floating on their thrusters.
"I've no idea," Tails admitted, sending out an emergency signal beacon on his wrist device.
Shadow, on the other hand, had already popped up out of nowhere.
"Take 'em out here!" he growled, clenching a fist and mentally preparing a Chaos Spear, "Before they reach the city!"
The robots, having seemed to come to a silent agreement, turned on the spot and descended into the plain, their landings causing the ground to shake.
"Huh, seems they're on the same wavelength as you, Mr Ultimate," Charmy grunted, crouching into a fighting stance as their potential opponents turned in their direction and slowly started to advance towards the small party of four.
In the time it took for them to make their way over the meadow, the rest of the Sonic Allies had assembled in record time.
Tails supposed that, with Sonic no longer around, the level of urgency was now well into the red zone.
"Charmy," Vector tutted, whipping out a stun gun, "what did I say about wanderin' off and findin' trouble as soon as Espio and me turn our backs?"
Amy skidded to a halt with her hammer already primed and practically humming.
"Give us the 'Sit-Rep', Tails," she ordered, counting the number of potential punching bags in her head. There were about twenty of the Goliaths.
"We don't know what their targets are," Tails hurriedly explained, "So long as we keep them from civilisation, we can minimise the damage."
Knuckles seemed to materialise from nowhere and caught the tail-end of the sentence.
"Rouge isn't coming, is she?" Shadow immediately asked, not exactly looking at Knuckles for favour of keeping his steely gaze on his first chosen scrap of metal.
As everyone ran to confront the threat, Knuckles dashed by him.
"Left her on Angel Island."
- - - - -
Perhaps it was because Sonic was missing or because they had spent too much time with him, but some of the Allies ( certainly not all ) found that making conversation in battle was a good way of annoying your enemies and calming yourself down.
Of course, this wasn't exactly encouraged when the threat was too extreme. You had to be sensilbe, after all.
"Heard you went in for another scan today," Amy called as she ducked under a swinging fist and buried the head of her hammer into the ankle of the same robot, "What was the result?"
Her addressee was Knuckles, of course.
The echidna had ripped off the plating of one of the robot's arms and had used it as a frisbee to skewer the optic of another robot.
"Good news, Shade!" he called down to Shade, who was working on toppling the robot, "It's a puggle."
Shade looked mighty pleased. "Thank Albion."
"Thank what?" Vector asked.
"Never mind."
"What the heck is a puggle?" Silver's confused voice sounded from the sky, levitating a severed servo above his own victim quite sadistically, "Rouge cheat on you with a dog or something?"
The servo crashed down on to the head of the robot as E-123 Omega, the mecha with the strongest grudge against any Eggman robot, shot a plasma beam through the bot's chest compartment. His task done, he stood beside the smoking carcass and chose that moment to quickly Google(c) Silver's question.
"Accessing file... File:EchidnasPuggle. Echidna offspring, otherwise known as puggles, hatch from their egg several days after the egg has been lain."
Blaze was nimbly leaping from robot to robot, torching and scalding metal where she could, but she took a moment's breather, clinging on to Omega's shoulder to smile.
"Baby echidnas are called Puggles?"
"Alongside hoglets," Cream laughed, drop-kicking a robot that thought it wasn't completely out of the running yet, "that has to be one of the..." She paused to hurl an enthustiastic Cheese at a drone that had emerged from another robot, "...cutest names given to any baby."
"Yo, watch it!"
Down came anotherr robot servo. Omega and Blaze only just leapt out of the way.
"Sorry," Silver apologised sheepishly, "should have given you a better heads up."
Blaze gave her hedgehog boyfriend a look that promised that he'd be paying for his mistakes later.
"Anyway," Amy went on, still talking to Knuckles and still dealing damage to robot ankles, "congratulations! Boy or girl?"
"We don't know, the baby's too small," Knuckles replied, anchoring his fist into the back of a robot to use as purchase for climbing up towards the head, "The only way they knew it wasn't a bat was the fact that it had no wings."
"I suppose that would be a bit of a giveaway."
Espio had to resort to using his tongue as a whip to zip out of the way in a hurry as another rain of laser fire came at him. To his annoyance, his slightly heightened emotions were causing him to turn pinkishly red - not helpful when he would rather be green to match the meadow.
"Always the way," he complained, dodging a robot foot that attempted to crush him, "When you actually need Sonic..."
"Who says we need him?" Shadow protested, practically demolishing a robot as he had seen construction workers demolish skycrapers, "I can take a fleet of robots with my eyes closed."
"No-one here is questioning your abilities, Shadow." That had been Blaze, flashing by with a wave of heat radiating in her wake.
"I was merely referring to the fact that Sonic provides a welcome diversion in some instances," Espio explained, holding onto the foot of a robot and lugging a convoy of shuriken stars up into the unprotected chest cavity underneath the metal plating with frightening precision, "These are donkeys and he's the carrot."
Cream, no longer the fragile creature she once had been considered as by some, executed an impressive backflip and landed with the skill of a gymnast into the general area.
"That's because these are Eggman robots," she told them, "They've all got built-in programming to automatically target Sonic unless otherwise ordered not to. It's called an Order Override, or something. And if their job is for something completely different, there's the, oh what's it called...? I think it's called the 'Priority 1 Override'. Yeah, if they bump into Sonic and he's in a position to be caught, the 'Priority 1 Override' kicks in and they'll go for him. Even if they're just, like, scout drones." Espio and Shadow stared at her, distracted from the battle for a fleeting moment. She shrugged and smiled awkwardly. "Tails told me."
There was a yell and a crash as a 24 year old hedgehog fell like a hailstone behind them, imprinting the ground in spectacular fashion.
"Newsflash, fellas," he moaned, unsure if he was looking at one robot or five as he poked his silvery head from the hole he had created, "If you really are looking for him, Sonic isn't here. Did your boss not give you the memo?"
"Well, if they're not here for Sonic," Shadow snarled, taking off a robot's head with a jerk of his left arm, "then what ARE they here for?"
"Suicidal, maybe?" Knuckles suggested as he popped from Shadow's dead robot, an exact imitation of a scene from Alien, "What better way to go out then with a fist through your rusting CPU..."
Amy, having recently freed herself from a vice-like hold and repaying the favour with an exceptionally hard blow to the robot's temple, dusted herself down and stretched her back painfully.
"...I can think of a few better ways, if I'm honest," she commented to herself, her aching joints protesting loudly and rejoicing gleefully when discovering that only one robot remained.
"Heads' up, boys!" With a final blow, Vector ensured that the one robot remaining was sent down in a shower of metal shards. Blaze had to jump out of the way yet again.
"Are people incapable of giving us just a few more seconds before sending a mammoth's weight of robot on top of us?" she hissed, wagging her tail in aggitation.
Peace finally returned to the countryside.
The field was littered with robot corpses, some fairly intact but most completely obliterated, so disfigured that even Eggman would have a hard time identifying them back at his robot morgue.
With a possible catastrophe averted and their work successfully completed, the Sonic Allies, minus Sonic himself, took a few moments to regain breath, sitting either on their fallen victims or beside them on the grass, giving one another thumbs up and performing instinctual head counts.
Knuckles cracked his namesakes and rolled his shoulders, looking over the scene with a serious disposition. Amy had returned her hammer to wherever it was she kept it (some argued hammer-space, some argued a TARDIS-like bag) and came to stand beside him.
After a moment, both felt the same misgiving unease; there was something wrong with the scene before them.
"Tails?" Knuckles murmured into his communicator, amethyst eyes combing the area for any sign of their twin-tailed friend, "Yo, Tails, where are you?"
No answer.
A river of ice seemed to cascade down Knuckles' spine.
"No, don't you dare," he heard Amy breathe.
Emotionally numbed, the Master Emerald guardian silently turned his head in the hedgehog's direction.
She wasn't even looking at him.
Her eyes, wide and betraying her premonition, were fixed solely on nothing, her irises pulsing with her fluctuating emotions.
"Don't you dare tell me what I think you're gonna tell me," she added to her previous breath.
Heightened negative emotions travelled far and wide on Mobius. Like sharks drawn to bloodied water, so the Sonic Allies were quick to trace the scent of trajedy.
"What's happening?" Blaze was the first to ask. Amy seemed to have solidified into rock where she stood so it was up to Knuckles to deliver the bad news.
"Tails," he announced in a lead-lined voice, "isn't answering his comms."
Somewhere, high up in a tree, a courageous young Flicky chanced a second to let out a sharp trill though that was not enough to break the noiseless horror that had taken over the - previously thought - 'victorious' group.
The first to kickstart his muscles was Shadow, whereupon he turned away and buried his face into his rigid hand.
"...You've got to be kidding me," he snarled.
"Wish I was," Knuckles muttered back, hiding his own face so that no-one could see his mounting distress. It took everyone's effort not to jump in alarm when Knuckles' wrist suddenly spoke.
"You fellas there?"
It was not Tails' voice.
"What is it, Rouge?" Knuckles asked, masking his sigh of disappointment and answering his comms.
"Been monitoring the robots," she replied, also masking the fact that she was sourly put-out when she had coined onto the fact that Knuckles had purposefully left her out of a fight, "One took off early and is making headway for the Abandoned Isles."
Charmy and Cream immediately went about counting the robot remains and finding that, true to Rouge's word, there were only 19 corpses, not 20.
Silver's ears perked.
"Abandoned Isles?" he repeated with a frown, "They're thirty feet under sea level in my time. You're telling me Eggman's hiding out there?"
"Sonic was born there." It was the first time that Amy had spoken since the latest piece of misfortune had struck them, "Guess Eggman comes from there too."
"The Commander did say humans were sentimental creatures of habit," Rouge was starting to say but was quick to shut up once Shadow reached his tipping point.
"How FLAMING hard is it to keep a hold of our own TEAMMATES!?" he bellowed into the air.
The courageous Flicky was now the very cowardly Flicky and took off in a flurry of pale blue feathers.
"First Sonic now Tails..." the Ultimate Lifeform went about growling, pacing up and down. He stopped and shot a warning glare toward Amy and Knuckles. "You better watch it," he slowly told them, "Doesn't take a wise old hermit to predict that the next one to go is one of you two."
There was no exchange of worried looks, much to the admiration of some of the Sonic Allies.
"That's a little dramatic, isn't it?" Amy hurriedly replied, "We don't know who's pulling these strings here. It could be that other Robotnik guy who, can I point out, won't know either Knuckles or myself."
"It struck me he didn't know Tails either but guess who's just been declared missing?"
"Not Froggy this time," Big commented from somewhere in the back. His participation in the fight had been minimnal but strangely effective, canonballing from one robot to another.
"I'm hearing a lot of loud voices arguing with each other but not a lot of action," Rouge's voice sounded, "If you're thinking that Amy and Knuckles are the next targets, Shadow, then you better put your tail in gear and get to the bottom of this. I refuse to be a single mother!"
"Love you too, dear," Knuckles sighed, not daring to roll his eyes for fear that Rouge had developed the ability to see through the communication signal and catch him out.
"Have yer got an idea on which island the bot was headin'?" Vector asked to which Rouge replied,
"The signal is hazy but I'll try working on it." She was then back to addressing her best friend. "Shadow, I'm serious," she threateningly purred, "Pad my husband up in bubblewrap if you must."
Unlike Knuckles, Shadow did roll his eyes, "Copy that."
Cream, with Cheese on her shoulder, hugged herself miserably.
"I'll head over to the Mystic Ruins," she said softly, hardly heard by those too far away from her, "Poor Zooey will need to be told."
With a comforting nod from Charmy, Cream was away, her youthful legs gaining her impressive speed from a decade of experience.
"And the rest of us?" Blaze prompted, "We need a plan of action."
"I suggest splitting up," Espio answered her, "We'll draw less attention to ourselves while also providing back up should anyone else get taken."
"In any case," Silver nodded, "our destination is the Abandoned Isles. We just need to figure out which one."
"We can get on that, right Vector?" Charmy decided, quite forcefully, spurred on by the fact that he wanted to be doing something like Cream, "Digging up the dirt is what we do best!" The proud smile from the older crocodile was something that the bee had begun to live for.
"Straight from the croc's mouth," Vector nodded, "Atta boy, Charmy."
Omega appraoched them.
"The GUN database will provide some information," he bleeped, "I shall offer my assistance." Of course, where Omega went, Shadow was likely to follow - but not without snapping a finger at the Master Emerald Guardian first.
"Knuckles," he barked, "you're with me."
Knuckles blinked, looking from Shadow to Shade in the brief contemplation that the Ultimate Lifeform had been rudely snapping his fingers at the wrong echidna.
"I am?"
"Chaos knows I'm not going to suffer Rouge if something DID happen to you and I wasn't around to stop it."
Knuckles could feel his hackles rising, proud masculinity at risk and his own testosterone levels on the line.
"I don't need a babysitter," he informed Shadow and those around them.
"Neither did Sonic," Shadow huffed, "but there you go. You're with me." Deeming that it was wiser to put up with Shadow's grumbling than Rouge's deadly threats, Knuckles conceded defeat and trailed after Team 1.
"I guess we can start preparing," Blaze suggested, "Can't jump in blind with this one."
"Yeah, Sonic was the improv guy," Silver heartily agreed, all for a carefully laid out plan.
The lavender cat cleared her throat and wriggled her whiskers at the female hedgehog.
"If Knuckles is going with Shadow," she said, "you'd be best to stick with us, Amy."
Amy looked round at the remaining allies and soon discerned that they were in unanimous agreement with one another.
"This is so over the top," she sighed, resigning herself to the outcome.