Coop lay on the bed, and stared at the TV, unseeingly. The TV was tuned to a news station, which had just exited a series of commercials and was back with the anchor in the studio:

“—say that while no more than four of the gems were ever accounted for, officials should nevertheless be able to offer some explanation as to where they’ve gone in the past few days,” the voice from the TV was saying. “With the recent break-in at the Wild Laboratories, this brings the number of freely circulating Chaos Emeralds—or ‘Chaosol’ as they’re being referred to by some groups of people—back into the—”

Coop was not paying attention. He had slept, the past few days. He had slept for a long time. He hadn’t even gotten up to eat on more than one occasion. He felt jangled, and he felt angry, and he felt tired, and these varying emotions ganged up on him along with several days worth of sleep deprivation, and sent him into a coma.

He had watched the news when he was not asleep, and saw the deteriorating state of the outside world. Emeralds missing, again. Tension rising between GUN and the government. His compatriots had been arrested; the base that the three of them had occupied was, at this stage, old news, it had been picked apart and abandoned.

Coop did not feel well. He lay on the bed, staring at the television screen from under the hand he had clapped to his forehead. After a few minutes of the television’s non-stop talking, he let his hand slide down so that it covered his eyes, and stopped listening.

He lay there, and the sound of the room began to get louder around him. The TV became a clangour of voices and sounds and snatches of music, slowly escalating in volume until he could hear the background hiss of the channel. The eagle became increasingly aware of the acoustic quality of the room, to the point where he was sure he could hear the shape of the room outside his, carved out of the silence by the imperceptible echoes from the television’s noise.

Time seemed to stretch out while he listened to the room, in the way that time does when you are beginning to drift off, and he was just on the border of falling asleep—he felt—when something changed. He heard… noise from the street. The noise was very far away, but… clearly, for a moment—clearer than he remembered hearing it—Coop heard a car honk. He opened his eyes.

He listened intently to the distant sound of the street, and—as he listened—it very slowly, imperceptibly faded away, and was replaced once more with silence. There was a difference, however; whereas the silence before had been the silence of the absence of people, this silence that filled the room now was comprised of the thick, muffled sort of silence created by someone very carefully making no noise.

Coop rolled up, over to the edge of the bed, and gently let his feet touch the floor. The illusion that he could hear the shape of the room collapsed.

Rocking very gently, shifting his weight to keep the carpeted floor from creaking, Coop made his way past the TV, to the door, and peered out into the living room area to see:

Rouge. She stood there, smiling, not at all affected by his appearance in the doorway.

“Hell-ooo,” she said.

Coop stared at her, accusingly. She remained unfazed.

“…What are you doing?” he eventually grumbled, after a few moments of silence.

“Were you asleep?”

“Almost,” replied the eagle, darkly, “what are you doing?”

Rouge tilted her head, “I was just stopping by to see how you were.”

“Mm?” intoned the eagle, unaffected. “So. How am I?”

“Well, if you’ve been watching the news much,” Rouge replied, nodding her head towards the sound of the television drifting out from the bedroom, “I wouldn’t say you were doing very well. You’ve heard about your friends, right?”

Coop put a hand to his forehead again, and leaned against the inside of the doorframe.

“…Yeah," he sighed, "I heard,” and the tone in his voice left unspoken the words ‘and that’s that.’

“That’s right,” said Rouge, brightly, “I guess taking the government by storm will have to wait for another day. Guess what, though—If you’ve been watching the news, I suppose you also know that all the Emeralds that have been recovered so far have been mysteriously disappearing again!”

There was a silence, broken only by the TV.

Coop had looked up at her, venomously, at her flippant dismissal of his cause, but now he looked at her in wary interest.

“Yes,” he said, “why?”

“Well, I don’t have them,” she stated, holding her hands out in a shrug, “but I do know where they’re headed. They’re all heading towards Westside Island…”

“Oh, yeah?” he inquired, straightening up.

Then he sighed, and slumped down.

“Oh,” he said, “So, what is this—Is this how it’s going to be now? Do you want me to become some kind of… black-mail mercenary because I have no-where else to go?”

“Tch, Hardly,” the bat sniffed, with the good grace to sound insulted, “anyway, a big lump like you—you’d never be able to be stealthy enough for my kind of work. I would have thought you’d be interested in what I had to say, though, if you’d seen—”

She stopped, and looked pointedly through the doorway, into the bedroom, where the TV was now saying:

“—until recently, when the rapidly disappearing emeralds were joined by yet another of the powerful gems—this one stolen from Wild Labs. This afternoon, security footage was released by the Labs of a short figure in a green sweater—apparently, for one of the first times recorded in such an incident a human child. For any information on the figure shown in this security tape—whether sighted nearby or in the vicinity of the building, please call—”

Coop turned, and then jogged over to see the screen on the television.

His eyes widened.

His eyes narrowed. He hissed quietly to himself, then looked up at the bat.

“Riiight,” he rumbled, “right, right, right.”

“Mm-hmm,” Rouge replied. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed, and regarded him with quiet interest, tinged by only the faintest hint of smug.

“So,” Coop said, “where are they?”


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