All Hoji got in response was static—Obnoxious, interference-laden static.

Somewhere, in a room far removed from the open, blue, sunlit spaces the group was stranded in, a dark, metal-paneled room buzzed and clicked with activity. The moderately-sized chamber held at its center a great, vault-like door, recessed into the floor itself, and lit only by a cool, flickering glow from a distant monitor. A kiosk with a console, presumably for entering security data, stood all by its lonesome, raised from the floor next to the mighty, impregnable door. The side of the panel had been tampered with, pried open, with an odd, PDA-like little device crudely wired in. The handheld seemed to be doing the work on its own, while its owner was across the room, typing in another, larger console.

The high-backed chair was surely intended for Eggman himself, but absent was any of the normal gleeful laughing, embittered remarks, or general obnoxiousness. Visible on the screen in front of the chair was none other than a camera view from inside the monorail car itself. (Tank was in the process of punching open the floor around that moment.)

"... Hhhehhh..." came a barely-whispered sigh. A silhouetted head and elbow dipped off the side of the chair, as the apparent puppet master slumped lazily, but thoughtfully. His free hand moused around, clicking through menus on the humongous screen, until he arrived at something else of apparent interest, sat hastily upright, and typed some more.

"Yes."



Glowing eyes lit up not far from the submerged train car. Some aimlessly floating robots, all with long, cylindrical, propeller-equipped, and with big, grinning shark mouths, suddenly buzzed to life with a roar of bubbles, and made a torpedo-like beeline for the real shark in the water no later than a few seconds after he jumped in.

Mako didn't have much in the way of cover. There was nothing but the suspended rail, and a long, underwater sprint, either back to where they'd started, or to the next large structure. Nothing could ever be too easy, could it?

Tank turned to the others with a subtly confident air about him, and a mild smile to match. "He is a sharlk, and been poot underlwater. Hai em surle he weel find som hway to" beeeep, beeeep, beeeep.

The tortoise froze in place. Even his mouth seemed to be stuck in mid-syllable for a bit, before he expressed his betrayed emotions as well as he could with his turtle-beaked head. He grumbled a low mumble and sure enough, dove in after. Thankfully, the hole was already accommodated to the size of one such as himself, and the worst part about it was the fact that the others above water may find themselves oh-so-slightly wetter than they were a minute ago (Tank was not as sleek a diver as Mako was).

He took off in hot pursuit, but... not in the direction Mako might have hoped. When he dropped his Power Beeper, he also dropped the built-in Power Beacon he would use to follow him. So that meant a number of precious seconds were spent with Power Mask chasing down to the bottom of the room, and looking concernedly around the gadget discarded to the floor-- and in a scenario like this, every second counts.

The incoming number of robots soon changed from a scattered few to a full-on swarm, pursuing the shark like an angry undersea mob past the monorail car, and toward the next structure. There were so many that quite a few struck the monorail car itself—some ricocheting off harmlessly, others putting frightening, long-running, lightning-like cracks right in the glass. One in particular clumsily struck the top of the train car at maximum speed and outright exploded, causing the vehicle to drop a whole foot or two downward, as it threatened to come loose from its rails and sink to the ocean floor. Thankfully, it didn't—It just hung there loose on the rails, rolling backward a bit before coming to rest again.

Unfortunately for well-intending Tank, Mako and his pursuers were probably too swift for one of the turtle's particular girth to be able to keep up with in the water. If anything positive could be said about the situation, though, it was that the shark robots weren't particularly accurate (and definitely not smart), and seemed to function more like toothy torpedoes than actual intelligent robots. So long as Mako could keep up the pace, he could probably find another moon pool to emerge from somewhere on the gigantic seabase ahead...