The host of speedsters, feet pounding like pistons, wings beating, and tails whirling like rotors, each blazed a trail for miles across the desert and grassy plains. The group followed their little orange fox leader on his fearless flight into the belly of the beast: Gigalopolis, the city some of them had just escaped the previous day.

The outskirts of the metropolis were grim to behold. Plant life, contaminated by chemical runoff from the new facilities springing up all around, was mostly dead, and thick clouds of corrosive vapor hung overhead, yet it seemed to only make the sun roast through hotter for some reason. The perimeter of was not as well defended as one might have suspected; while there were robots here and there, Eggman's forces were stretched thin and were easy enough to dodge, and those that got plowed over didn't seem to have any kind of distress beacons. The path into the city was clear and open, and it didn't take a detective to find where Tails' spaceship, the Cyclone, had landed: Just look for the fire.

There it was, a mass of gnarled white and blue metal at the end of a long trench in the pavement, where it had entirely obliterated a section of street, and smashed into one of many construction sites, leaving it covered with toppled steel beams. The structure was still partially standing, but not by a whole lot. Dust and smoke was still blowing everywhere, E-10 Cop Speeders were all over the scene with their little red lights spinning, Buzzers were zipping back and forth overhead, while a fire truck with some yellow-uniformed Eggman Army emergency workers seemed to be trying to quell the blaze before it spread much farther through the many surrounding under-construction factories and refineries. It was chaos. Maybe owing to that chaos was the fact that nothing was attacking anyone in the group yet, not even Tails. Of course, that could quickly change, depending on their method of approach.


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Surprisingly, no one seemed to spot the little fox or his big ears. All eyes were focused on the scene itself... where there were some faces likely familiar to both Tails and his friends.

Two white figures. One, a primate, wearing crimson red trousers (actually a jumpsuit tied at the waist), was holding the other in his arms: a scorched, tattered-looking bat girl, unconscious. It was Rock and Rouge.

At Rock's flanks was another monkey, red (Jam, one could easily presume), and a tall, formidable-looking robot—Tau, of course.

"'Ey, grab that stuff, wouldja?" directed Rock, gesturing with his head toward where there was a large, torn nylon sack laying on the damaged pavement, spilling several jet-black, high-tech-looking briefcase-sized containers. It seemed they were making off with some sort of loot from the ship, not to mention a captive.

Coop landed behind everyone with a gentle thump. The floor creaked a little.

He approached on of the shattered windows, his feet making gritty crunching noises as he treaded on broken glass.

He took a very brief peek outside, and his face set. He rubbed a thumb against an eyebrow. He frowned.

"Look who it is," he mumbled.


Tails, meanwhile, registered intense alarm. He stared down at the bat.

"They've got Rouge!" he whispered, "and—" he stared, "and nocturnus technology!"

He looked around at the members of his team, "it's technology from an ancient Echidna world," he exclaimed, "if Eggman finds it, he could figure out how it works and use it in his own creations!"

He turned and stared, eyes fixed on the scene below:

"We have to stop them, somehow!"

He scanned the environment rapidly, searching for a time or place to jump in. His feet shuffled on the ground, and he hunched down near the window, seconds away from action.

"We'll figure it out later," Rock reassured, then started hoofing it out of there, walking purposefully past some noisy Cop Speeders and some grey-uniformed Eggman Army troops on his way toward a waiting truck.

To just call it a "truck" was a little misleading, though. It was more a hovering, wheel-less vehicle of some kind, grey, caution-striped, plastered with the Eggman logo, with red dome lights on top, and a body not unlike some kind of little old passenger van. Rock slid open a side-panel door, laid a seat down, and stuck Rouge inside, then slid the door shut again.

He paused there for a second, and called out to one of the nearby grey-uniformed troops. "Hey—find anybody else in there?"

The soldier, an incredibly nervous-looking cat with wild eyes and crooked, gimpy legs that didn't seem to be able to agree on whether they were sitting or standing, jerked around to face Rock with a paralyzed look. This didn't seem to have anything in particular to do with Rock; the guy looked pretty much like this before the monkey ever said a word to him.

The cat opened his mouth to speak.

" ... ... ..."

He then just shook his head with twitching, breakneck rapidity.

Rock shot an awkward glance toward Jam, shrugged, pulled the driver's door open for himself, and motioned for his party to pile on in.