Shadows of the Future
Chapter Five
Strange New Worlds...
(Explanations, rating, and disclaimers can be found at the beginning of Chapter One.)
Knuckles woke up in a sterile, plain, white bed in very sterile, plain, white surroundings. At first he couldn't remember where he was, or what had happened. Then he saw the face of a nurse--an echidna nurse!--looming over him and it all came rushing back to him with painful clarity.
"Ah, I see you're coming out of it," said a middle-aged male echidna all in green, who was evidently the doctor. "Now let's see if the surgery worked correctly. Try flexing your left hand."
Surgery? Knuckles wondered. But, curiously, he did what the doctor said.
He SHOULDN'T have been able to move his hand at ALL. With the damage he had sustained, he should have been crippled for life. After all, he'd heard that the bones in the hand were almost IMPOSSIBLE to knit together properly and the nerves and tendons even worse.
Yet here he was, only hours (actually, it was now early afternoon of the NEXT day) after smashing his fist to bits against a metal bar, and his hand was working normally! It shouldn't have been, but it was! Sore, but still...
They had sure advanced an awful lot in only 12 years! he thought.
The doctor interrupted his thoughts by saying, "Here are Police Seargeants Lorinda Steele and Shirlana Cagney, to see you. They're the ones who brought you in."
"Oh, I'm so glad you're all right!" said Lorinda, rushing over to Knuckles' bedside. "You were bleeding a LOT, I mean...Doctor, do you know when he'll be completely recovered?"
The doctor clasped his hands behind his back as he turned around to face the two women. "Technically he could go now. Just as long as he takes it easy on that hand for a week or so, and eats plenty of food to get his blood sugar levels back up..."
"Then I'm outta here," said Knuckles, standing up decisively. He felt a bit woozy but thought he could probably make it. After all, while he had been lying in the hospital--and the jail--for the Goddess only knew how long, his Island had kept getting sicker and sicker. In fact, he was sure that his inability to punch through the bars of his jail cell was yet another symptom of the disease, and a sign that it was indeed affecting him personally just as he had feared it would. And he still wasn't ANY closer to finding out what was draining the Master Emerald. In fact, he didn't even know if the problem WAS connected somehow to this strange new culture of his own people or not, but it was definitely worth exploring the city and seeing what he came up with. After all, that strange teleporter hidden in Lava Reef--and those disturbing inscriptions on the walls--were all he had to go on.
"Come on, then," smiled Lorinda. "You need food, I know a GREAT little diner where they have an all-you-can-eat buffet for only 3 denarii. You coming, Shirl?"
"No," said the older cop, with a little wink that was not lost on Knuckles. "I already ate. But YOU two go off and have a good time..." she grinned and strode away.
* * *
The diner was indeed a nice, cozy little place. A bit TOO cozy--Knuckles' phobia of crowds was starting to come back to him here, only a little bit, however. That wasn't the main source of his discomfort, though. It was...well...he wished that Lorinda hadn't picked quite such a small booth, their legs kept bumping each other.
The food took his mind off that for a while, though. He had not realised exactly HOW hungry he was until he smelled the food coming towards their table. For the first few minutes, he ate ravenously. Lorinda watched him with some amusement.
"You're silly,"she said laughingly. "You say you're starving, and yet you haven't touched any of the meat!" She ponted to a set of some kind of sausauge-linkish things on his otherwise-empty fifth plate, then helped herself to one of them.
"I'm a vegetarian," said Knuckles matter-of-factly. "Isn't everyone?"
"Oh, my heavens, no!" laughed Lorinda. "Hardly anyone is, nowadays!"
"But aren't you worried that by eating meat, you might be eating one of your animal friends?" Knuckles persisted.
"Animal....FRIENDS?" Lorinda repeated the phrase as if it sounded so strange to her, she could barely even pronounce it. "I've heard of people having PETS that were animals, but friends?! Must be one heck of a lonely person!"
Knuckles himself was "one heck of a lonely person" but he didn't feel like telling HER that right now. "Where I come from, ALL the species of animals are intelligent, from mammals on down through insects. No-one who had any decency at all would eat real meat!"
Steele was looking at him VERY strangely now. "Where DO you come from, anyway? I've been meaning to ask ever since I heard that exotic accent of yours. It's hard to understand, but it's cute."
Knuckles felt a bit wary about saying where he was from in public--why, he couldn't say. But he felt that, despite her strange faults, Lorinda could probably be trusted. "I am the Guardian of the Floating Island." he informed her.
NOW Lorinda was REALLY surprised. "The Floating Island? But no-one has lived there for 500 years!"
Knuckles was shocked. He felt as if he had been run over by a boulder. 500 YEARS?!! How could that much time have passed for his people? It had only been twelve years for him! No wonder the society was nothing like what he remembered! 500 years!
Lorinda looked about nervously; even though Knuckles wasn't saying anything, his rigidly-frozen body, bugging-out eyes, clenched fists, and raised spines were definitely attracting unwanted attention. "Uh, Knuckles?" she suggested, gently laying a hand on his shoulder to snap him out of it, "What do you say we go on a tour of the city while we discuss this further? It's too crowded in here."
Stunned, Knuckles nodded once and followed her out the door after she paid their bill.
And a shadowy figure in a black-and-gold uniform, busily taking notes all the while, followed HIM.
* * *
"So," said Lorinda as Knuckles licked at a cold treat that somewhat resembled ice cream, "you've seen the outside of the Royal Palace, the holo-theatre, the anti-gravity skydivng club, and even the carnival--and you STILL wanna see something else?"
Knuckles nodded. His feet were getting tired, too, but not that bad. It had been quite a day. While they had travelled among the glorious high-tech, soaring, sweeping towers and bridges of metal and purest crystal, past ornamental rivers where water was magically made to flow UP, through swaying exotic purple fronds that reminded him of pictures of gigantic ferns from Mobius's prehistoric days, floating billboard signs and flying rocket-cars, and more, Knuckles and Steele had exchanged information about their worlds. Knuckles' tales of the Floating Island made Lorinda both smile at the quaintness of his "old-fashioned" lifestyle while feeling sorry for him, being the last of his kind and all that. But Knuckles had found little to smile about in her description of life on this new world the echidnas had found themselves teleported to, Arellus.
It seemed that, going back in time 12 years for Knuckles, that HUGE explosion of light and sound that had rocked the Island was NOT caused by the army that was attacking the City of the Sun, but rather by the transporter beam going off. Yes, the same huge, glowing, half-globe that had teleported Knuckles and his friends here. At least, he supposed it had. It was starting to bother him that he hadn't yet met any of his friends here...
At any rate, the huge dome was indeed the transporter. In fact, Knuckles realised, now that he had found it, all it needed were some huge twisted-wire guard-rails and it would look JUST like a much larger version of the ones in the Sky Sanctuary. The Queen had ordered the project started a while before the attack, to plan for just such an eventuality. The idea was to make a means of teleporting the entire CITY at once, part and parcel, should a really, really drastic emergency arise. But that emergency had arrived far earlier than anyone had thought it would, and the machinery had not yet been tested properly or set to teleport the city to a specific, chosen destination. Ordered to flip the switch Or Else by a desperate Queen, the scientists teleported the City of the Sun--most of it--to the realm of Arellus, a place no-one had ever visited before--AND...500 years into the past, Mobian-Time.
Meanwhile, since the transporter beam had not been correctly sized, parts of some of the buildings were sheared straight open by it, solid marble cut as if by a gigantic razor, the edges falling to the ground smooth, then breaking on impact. Sometimes people had been caught down the middle by the beam; they were, perhaps mercifully, incinerated to ashes on the spot. The beam was SO powerful that it also disentegrated the entire invading army, ships, people, and all, and pushed the transporter itself straight through the floor of the Hidden Palace due to the massive recoil.
And so, the "ancient ruins" of the area now known as Marble Gardens was formed out of the broken pieces of the buildings the beam didn't quite get.
THEN the great shockwave ran through the Island, and by the next morning, ALL of the great buildings the echidnas had left behind, no matter how far away, up, or down from the ruins of the City, were crumbling and falling apart. It was in this horribly lonely parody of civilisation that the self-appointed "Guardian" had been forced to live for 12 years.
Meanwhile, on Arellus, the echidna-people were not having a very good time, either. The climate was so inhospitable, they almost died right away. It was only the flickering remnants of the City's force-shield that gave their scientists time to find out something very valuable--Arellus was just swarming with Chaos Emeralds!
But only small ones, as far as anyone knew. Still, they were enough. With their help, the scientists were able to quickly construct a magical dome, a strong one, to protect the city from the environment, and also control the temperature, and purify what little water there was. It was enough to survive on for a while. Eventually, as the Chaos Emeralds started to burn out--for small ones like these were NEVER meant to power an entire city--a physical dome was built and mechanical means of purifying water and heating were found. The few animals already living on Arellus were non-intelligent--all the native life on this new world was--and, along with the tougher, mutated versions of the plants they had brought with them in the city, provided enough food for the transplanted civilisation. Oh, sure, there were some problems, but considering that Arellus was basically an ice-cold, airless rock, it was liveable. The climate-control machines were never able to produce the subtropical heat the echidnas had grown accustomed to on the Floating Island; that would have been a wasteful use of their limited power. So they made do with a lower temperature and shivered--and started wearing clothes. What started off as sheer necessity gradually became a law, and now it was, as Knuckles had already found out, illegal to go out-of-doors naked.
But in general, despite a few flaws here and there, the system worked.
For a while.
Two hundred years ago, Arellan time, the first "Wizard-Queen" had appeared. She claimed to be a follower of something called "The Dark Master", which everyone supposed was some kind of evil religious cult of some kind, and to have supernatural powers. Though the average person might disbelieve in The Dark Master, the Queen's powers were QUITE real, and she used them to terrify the populace while making her own life more and more opulent. Gone were the days of equality and democratic monarchy; now the City of the Stars was intensely divided along many different class-lines almost to the point of a caste-system, the so-called Royal Cabinet, whose job it was to temper the Queen's power, was little more than a joke, and the most bloody and treacherous of political backstabbing took place at the highest levels. Even more disturbing was that, from the days of the first Wizard-Queen on, EVERY young Princess, raised by tradition in the innermost chambers of the palace, had become JUST as evil and powerful as her predecessors--though usually with a different special power--by the time she took the throne. No matter HOW sweet and kind she might have been in earlier life.
If that wasn't bad enough, the first Wizard-Queen had ordered EVERY mechanical power source on Arellus dismantled. It was done, and strangely enough the city continued to run smoothly! But what it was running ON was anybody's guess, and after the Queen had the 20th person executed who had tried to sneak into the Palace and find out, everyone stopped asking.
Still--and at this point Lorinda got a rather bitter, angry look on her face that Knuckles found disturbing at the time but was too wrapped up in the story to ask about--there was a general feeling among the populace that the entire City of the Stars was hanging by a thread--and there was no telling when it might snap.
But, as alarming as all of this was, Knuckles thought as they continued down a glowing purple energy bridge, the thing that REALLY bothered him was the way Lorinda told him the entire story in furtive whispers, and kept looking nervously over her shoulder. As if even history was dangerous in this strange new world...
Back in the present, he shook himself out of his reverie . "Yeah, I wanna see something else before we stop. All these buildings are quite beautiful, the technology is amazing, all of that--but where is the nature? I want to see trees, grass, flowers. Surely a city as great as this one has those things, too?"
Steele pursed her lips thoughtfully. "Well", she said, looking at a watch that flashed itself into existence as she raised her arm to look at it, then disappeared again as she lowered it, "if we hurry, we MIGHT be able to beat the afternoon rush at the park, but I doubt it." And before the bewildered Knuckles could say any more, she hurried him along.
"Afternoon rush" was right. The park was PACKED. Absolutely jammed with people. Knuckles and Lorinda had to wait in line for HOURS to get in--and only after paying for a ticket. A ticket! Imagine, PAYING to get into an ordinary park! Knuckles said as much to Lorinda.
She shrugged, then apologised to the small boy next to her whose arm she had bumped in so doing, causing him to almost drop his ice-treat. "It's a tourist attraction," she said casually. "Although there are scattered single trees all around the city, small flowerboxes, and everyone with more than a menial income can afford a holo-garden, this is the ONLY place on all of Arellus where there are enough trees to actually get in AMONG them, grass plentiful enough to walk on and actually touch without getting in trouble, and flowers enough to perfume the air itself for a short distance. And so, because of that, it's very very popular. Because, even though several generations of echidnas have never even SEEN the Floating Island at this point, we still miss it. You can take the animal out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the animal."
"A little TOO popular, if you ask me," grumbled Knuckles, whose phobia was coming back to him VERY strong in this intensely-packed crowd. "Isn't there any open WILDERNESS around here?" His voice squeaked at the end of the sentence a bit more than he would have liked.
Lorinda sighed. "There's just no pleasing you, is there? Well, I suppose the area outside the city would technically count as SOME kind of wilderness..."
"Good." said Knuckles, standing up quickly. His spot on the ornately-carved metal bench was taken instantly by an old man, who glared jealously at Knuckles as if DARING him to try to take the seat back.
"NOW?!" exclaimed Lorinda in dismay. "But we just got here, Knux! These tickets are expensive!"
"I'll pay you back," he promised, though he had no idea HOW. He had none of this world's money and very few marketable skills in this advanced society. But he would think of something.
She started to argue, then noticed the slightly pale cast to his features, and reluctantly stood up. Her seat was instantly taken too--by a disagreeable old lady echidna would could very well have been the grumpy old man's mate. "All right," she said, flashing her watch in and out again, "we'll go to the outskirts of the city. But we'll have to hurry, the day is almost over. And you DON'T want to be out after curfew..." She guided him through the crowd to the park's exit.
Knuckles thought that comment about the day almost being over rather odd, as the sun was still shining brightly in the blue sky and showed no signs of setting. But he followed her without asking; presumably she knew more about the length of Arellus's day than he did.
As they travelled through the city, he paid closer attention to the details of his surroundings this time. He noticed now that many of the structures were like Lorinda's watch, in that they were only there when a person approached and winked completely out of existence when no-one was around. Oh, sure, the larger buildings, streets, vehicles, etc. were solid, permanent things, but on the other paw, Lorinda led him straight over bridges that had been nothing but empty air seconds before and up stairs that hadn't even been there before she raised her foot too many times to count. At first he was scared to death he was going to fall and felt hideously disoriented, but, as he gradually got used to it, he began to see the wisdom of such a system. The phasing objects must be using some variation on the transporter technology, so that when a bridge WASN'T in one spot where there was no-one around, it could appear in a DIFFERENT part of the city where it WAS needed. One bridge, one set of stairs, one sidewalk could do the work of many. He wondered if this had something to do with how the city was surviving with so few resources. Whatever it was, it was VERY advanced, and a brilliantly efficient way of doing things. Whoever had thought of it must be a genius.
"Here we are," said Lorinda, "The edge of the city. It's not much, but it's what we've got."
Knuckles looked up and stared in horror. All he saw in front of him was lifeless, empty, barren rock as far as the eye could see. He took a step forward, staggering, and came up against some sort of transparent screen. It was cold to the touch and felt almost like glass, but seemed totally frictionless. It made him tingle in an unsettling but not painful way. However, it absolutely would NOT let him through.
"That's the environmental dome, silly." chided Lorinda good-naturedly. "You'd better be GLAD it won't let you through--we'd all be sucking vacuum if it did. Or as close to it as makes no odds--the natural atmosphere of Arellus is only a tenth as dense as that on Mobius."
"But where--where is the wilderness?" said Knuckles plaintively, pressed up against the screen like a bug trapped in a jar, frantic to get out. He looked out at the solid black sky, the stars, the moon, and the large blue planet nearby. Such a contrast from the happy azure heavens inside the city. All he wanted right now, more than anything, was to strip off all these hateful clothes and roll naked in the sticky, humid, living warmth of the Mushroom Hills. The way they USED to be, not the way they were now...
"You're looking at it," said Lorinda, a trace of the same sadness in her own voice. "That's the only wilderness we have. The native animals used to live out there, but...well...there aren't very many of them anymore..."
"Where I come from," he turned to her, "the areas outside the city are mostly overgrown, lovely, warm jungles and huge deep lakes."
"I envy you," she said sadly. "The only time I've seen such things is in history books. I wish I could see your world."
"Maybe you will someday," he said impulsively. It just then occurred to him that he had no idea HOW he was going to get home, let alone taking another extra person with him!
"Maybe," she replied vaguely.
Then she flashed her watch back into existence. "Oh, Goddess, it's almost nightfall! I gotta get home before it's dark! Come on, Knuckles. I live in a fairly safe neighborhood."
Well, it was HER city, after all. He followed her.
"Oh, dang, I didn't make it!" she muttered as they neared her house. "It's night already!"
"But--but the sun isn't even setting--" began Knuckles, then stopped.
As if some gigantic hand had flicked a gigantic light-switch, the entire city went from blue-skied sunshine to star-speckled blackness. With NOTHING in between. It was daytime, and then, WHAM, it was night.
"You'd better get inside somewhere." said Lorinda, breaking in on his gaping-mouthed amazement. "Darkfall is curfew; it's dangerous to be outside now. The Queen's Own prowl around all night--trust me, you DON'T want to meet them. You could stay here, I have an extra room..."
Something about the way she said that made Knuckles feel a bit...strange...so he declined. "No, I saw a tree out in back of this block of apartments. It's small but I think I can sleep in it. I'd FEEL better in a tree, anyway."
She shrugged, trying to seem nonchalant though she was obviously more than a bit disappointed. "Well, they usually only search streets, not trees, so you should be safe there..."
"Good night, Lorinda," he said, starting to walk away. Then he remembered something--he had promised to pay her back for all the money he owed her today. How was he going to do that?
In answer, he felt something fall out of a hidden pocket in his fur to land sparkling on the ground. He picked it up. Of course! That small orange Chaos Emerald! He'd had it with him, somehow, ever since the Hidden Palace, and completely forgotten about it! Its fading orange glow seemed a bit brighter here--or was it just the dimmer lighting making it seem brighter in comparison? At any rate, it was definitely still a thing of beauty and value.
"Lorinda," he said, turning back, "I'd like you to have this as payment for all the money you've spent on me tonight. It's a..."
"I KNOW what it is!" gasped Lorinda, snatching it out of his hand with barely-restrained glee. Her eyes were huge. "Where did you GET this? I haven't seen a real Chaos Emerald--let alone a LIVE one--in years! Not even in a museum!"
He smiled and started to turn away again. "I'm glad you liked it."
But before he could turn to leave, Lorinda grabbed him by both shoulders and planted a great big kiss on his face! It was meant to have hit his cheek, but since he turned at exactly that moment, they wound up in a huge lip-lock. A rather long, intense, passionate kiss.
Knuckles felt--well, he didn't KNOW how he felt, exactly. He had never really been kissed by a woman before, so he had nothing to compare it to. As every inch of his body seemed to suddenly electrify, the only way he could think of to describe it to himself afterwards was that it felt somewhat like turning Hyper--only a lot MORE so!
As they broke off after a very, very long moment that was also somehow far too short, he realised that Lorinda looked just as stunned as he did--but NOT unhappy. No sir. She had not PLANNED for that, but she didn't dislike it either. Not one tiny bit.
"Well," she gasped in a rather breathless, husky tone of voice, "I suppose you better go get in that tree now, before the guards find you."
"I suppose I better, too," he answered back in the same tone. He was having the hardest time breathing properly, all of a sudden.
She watched him leave as he walked slowly away, stealing backwards glances every now and then.
By the time he finally got around the corner of her block and couldn't see her anymore, he was so dazed that he didn't even notice the two large black-and-gold clad figures pouncing on him from out of the shadows until it was too late.
It had been quite a day, all right.
And it wasn't over YET.