Regrouping

[Dr. Robotnik]

[Let's assume that after Robotnik left Robotropolis, Rampage was successfully rescued before the bad dinosaurs took over the city. For now this topic would be between Rampage and Robotnik.]

The Egg Carrier cruised over the Higara Grasslands, with the rest of the Egg Fleet in tow. It was all that remained of Robotnik's forces after the devastating attacks in Robotropolis that day. In stark contrast to his normal, jovial self, Robotnik sat slumped in the commander's chair on the Egg Carrier's bridge. Sure, he always bounced back after his many failures, but it felt different this time. Today, he'd been attacked by just about every single other faction on the planet, and even a few that came from outer space.

Also, Robotnik originally thought that this dimensional merge would have been a great thing for him. The only other city besides Robotropolis was Soleanna, and they didn't have much of a military at all. But the Freedom Fighters thwarted him there. So he decided to get more emerald shards to power up his forces. Again, many forces lost, but at least he got some of the shards back, right? But that brought its own problems. He got attacked by this Mammoth guy, and then shadow creatures swarmed the whole city. They apparently were drawn to the shards. So his success at Angel Island directly brought about that disaster. And then to top it off, a whole other army he didn't know about had come out of nowhere and he simply wasn't able to stand against it.

Just a complete and utter disaster from start to finish. What could he do? Everything he'd done so far had blown up in his face, even when he thought he'd succeeded at something. There had to be something new he could try...

[Rampage]

The doors to the bridge swished open as a decidedly bloody cybernetic badger limped onto the bridge clutching the laser wound he'd suffered during the battle in Robotropolis. Rampage could see Robotnik slumped over in his chair, steam practically wafting out of his ears and his face a matching shade of red to his uniform. A metaphoric exaggeration perhaps, but suffice to say, all the warning signs were there, and Rampage still decided to open with a smart-ass remark.

"So, that was fun." He said with a frustratingly cheerful demeanor completely at odds with the real situation.

[Dr. Robotnik]

[In truth, I was hoping to show Robotnik as depressed, rather than angry. Hence the slumped position. It's ok though. I guess I didn't give enough cues.]

Robotnik didn't react to Rampage's quip immediately. The doctor's eyes never left the forward viewport. Instead, he let out a disappointed sigh, temporarily rising up in his chair before settling back down into his slump.

"Your opinion Rampage, as always, is valued..."

Up ahead of them, the grasslands faded for rocky mountain peaks. Snow started to trickle past the ship.

"Nothing's gone my way ever since this merge. I thought it would make things easy on me." He stood up and paced around the bridge. "Maybe I just need to think of a new way to do things. All of my plans always seem to revolve around those emeralds, and they never, ever work. It's like they're cursed. I need to think of a new way to do things around here..."

Suddenly he spun around, looking at Rampage directly.

"What do you think you'd do, if you were in charge here?"

[Rampage]

[Oops. my bad. Misread that one]

Rampage blinked in surprise, his cybernetic eye making a soft whirring noise as it's camera shutter-like eye lid narrowed. He was surprised, not just by the question, but also how by how badly he'd misread the good doctor's mood. At any other time after suffering a defeat, he'd be stomping around fuming about how those insufferable rebels bested him or some other such pompous line of thought. This time, he seemed genuinely exhausted and downhearted about the whole thing.

If he still had a flesh and blood heart, Rampage MIGHT have felt it break a little to see the normally flamboyant villain so down and depressed. Then again, bad moral is bad moral, and if he wanted to keep a good fight going, he'd need to pep him up a bit.

Quote:"Nothing's gone my way ever since this merge. I thought it would make things easy on me." He stood up and paced around the bridge. "Maybe I just need to think of a new way to do things. All of my plans always seem to revolve around those emeralds, and they never, ever work. It's like they're cursed. I need to think of a new way to do things around here..."

"Well, to be fair, they are called CHAOS Emeralds. Chaos does tend to follow them around." Rampage shrugged nonchalantly.

Quote:"What do you think you'd do, if you were in charge here?"

"Huh..." The cyborg mused as he put some honest thought into the question. "Well, for one thing, after something like this happened, I'd say that holing yourself up in Robotropolis was a bit of a mistake. Too exposed, to open for attack. I'd say it was probably just bad luck so many things happened all at once, but it'd be a lot tougher to be attacked if no one knows where you're operating from."

"I guess the other thing I'd want to do is find out who those bozo's in the crazy ship were. What they're capable of; what they're here for. Speaking of which. I saw some kind crazy cloaked space ship that dropped off a whole mess of dinos packing some serious fire power right before me and Beta split. He's got combat footage you might be interested in.

As for those other guys, the ones in the ship, either we need some covert intel gathering, or maybe we could try and capture one of those dinos I mentioned. Their ship kind of looked like that other one. The tech involved seemed pretty similar. They might be connected somehow."

[Dr. Robotnik]

Quote:"Well, to be fair, they are called CHAOS Emeralds. Chaos does tend to follow them around."

Robotnik shook his head. "No, I don't think it's the name. They're kind of like..." he made a wavy motion with his hands, near his face, "...the ball in a game of rugby. Now THAT is chaos. You're either diving into a moshpit trying to get the ball, or in the middle of the moshpit trying to hang onto it." He made an embarassed chuckle. "Or at least that's what it looks like to me. I'm not exactly in shape to play it. I've only seen it on TV a couple times."

At the mention of having a hidden base, Robotnik waved around at the mountains.

"Speaking of staying hidden, I thought it would be nice to take a little retreat up here for a while. It's nice, quiet, and isolated, don't you think? And it would be great for skiiing as well...again though, I'm not exactly in shape for it." He tried to bend over to look at his small legs and knees, but couldn't see round his belly.

"Learning the secrets about these newcomers to our world would be most excellent though. I'm definitely most intrigued to learn more about their technology. Could you play that video for me right now, up here on the main screen? I'd love to see it."

[Rampage]

For some reason, when Robotnik mentioned skiing, all Rampage could imagine was himself in a para-glider with half-a-dozen nameless, faceless morons as back-up chasing some tuxedo-clad bimbo and his extremely foxy lady friend down a mountain side towards a cliff.

Shaking off the momentary day dream, Rampage approached one of the ship's consoles and punched in a few buttons. "Sure thing boss, coming up now."

A monitor in the ceiling panned down and the screen flashed to life with a somewhat fuzzy video feed, courtesy of Beta. As the film rolled, Robotnik would be able to watch a blow-by blow exchange shared with the unknown Raptor creature, and got a first had look at the weapons both he and the wolf-fox were wielding. Rampage froze the image as the two tried to sprint away from the car on the image of the raptor in particular, and exploded the image for greater clarity.

Rampage then split the screen so that the combat footage could continue playing on the left while Ramapage put up an elevation view and diagnostic damage report of Beta on the right hand portion of the screen. If Robotnik were to look closely, he would note that while the damage was largely superficial, Beta's combat logic reports did identify the approximate muzzle velocity, kinetic energy and damage potential of the weapons. In a nut-shell, the damage output put practically any standard ballistic weapon to shame, and even made some of Robotnik's own forces look sub-par by comparison. In fact, had it been any of Robotnik's forces facing of against these two, the weapons would have made embarrassingly short work of them.

Finally, as the combat video came to the part with the alien ship, Rampage pulled the video back to full screen to show off the alien ship. Clearly, the ships propulsion was substantially more advanced, as were the ships shields to withstand the weight of force from Beta's cannon. But more interestingly enough, Beta's optics had captured a detailed record of the entire emergence of the alien ship from it's apparent warp jump. Video, audio, even detailed thermal readings.

"Not sure if any of this stuff'll help you develop any new tech, but I figure it might at least let us know who we're dealing with a bit better." Rampage conceded as the video at last finished.

"Oh, and I almost forgot. Managed to wrench these out of a few cold, dead fingers while I was down there." Rampage added as he present Robotnik with about half-a-dozen randomly coloured emerald shards.

[Dr. Robotnik]

Robotnik moved over to the console and re-winded the tape so he could watch the footage over again.

"That's curious. They're raptors but who is that canine Mobian helping them? You'd think he wouldn't belong with them." He turned to one of the drone robots manning the bridge. "Run a background check on him."

The drone immediately set to work, rapidly punching commands into the console. Meanwhile, Robotnik turned to Rampage.

"There may be some information in the canine's personal history that could lead us to where the raptors came from. He's clearly not an original member of their group." Robotnik watched the fight again. As before, their advanced weapons didn't seem to be a match for Beta. "It's very lucky you and Beta ran into them first. Standard SWATBot units would stand up to them about as well as giant tin cans."

They reached the part just before the giant alien ship appeared through the wormhole. Beta was now firing upon a group of raptors. Robotnik's eyes suddenly focused on something in the background. He froze the tape, and then zoomed in on one of Beta's targets. Instead of a raptor, Rampage and Robotnik would see yet another Mobian, this one a yellow-colored cat dressed in a brown cloak.

"I've seen that cat before. Right after the dimensional merge, two Mobians snuck into the HQ tower back in Robotropolis. That cat was one of them. He also had a deer with him, and I believe that deer was one of the freedom fighters here today as well."

Robotnik stroked his chin.

"It's all very interesting, don't you think?"

Then Rampage showed him the emerald shards. Robotnik stared at them. After his little speech earlier, he actually felt a little bit afraid of hanging onto them.

He recalled how Mammoth Mogul just walked right into his command HQ and knew exactly where Robotnik was keeping the shards without seeing them, even though the mammoth clearly didn't have any sort of detection equipment with him. Going by the mammoth's powers, he must have had some kind of extra-sensory way to detect the shards' energy.

Robotnik looked at the shards with a small shudder. He wondered if the mammoth knew exactly where they were right now, just based on these shards he held in his hands. Mogul had said Robotnik would fear his name before long. Robotnik hated to admit it, but Mogul was turning out to be right.

"We should...I think it would be prudent to develop some kind of way to shield the energy of these shards, so that they can't be detected by sensors or anything like that." Robotnik looked at Rampage. "Our new secret base may not be so secret for long if someone can find us by tracking emerald energy."

[Rampage]

"Not sure how much info you'll get on that guy boss. If the merge threw folks from other worlds completely, I'd be surprised your machine would have anything on them. Still, running surveillance on them would probably be more useful." Rampage said, rubbing his chin in thought.

Quote: "It's very lucky you and Beta ran into them first. Standard SWATBot units would stand up to them about as well as giant tin cans."

"Yeah, about that. That ship the raptors showed up in had a cloak of some sort. I didn't just run into 'em. They deliberately dropped that first raptor and that fox guy to engage me. Right about when I was mowing down those rowdy civilians to get your shards back. I was already fighting some punk hedgehog named Alpha, so that's when I called Beta for back-up."

"Wait, wait, wait. A deer? That wouldn't happen to be the same deer that whooped your butt back on Angel Island would it?" Rampage wondered with on the faintest hint of a smarmy grin on his fleshy face.

Rampage stared down at the shards in his hand. He figured Robotnik would be giddy to get at least some of these things back. "Fair point boss. Don't suppose burying them in a vault of lead will work though, huh? Speaking of, mind filling me in on what happened before I showed up?"

[Dr. Robotnik]

"So we know that these raptors are concerned about the welfare of common civilians then, like the freedom fighters I suppose. I wonder if they are working together or not. If the were though, the raptors were quite late to the party."

When Rampage made his snark about Robotnik getting beat by a deer, Robotnik narrowed his eyes. That appeared to be the only change to come over to his face. Instead though, Robotnik shook his head and sighed.

"I see what you're trying to do Rampage. Normally I'd fall for that and get red-faced with steam pouring out of my ears. But I think today's hard losses have taught me a powerful lesson in humility. I had no idea when I woke up this morning that I was going to lose my slaves, my city, most of my army, and most of the shards. I was just caught completely off guard. It's because I've been arrogant and pompous, thinking that no one could possibly get that deep into my city without me knowing about it. Clearly, I was wrong."

He scanned the mountain range up ahead.

"I cannot afford to act like that anymore. Not now while we're on the run. It's somewhat ironic, don't you think?"

He turned back to Rampage.

"We seem to be becoming more like the Freedom Fighters today. We've been expelled from our city by a much more powerful force, and now we need to figure out a way to discreetly subvert that force since they'll overpower us in a straight fight. I hate to admit this, but I think we might need to start being a little more sneaky, like they are."

Rampage brought up the shards again. Robotnik took one in his hands and held it up to the light, watching it twinkle even in the faded sunlight coming in through the windows.

"I'm sure you saw that mammoth, right? He knew the precise location I was keeping the shards, right down to the specific box in my lab. If I hadn't been there, he would have gotten clean away and I would have never known who took them. Clearly he has some method of detecting the shards without needing equipment or sensors. If he can do that, then trying to hide is probably worthless as long as we have these shards. Finding a way to stop him from sensing these shards should be our first priority, once we've found a new place to set up shop.

"Aside from that, we fought for a while in the lab, the shards got flung out onto the street, and between the shadow creatures, freedom fighters, and dinosaurs I think you saw the rest."

[Rampage]

"Yeah... 'bout that..." Rampage muttered, scratching his chin as he recalled the strange beings through the scope of his brand new tank. A tank that was now a smoking heap thanks to those blasted freedom fighters.

"What WERE those things? They sure were hell-bent on gobbling 'em up. 'N they just kept getting bigger too!"