Belly of the Beast

[Dr. Robotnik]

[Sorry I've been moving slow guys. I had my wisdom teeth taken out yesterday. Was spending the past week getting ready for it. But I'm recovering fine today.

Anyway, I think I'll be skipping Giichi for a while. Can't think of anything interesting about running around in air vents.]

Robotnik jumped a bit as Chadin banged into the bars. Whirling around, he sighed at his prisoner. "Could you please be quiet? I'm trying to think of what experiment to do on you next..." There went Robotnik speaking again as if Chadin were a guest at a country estate. Now he spoke as if he were considering what kind of hors d'oeuvres to serve him before dinner.

However, he couldn't help but notice the glowing on the deer's scars. The doctor's mouth visibly fell open, just hanging there.

Glowing scars? What is this?

The doctor got the feeling that he should take cover. He quickly moved behind a lab table and crouched there, looking over the top. Robotnik wanted to be safe, but he was too curious as a scientist to not look away from this.

[Chadin]

"TESTS!!! After everything else you've done to me, you want to do more!!" The glowing lightning pattern on my body now was glowing a brilliant blue-white light and my eyes too shone radiated with the same energy. The glow was so strong that the scars were visible through my clothing. Seeing Robotnik cowering behind the lab table surprised me; and in my anger, I mistook it for a sign that he'd been intimidated by my outburst.

"Yeah, that's right you overgrown blimp, hide like the coward you are!!" I growled angrily. I staggered back to the bars and with my good arm I clutched the bars again. The instant my hand came into contact with the metal bars an incredible rush of electricity arched from my hand into the cell door. The electricity caused the muscles in my hand to involuntarily clamp down on the bar as I screamed at the top of my lungs. "GAAAAGGHHHH!!!!" A split second later my legs clenched and my body reflexively launched myself across the cell. I slammed into the opposite wall like a sack of bricks and slide down the wall just like before. My eyes fluttered as I loomed on the verge of blacking out but I just manage to hang onto consciousness.

With a groan I raise my head and look at my left hand. I could barely keep my hand held straight because of the pain and the residual effects of the electrical shock. Tiny plumes of smoke wafted away from the partially scorched fur on the palm of my paw. I even saw a few sparks of electricity arch between my hoof tips. I couldn't see my palm through all my fur, but I could feel the blood rushing to the burns there. I knew that pain well. It was the same feeling I felt when the MFF destroyed the mind control chip on the back of my neck.

I didn't notice myself, but there was also a faint trail of smoke trailing away from the electronic door controls too.

[Tails]

Tails zips toward a swatbot and steps behind it. He smiles and taps the robot on the back side. As the robot turns around, Tails stays behind him and laughs silently.

Tails taps the robot again and he snickers silently. "You'll have to do better than that. You're nothing compared to me."

The robot quickly turns around and doesn't see anything either. The robot contacts Rrobotnik. "Lord Robotnik, a voice is corrupting my systems."

Tails rushes right in front of the robot and sticks his tongue out. "Nyah, Nyah, Nyah. you can't get me!"

The swat bot calls the other robots for support. Tails jumps onto the swat bots head and the swat bot can do nothing to get the fox boy off. Tails ducks as the other swat bots fire at the robot's head and the lasers cut through the wires and dismantles the robot.

The swat bots who took out the downed swat bot send a message to Robotnik. "Intruder destroyed lord of the egg yolks of lardiness. No more fox boy to save the two other intruders!"

Tails stays sprawled under the downed robot as if he were crushed and waits for the other swat bots to occupy themselves with something else. In case Robotnik looked outside, he would think by looking at the sight that Tails was crushed under the weight of the downed robot.

[Dulcy]

Dulcy had been busy for quite a while exploring, trying her best to figure out this strange mixed up world. She found that some things were the same as she remembered, some were familiar yet still different, others were totally alien to her memory, and still others were just not there.

She now approaches the one place left in the general vicinity of the part of the planet she knew, or used to know anyway. The mere thought of coming to Robotropolis on her own still sent chills down her spine. But she wondered, even though she hadn't seen anyone she knew when she flew around Knothole, it also seemed a little light on the number of mobians present. That led her to believe that perhaps there was a mission underway.

So the young dragon enters Robotropolis, flying low to best avoid detection by any sensors looking for something in the air, but still high enough to avoid the thermal sensors meant for ground based intruders. As she entered the city, even from her low vantage point, she could tell something was off. Robotropolis still had the same dark, dingy feel to it, but it was clearly based upon a different city. The remains of Mobitropolis this was not.

She continues on, flying through the city as stealthily as she could, till eventually she spots a scuffle up ahead between some SWATbots and... she blinked in shock as she picked out the species of the mobian, then practically took a double take as she came close enough to spot that he had a pair of tails. She blinked again in surprise. "Tails!?" She gasps to herself, and was about to move in and assist the twin tailed fox, but then cringes as it looks to her as well like Tails was crushed under a disabled SWATbot. She restrains from going in to see if he's ok, knowing that it it was pointless to risk alerting Robotnik to the fact that she was here, just to 'rescue' her most likely crushed to death friend. She hoped that if he was alive he could hold on for a few more moments, or maybe that things weren't as bad as they looked from her point of view.

[Dr. Robotnik]

When the electricity started shooting into the metal bars and making loud popping noises, Robotnik ducked under the table. He stayed there as Chadin screamed. The doctor heard a lot of his experiments scream, but this one felt very chilling for some reason.

A loud crash at the back of the cell seemed to cut off the screaming, followed by groaning. Robotnik meekly poked his head above the table to see what had just happened. The deer laid slumped across the back of the cell...not moving.

I don't remember installing anything in him that'd allow him to channel electricity like that. But it looks like he doesn't know how to control it...

"Intruder destroyed lord of the egg yolks of lardiness. No more fox boy to save the two other intruders!"

Robotnik blinked...looking down at his personal communicator on his belt. Sighing, he unclipped it. He seriously doubted Tails was dead. That little fox had destroyed his fair share of bots, and Robotnik frequently got many hard lessons about how incompetent his bots could be.

"I want confirmation that he's dead. Bring me the body."

The other swatbots trooped over. One of them reached down to pull the downed swatbot off of Tails.

[Chadin]

"Ugggghhhh...." I staggered to rise to my feet, but quickly discovered that standing up my legs were as wobbly as a newborn fawn. I slumped back to the ground and rolled onto my side.

Wha... What happened...?" I groaned as I flexed my aching left hand and lifted myself off the cold steel floor.

[Tails]

Tails can't believe what's happening. The robots didn't just walk away. He thinks. This calls for drastic measures.

Tails runs for the base and the lasers fire his way. Each blast is an inch from his shoes.

He flies up and uses the base as a guide and manuevers until he reaches inside the hole in the wall that happened from the missiles.

He sighs with relief. "I made it."

[Dulcy]

She breaths a sigh of relief as she sees Tails spring up and make a run for it. She also decides to give the fox some cover, and just as the SWATbots are aiming to fire, she swoops down as she takes in a deep breath and blows out a stream of icy cold breath through her nose, aiming at each bot in turn, quickly turning them all into metal popsicles. She then follows Tails, flying into the hole in the side of the building and landing with a thud as she skids into a stack of servers. Robotnik better have some good backups.

"I'm ok maa..." She says in a dazed voice, then shakes her head a bit and stands up, turning to look back at Tails. She doesn't even realize that this is not the same Tails from her world, as he looks pretty much the same, and she looks pretty happy to see someone that she at least thinks she knows."Tails! It's great to see you, but..." She gazes around at all the destruction in the area and takes that with the fact that she hasn't seen anyone else. "Are you out here all alone? Where's Sonic and the others?"

[Dr. Robotnik]

"Dr. Robotnik...young fox creature not incapacitated after all. Fox has just entered at the server level, along with a dragon."

Robotnik snarled as he listened to the message. That sounded like Dulcy. Ever since she joined the freedom fighters, she'd been an especially big wrench in his plans.

"Now all the freedom fighters are just flying out of the woodwork!"

Now he spoke to his swatbot teams through his communicator.

"Swatbots...back to the server floor. We have two more uninvited guests that need to be detained."

He whirled around and marched over to Chadin's cage. Robotnik didn't know what had happened just now with the deer, but his prisoner clearly wasn't up for the same show of strength as before and Robotnik needed more intel on what was going on right now.

"You...how many other freedom fighters are out there right now?" He thought about threatening him with the roboticizer, but then thought of something better. He allowed a small smirk on his face. "Tell me...or I'll resume those mind control experiments on you again, Chadin. That's your name, isn't it? Or am I wrong and it's Bambi?"

Robotnik allowed a small chuckle. Then it became a gargling sound. Spit drooled out of his mouth as he stumbled about the room...before he collapsed and fell against a table, knocking it over completely and spilling the contents everywhere. Glass vials shattered all over the floor.

Behind where Robotnik was standing, Chadin would see a narrow blowpipe sticking out of a vent in the ceiling, with two eerie yellow eyes highlighted in the darkness.

[Giichi Twinkieland]

Giichi smirked. He never dreamed that his blowpipe might actually come in handy in a city full of robots. The cat withdrew the blowpipe back through the vent slits, before kicking the cover out of its place.

As it banged on the floor, Giichi smoothly slipped out through the hole and landed with a soft thump behind it. True to his cat nature, you could barely hear him hitting the floor. It sounded like a fist hitting a pillow. Giichi wasted no time rushing straight to Chadin's cage. He thought about whipping out his netbook again...only to see that the door lock had been shorted out somehow.

Since he'd missed Chadin's light show before, he didn't realize the deer himself had done it. Giichi scratched his head for a moment, then shrugged and just tugged on the cage door. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

The cage door opened rather easily, and soon Giichi was at Chadin's side. The stench of burning flesh reached his nostrils, and the cat retched at the stench. "God...what did Robotnik do to you? Hit you with a cattle prod a few thousand times? Can you still walk?"