Scrambled -- An Honesty is the Best Policy Story w/ Eggman

Chapter 4

(Originally published on December 6th, 2022)

"Here's the couch Sonic sat on in that one scene. Notice how I've left the crumbs from his chili dog; they have sentimental value."
Honest looked like just seeing them might cause her to hurl right then and there. "You do know those will attract rats, right?" she questioned in a worried tone. Shadow, who was standing beside her, was intently observing the walls as if scoring Eggman on his interior decorating.
"Oh, no. I don't think that will be a problem. I haven't seen a rat in the base in the past six- hey, no! Wait!" The doctor reached his hand out uselessly as a large rat came out from beneath the sofa and grabbed a chunk of stale bread, eating it whole in a matter of seconds. It then proceeded to jump on top of a half pillar which a sort of raygun was displayed atop, causing it to fire a round across the room. The round hit a banner sporting the Eggman Industries logo and it immediately burst into flames. The doctor screamed like a deranged goat and fainted. Orbot and Cubot rushed in with a pail of water between them and doused the flames causing them to go out but not without dissolving half the banner and causing the face of Eggman displayed upon it to be warped. It kind of looked like the face was crying now.
Despite the chaos that had just unfolded in the relatively cramped room, Honest was more worried about the stale crumbs of bread. Her eyes lit up after traveling the room a bit and eventually landing on a broom propped up against the wall beside the door. She grabbed it and the dustpan attached to it and got to work sweeping up the chunks of chili dog bun from around the old sofa. It was hard thinking that specific episode, episode 44 of season one, aired so long ago, but it most certainly had. If anything, it just further proved that Eggman was crazy for keeping those fossilized pieces of bun for all that time. The only reason Honest remembered the exact number of that episode or that episode's contents was due to it being one of the three episodes on the DVD that came with Sonic Boom: Fire and Ice when it was pre-ordered, the other ones being the episode where Knuckles gets kidnapped by sentient chili peppers and the sacred Episode 52 (otherwise known as "the Shadow episode"). Honest guessed those episodes were chosen due to popularity and the fact that their CG game was on point all three times. She always thought it was interesting how the CGI quality differed from episode to episode. Had they been alternating shaders or rushing the episodes or using different methods? The world may never know.
Shadow, who was standing in the doorway, cast his eyes down the corridor outside, searching for somewhere, anywhere, to which he could escape. The light dimmed further down the hallway until about halfway to the end, a blue glow cut through the partial darkness, a glow which seemed to be emanating from a room, a room whose door was somehow forced open. Sparks showered down from above. It seemed he had his escape.
Stepping into the room, Shadow's first impression was that this was a storage room of some sort with how large it seemed to be and how crowded it was. Some sort of unfinished contraption with a tank sat across from the door. The room was narrow that way and longer going to his right. The wall to his left was covered up with monitors of every shape and size and that were lit up with every color of the rainbow. Scrap metal lay in heaps everywhere with one large pile lying to his left near the entrance and the others scattered around the foots of the machines.
In the middle of the room was a large contraption with rapidly spinning gears the size of Shadow on either side of a blue screen. Shadow squinted at the image projected there. It appeared to be the ruins of some long-forgotten civilization. Perhaps it was not a screen but rather some... Portal? The rest of the room was pitch-black.
"Greetings, Shadow."
The character being greeted jumped at the voice. The voice seemed to be emanating from the back left corner. A dense fog or mist was gathered there between the monitors and the machine with the tank. Every second or so, a bolt of electricity shot across.
"I require your assistance," the voice continued. It sounded like Eggman, but... Off... Like it was coming through a filter. Perhaps, though, it was just due to the echo the large room generated that it sounded so strange.
"W-With what, d-doctor?" Shadow stuttered out, grasping the door frame with a hand as if holding on for dear life. Wasn't Eggman in the other room out like a light in the middle of the floor after the situation with the rat? Of course he was. Then who was this?
The black pineapple squinted. He couldn't see anything resembling a human in there. It was as if he were part of the darkness itself. Had Mephiles learned to do voice impressions? Naw, that was ridiculous. If that were somehow the case, what would explain the electricity?
"You know the password to my computer. Take this," the phony phantom doctor told him. A shadowy... hand(?)... stuck out of the blackness. In its grasp was an ordinary, everyday flashdrive; it was purple, about the size of a stick of gum, and it had a plastic cap on one end. "Plug it into that tower there for me, would you?"
"Would I?" Shadow asked, tilting his head. "Would I really do something a shadowy blob in the corner told me to do?"
An unholy cackle resonated within the room as a huge, bone-chilling grin spread across the murky darkness. Was that whole thing its... face?! The cloud began to spread, filling the whole room.
"I know you wouldn't want to find out what would happen if you didn't."
---

"AAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"
A muffled scream shook all the building's occupants to their cores.
"Uh... Was that Shadow?" Honest asked, looking to the doorway behind her.
Eggman was slowly recovering from his rodent induced coma against the wall to her left. Orbot was pressing a damp cloth to the doctor's forehead while Cubot was looking for the whiskered culprit under every piece of furniture in the room.
"He's snooping as usual, I see, and my guess is he found something rather horrifying this time," Eggman deducted.

---
"Okay! I'm doing it!" Shadow exclaimed as he jammed the likely virus-ridden USB stick in the front of the computer tower. As soon as he did that, all ten or so monitors above his head lit up a deep purple and began to boot up some sort of sinister, alien program.
"Excellent," the Eggman-like voice said. He still didn't come out of the dark corner where he was hiding. The tapping of feet on the metal flooring outside signaled someone was coming. "It sounds like your friends are on their way. Lucky you. I'll see you around."
The whole room dimmed until Shadow couldn't see even a foot in front of him. However, the light of the portal in the middle of the room flickered as a large shape obscured it and then disappeared inside.
Click.
Shadow spun around as a lightswitch was flipped and the room lit up with artificial light from the ceiling tiles above. Honest and Eggman stood in the doorway. "What was that scream for?" Honest asked.
Shadow looked behind him at the now vacant corner and next at the open portal. "There was some sort of strange, shadowy man," he told them.
"Like you?" Honest asked. Shadow didn't laugh and instead looked disappointed. Eggman pushed his way past Honest and further into the room. Shadow was still visibly shaken by what had previously transpired. He looked up and glared indignantly at the doctor.
"What kind of strange and possibly unbelievably illegal things are you doing here?" he asked. "Where does this portal lead? What does it run off of? Were any poor, innocent aliens harmed in the process of building it?"
"It runs off of city power. 120 volts, if you want to be specific. No aliens were harmed in the making of this mechanical marvel. It leads to a previously undiscovered zone. Would you like to stick your head in and take a peek?" Eggman asked in a flat tone after answering all of Shadow's questions. Shadow seemed to recoil in fear.
"Heck, no, I don't want to go in there! Did you not hear me? I saw a shadowy man. He went in there! He looked like you, he even sounded like you, but he was a shadowy demon. Like- like Mephiles, but it wasn't."
"You better just be telling a joke," the doctor told him. After turning around and seeing Shadow's deathly serious expression however, Eggman was forced to take this just as seriously. "Well, then." He scratched the back of his head and turned back around, staring into the portal with a bewildered expression. "It seems that this zone isn't nearly as abandoned as I had first hypothesized."
"You think?" Honest asked, narrowing her violet eyes. Eggman chose to ignore that sarcastic remark and went to deactivate the machine. However, even after all power was removed from it, the portal still didn't close. "Uh... What's going on?"
Eggman just sat back on the floor and stared at it. "I... I don't know." Honest and Shadow sat down as well and peered into the portal frame.
The realm on the other side of the portal remained still and silent as always. Honest didn't want to waste the whole chapter just sitting there staring at it, so she put a theory across.
"Maybe something on the other side is keeping the portal open," Honest theorized. Shadow just looked to the doctor.
"Does that sound plausible?"
"Y-Yeah, I suppose so. We don't exactly know what's behind the portal, just what's in front of it. The only thing I can think of that could keep a portal open like this is an equivalent source of power. Someone would have to have something just like this on the other side."
"Okay, then!" Honest exclaimed, standing up. "Let's go inside and confront this 'strange, shadowy man' of yours." However, Shadow didn't budge. "Shadow?"
"I'm not going in there," he said, his eyes locked onto the portal behind her. "What if that demon's waiting on the other side?"
Honest sighed. "Okay... Eggman, I guess you and I will be going this alone." She went to step inside the portal but noticed the good ol' doctor wasn't budging in the slightest. Her eyelids lowered. "You've gotta be kidding me. You, too?" When all Eggman did was shrug, Honest turned back around and closed her eyes, sighing. "Fine then, I'll be right back."
The blond feline took one step and was swallowed up by the portal. However, instead of Eggman and Shadow seeing her appear on the other side, lasers appeared to shoot at her from both sides and she disappeared in a puff of orange particles.
...
Eggman turned to Shadow. "Is she dead?"

---

I had one more part of this, but I didn't like how it ended, so I've unpublished it. Instead, I think the Shadow Eggman plot will be moved over to Comic Edition on my main account HeartstheKitteh . Thank you to everyone who has read up to this point, and I plan to add on to this story sometime in the distant distant future, kind of like how I took a four year break in the middle of Limited Edition. In the meantime, please consider reading some of my other stories on HeartstheKitteh. See you there! :3