The Angel and the Blue Devil [All Sonic the Hedgehog movies]

Sudden Blackout

The silent night fell as Angel slept in her bed early. She dreamed of that quill that her dad found and was trying to find someone that owns it. She was in the forest looking for someone and can see someone, looking at her before he left. She called out to him, but he was too far away. When he moves, a blue trail of light appeared and disappeared whenever she tried to follow him.  If that person owns this quill, what does he use it for?

A sudden blast made Angel wake up in shock, startling her out of her dream. Something that is so powerful that she could even hear it like the explosion of the big bang. Looking outside, she saw that the houses have turned pitch black and the streetlights are put out quickly. The electrical shock must have burned out the grid for all of Green Hills. It was supposed to be daytime, she thought. 

"Dad? Dad?" Angel cried. "What's happening?" She went downstairs and searched for him.

"Don't worry. It's just a blackout," Tom told her. The phone rang, catching his attention. He answered it. "Hey, Wade."

"Hi, Tom. Wade here. What is going on?"

"Well, gosh, I think the power's out," Tom replied.

"Yeah, no dur! The lights are out. The whole town is freaking out," said Wade. "What should I do?"

"Okay, relax," Tom said, trying to calm him down. "Take a deep breath, call Gil, see if they can locate the downed line, then call Zim and see if he can get his generator over to the Super Q so the food stays fresh."

"Call Zim before Gil? Call Gil--Hello?!"

"I'll call you back," Tom replied. He then sets his phone down. Angel was confused now. First they had found a quill, and now the lights went out. Was it from the blue devil?

"Dad, what are we gonna do now?" Angel asked. "We have to find the blue devil or else it will run away again."

"Of course, we will," Tom assured her. "From now on, let's get some sleep."

No one knew the odds of an event like that. He'd charted every possibility, run every statistic, crunched every number. He knew this was almost impossible. He was Robotnik. Knowing everything was his job. Now if only those pinheads at the pentagon would stand aside and let him do it.

His mobile lab rumbled as he pulled off the highway and onto the grassy outfield near ground zero. Robotnik had been contacted twelve hours after the incident, an electrical shockwave exploded out of Podunk Hills and caused chaos for over eight hundred miles. The defense grid collapsed for fifteen minutes. Electrical shortages reached from St. Louis to the Colorado Rockies. Four states in low-Earth orbit burned out. And then twelve hours later, they finally called him in.

Robotnik stepped out of the armored vehicle and adjusted his horn rimmed glasses in the midday sun. His mustache shone above his lip, not one hair out of place, and his red lab coat fluttered dramatically. He looked like a superior specimen by any calcification.

"Are you in charge here?" he barked as he stride across the baseball field with Agent Stone a step behind.

"Yes, I am. My name is Major–"

"Nope. Wrong. I'm in charge," Robotnik said, lifting a finger to the stubby looking military man. "You've never seen anything like this before. It says I'm the top banana in a world full of hungry little monkeys. Allow me to clarify. In a sequentially ranked hierarchy based on a level of critical importance, the disparity between us is too vast to quantify. Agent Stone?"

"The Doctor thinks you're basic," Stone responded. On cue, Robotnik's flying drones prepare to be dispatched.

"I'm initiating a sweep sequence. Ten miles in every direction should suffice. Is he still looking at me funny?"

"Yes, he is."

"Tell him to stop or I'll pull up his search history."

"If you don't stop looking at the doctor, he'll take a closer look–"

"I'm not deaf," the man responded.

"And tell him his men report to me now. Blah blah blah... blah blah blah... blah blah blah."

Major Bennington was offended. "Excuse me? Listen, pal, I don't know if you realize–"

"Nobody cares!" Robotnik yelled. "Listen, Major Nobody-Cares. You know why nobody cares who you are? Because nobody cares about your feeble accomplishments. And nobody cares how proud your mommy is that you're now reading at a third-grade level. Have you finished Charlotte's Web yet? Spoiler alert: she dies in the end and she leaves a big creepy egg sac." Then little drones float around in the air. "Ah, my babies! Ooh! Look at what came out of my egg sack! You know what I love about machines? They do what they're told, they follow their programming! They don't need time off to get DRUNK and put the boat in the water! Now, you do what you're told. Stand over there on the edge of your personal abyss... and watch my machines do your job."

Robotnik surveyed the baseball diamond as a quartet of lackeys rolled his control board to his side. There was a deep rut dug around the baseline, and no sign that the explosion came from a single source.

Somehow, little Podunk Hills contained something that his past jobs inciting rebellions in foreign countries and spying on every computer on planet earth did not.... There was a real challenge here.

Robotnik hacked away on his keyboard with reckless abandon, and his drones hummed to life. The whittling of their blades calmed his nerves and brought a crooked smile to his face. Machines were not like to buffoonish handlers in Washington. They did as they were told with precision and effect. And they didn't smell like sacks of sweaty meat.

"Can you feel it, Stone?" he asked his agent.

"I can feel it, Doctor," Stone said.

"It's evolution, Stone. It's evolution!"

The drones tore through the sky and dove deep into the foliage of the surrounding forest. Their infrared scanners swept cross rocks, leaves and brambles. In minutes, they'd gone miles from ground zero and swung back, again with beeps and blourps transmitting every detail back to Robotnik's wild eyes.

And then, in an instant, the needle jumped out of the haystack and picked him in the hose.

"Do you see anything useful in this image?" Robotnik asked, zooming in on the section of dirt, no bigger than a square foot.

"Nothing at all, Doctor."

"Of course you don't. Your eyes weren't expertly trained to spot tracks by the Native American Shadow Wolves." Even his deadpan agent could not compete with the beauty of his botniks.

Robotnik zoomed in on the faint outline of the footprint at the heart of the image and began twisting and warping it with his control board. In moments, a 3D image of a shoe was before him, and with a dramatic swipe of his hands, the shoe split apart to reveal a tiny paw, more complex than a forest creature's mark, with large flat pads perfect for running.

"That's extraordinary," Stone gasped.

"No. What's extraordinary is I've determined the exact height, weight, and spinal curvature of this creature, and my computer can't find a single match for it anywhere in Earth's animal kingdom," Robotnik said. "This blackout was not a terrorist attack, and that's no baby bigfoot. This guy is something else... entirely. Divert all search units to the sight of the footprint. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for me."

Robotnik pressed the controls hard and his drones rose in formation above his head and shot off into the distance, toward a small cave on the outskirts of town.