Criminal's Morning Routine

A light and still cool breeze brushed through the leaves of the lonesome tree. The grass of the hills surrounding it was full with the sparkles of a mild night's dew and now began to twinkle like an ocean of diamonds in the orange light of the rising sun.

Sonic the Hedgehog yawned unabashedly and stretched his arms over his head, then he flopped back into a relaxed position on a thick branch, his right leg dangling freely and his quills flattened against the tree's stem.

Through the leaves around him, the blue hedgehog watched the sun crawl up behind the distant hills. In the small valleys between them, a slight fog gently levitated in ghostly wisps until the spreading warmth of the beginning day broke through the misty shapes and they fell apart, leaving only a soft haze behind. As the sun rose higher, it started to reach the haze and turned it to a glowing coat spread across the fields. In the distance, the carved-in-rock form of a Mobius loop was throwing a long shadow with a light hole.

Sonic sat up on the branch he'd spent the night on, swung his left leg over it and slid down to land on the ground. His sneakers left deep footprints in the damp grass as he slowly walked away from the tree. For a moment the hedgehog overlooked the green hills from where he stood and a small grin formed on his face.

This was going to be a great day for some running. Sonic felt his grin broaden at the self-amused notion that this wasn't saying much. Of course, in his eyes almost every day was a great day for running. Not only that it was his favorite thing to do, it also, in a way, served a deeper purpose, if he could call it that. Mornings like this one reminded him of how much there was to see in the world, how much there was to explore, and yet so little time to do it. Moments like this one were short, and he wouldn't want to risk missing on them.

And of course, running was also great training. After all, he had to be fit when the notorious Dr. Eggman turned up again and started another plan to take over the planet. Sonic chuckled lightly. He'd not seen Eggman for a while, but as far as the hedgehog was concerned that usually meant the crazed scientist was brewing one of his oh so awesome plans again. It was just a matter of time until he'd be back. If he was to be serious, Sonic wouldn't want it any other way. No matter how annoying Eggman was, he sure made his life more interesting…

Still standing atop the hill, Sonic wondered where to go first now. Leading a free life like his meant you could almost always go wherever you wanted. You could go everywhere… and sometimes Sonic just couldn't decide which part of everywhere he wanted to see first.

His right hand felt over his stomach as it gave out a loud, hungry growl. There was a distinct hole in it. The hungry noise sounded again and the hedgehog laughed a little. Getting some breakfast first was a great idea, actually. Sonic's head briefly turned around as he orientated himself, then he picked a direction and fell into a jog, the wind in his wake tearing the haze asunder and shaking the dew off the grass blades.

Metropolis was something like two hundred miles to the north. A relaxed little morning run.

A light gurgling sounded from where the water of the small creek fell about half a meter into an almost round pond, only a meter deep and so crystal clear that the ground covered with hundreds of roundish pebbles appeared as if seen through glass. Just the tiny movements of the surface showed the water wasn't all as still as it looked.

When Knuckles' bare hands dived into it, dozens of circular waves ran over the pond's surface. Sitting on his knees next to it, the red echidna leaned down towards the water, gathering some up in his hands to splash on his face. A light shiver ran through the guardian's body at the cold of it, but he smiled a little as his hands dived back into the water. While almost too cold for a morning clean-up like most of Angel Island's creeks, it had just that exact temperature that made water the most refreshing to drink. Knuckles swallowed it slowly, savouring how it tasted of the fresh winds up in the mountains and the blue ice of the glaciers.

When he had quenched his thirst, the echidna reached for his gloves and pulled them back on. He yawned and stretched his arms to the side, attempting to chase the last remains of sleep out of his body, then he started his walk along a narrow path that led him along the creek for a minute before angling through the forest, past the giant mushrooms, up a gentle hill and out onto a large clearing.

Knuckles followed the treeline to the very top of the hill, stopping there just briefly to let his gaze trail over the grassy hills. They shone in bright green, untouched and peaceful. Knuckles was about to nod to himself and just enjoy the calm mood when he spotted a blue streak rushing over the hills at what was at the moment Knuckles' horizon, probably five hundred meters from his position.

"Is that Sonic?" The guardian had not seen the hedgehog in a while, and usually it was easy to tell when he was about to 'drop in' as he used to call it way before he set a foot on the island. The biplane Sonic and his little friend Tails used wasn't exactly a stealthy or particularly quiet vehicle. But as the echidna thought about it, he found it was a little early for one of their visits.

Knuckles frowned, following the blue blur with his eyes. It raced past the point across of him, down a hill and into the forest at the other side of the grass hills. It had just disappeared from Knuckles' sight when the shockwave reached his position.

The echidna winced, eyes narrowed and hands pressed to the sides of his head. Yeah, he knew only on person who could get as close to shattering his eardrums just by running by…

What left the question of what Sonic wanted here so early in the morning. As it looked, he was heading straight for the Temple of Chaos. Had something bad happened? Eggman, perhaps? And where was Tails with his biplane? Normally, they landed near the Temple.

Deciding he wouldn't get answers until he reached Sonic, Knuckles started running after him. He didn't exactly have a chance to catch him. Even with the advantage of knowing the territory better than anyone else, Knuckles knew he didn't stand, or rather run, a chance against the blue hedgehog. But he knew Sonic usually only came here in search for him, and the Master Emerald shrine was admittedly the first best place to start looking for him.

The guardian was not very far from the temple when a momentarily totally unexpected sensation hit him so hard and so out of the blue that it resembled the feel of a hammer impact against his skull. Intrusion. Without needing to see anything of it, Knuckles could feel the sacred Emerald being grabbed, not touched, grabbed, with brute force and against its liking. He could feel it being lifted from its socket, violently removed from its rightmost place, its sanctuary.

Knuckles gasped in a sharp breath, speeding up his steps. He didn't need to ignore the feeling of branches snapping into his face and against his body as he tore through the forest. He hardly even noticed it. He only heard the hum of the Master's energy flowing through the very ground of the island growing weaker and weaker. In a few minutes it would be gone and the island would fall into the ocean. And he heard the Master Emerald's cries, its horror, the whole wrongness of the displacement. His friendly visitor was almost forgotten already again. Someone bad was taking the Emerald. And he had to be stopped at all costs.

He was closing in, he could feel it, and he was closing in quickly. Still, where was his superfast blue hedgehog friend when he could actually be of use for once?

The question was answered suddenly, and nothing to Knuckles' liking. When the echidna burst out of the forest and onto the meadow around the Temple of Chaos, the blue hedgehog stood at the bottom of the stairs, holding the Master Emerald up with both hands.

Knuckles stopped as suddenly as if he'd run into a non-existent wall. Mouth open, he stared at the hedgehog and the glowing green gemstone. "Sonic? What…?"

Sonic turned his head just for a second, acknowledging Knuckles was there, then he was gone, accelerating so fast it seemed he'd vanished into thin air. The second sonic boom he heard today mutilated Knuckles' ears and the blur of blue tore a straight line into the bushes it moved through.

Towards the edge.

There wasn't time to think and understand what was going on. Knuckles shook himself out of his frozen position and hurried after the fleeting hedgehog and the Master Emerald. The little rational part of his brain that was still working at the moment told him it was a race lost before he even started running, but he had to try.

When he stumbled out of the forest just a minute later, it was a new personal record for the distance. His lungs were burning, his head pounded with each of his way too fast heartbeats and his legs ached, but he could still see that streak of blue.

He wouldn't catch him anyway. He had barely caught a proper look of him again when Sonic rushed over the edge and disappeared from view.

Knuckles reached the edge five or six long seconds later, skid to a stop next to it, just to look down and check where Sonic had gone. Several kilometers below, the deep blue of the ocean twinkled at the echidna with no clouds in between. But both Sonic and the Master Emerald were gone.

How? The guardian stared down. Sonic couldn't fly. Neither could he swim, and if there was a plane or other vehicle he'd have heard or seen it. It was as if the very air had swallowed him up.

Shoving these thoughts aside, Knuckles considered his options. He could jump after him and try to catch him gliding, but he didn't know which way to take, there was nothing to land right below and in a few minutes the Floating Island would fall into the sea. As much as he felt the urge to follow the thief, the traitor that had so awfully betrayed his trust and friendship, how much worth was a guardian if the island ended up falling on top of him?

Knuckles shook his head. Survival first. And then… He didn't know. He didn't understand. Nothing made sense anymore…

The echidna gulped. He knew one thing with a crushing clarity, though.

He'd failed.

Sonic slowed down when the skyline of Metropolis appeared at the horizon. As much as supersonic running was a cool feat, he didn't want to get charged with a penalty if his sonic boom broke the glass of people's windows…So, the hedgehog reduced his pace to a relaxed jog again. It still made him faster than any car or vehicle, anyway.

Five minutes later Sonic had reached the city center and slowed down completely to slowly stroll through the street in search of a bakery he could get his breakfast from. He has just spotted a promising candidate at the next corner when police sirens sounded behind him.

His quills gave out a ruffling noise as Sonic's head whirled around. Behind him, two police cars had stopped, their front doors open, and two Mobians in uniform per car had gotten out onto the street and where pointing their handguns at him.

"Sonic the hedgehog, you are under arrest!", one of them shouted.

Sonic blinked, flicking his pointed ears. "Excuse me? What did I do? No supersonic running near the city, I swear!"

"Stop fooling around.! You have been filmed stealing GUN's secret material on the construction of Chaos Drives. Surrender yourself!"

Sonic groaned. "You got the wrong hedgehog. What would I do with something like that? I don't need any Chaos Drives. I suggest you go ask Shadow... and he doesn't even look that much like me!"

"Agent Shadow has an alibi. I repeat just that one time: Surrender yourself peacefully." The policeman, a well rounded fat cat that should get some more exercise in Sonic's opinion, gestured around with his pistol.

"No thanks." Sonic shook his head. "This hedgehog doesn't go to jail for anything he didn't do." He waved at the officers. "We'll play a game of tag. See ya, guys!"

"No, freeze!"

Sonic did the exact opposite: He whirled around and broke into a run. From behind he could hear the policemen scrambling back into their cars to follow him. So much about healthy exercise. Sonic cleared the next corner, throwing a short, longing glance at the bakery, then focused on the long straight road in front of him, and boosted.

The blue hedgehog didn't waste the time to confuse his persecutors by changing directions often. He just took the direct way out of town, and then started running in different directions out in the open fields surrounding it where he had more space. When he checked behind himself, the police cars were long gone of course, but he kept up his speedy changes of directions for a little longer just to be sure no-one was following him anymore.

Now completely awake for sure, his mental gears were working as fast as his feet. Someone had stolen GUN's Chaos Drives. No, not the drives themselves but some kind of secret stuff on how you made Chaos Drives. And they had filmed that thief.

And for some reason, they thought he was the thief.

This in itself didn't even confuse Sonic that much. He didn't exactly consider the Mobian authorities particularly intelligent. No-one there ever managed to find a way dealing with Eggman, or with any other crisis for that matter. And when Shadow appeared the first time and stole a Chaos Emerald, they arrested Sonic for it. It felt like deja-vú.

Most of the time if he thought about it, Sonic laughed at the ridiculousness of it. Really, black hedgehog – blue hedgehog. It shouldn't be that hard to see. Even on a black and white picture you could clearly see Shadow's turned up quills, while Sonic's own curved downwards. It was more than obvious. To Sonic at least.

But aside of his amusement about GUN's failures, there were other feelings that lingered in the back of Sonic's mind now that he was reminded of the events about a year and a half ago. It was what really had made him want to run instead of talking to the police and figuring things out that way. There was something currently not too dormant burning in Sonic's chest; something he would almost call fear.

They had taken him to their Prison Island. They had locked him in a cell. A small room without windows, just blank concrete and metal bars. And no matter how much Sonic had strained himself to look unaffected, behind the mask of put-on casualness he'd been terrified. Locked up. In a cage.

There was nothing, nothing, Sonic needed more than his freedom. He needed space to run, to feel the wind, to breathe. To live. Neither of those fundamental things had been in the prison cell. Being locked up felt almost like being stuck underwater and feeling your air running out with no bubbles or the surface in sight. Suffocating, slowly draining your life away.

Getting out of the cell and running across the platforms of Metal Harbor, feeling the wind brush through his spines again and smelling the sea, had been just as relieving as breaking though the water surface and gulping in a lungful of fresh air. It revived him.

No, Sonic never ever wanted to be locked up again. He had made an agreement with himself on that one. He would never let anyone lock him into a tiny room ever again.

Of course, he knew that even he, fastest thing alive or not, couldn't run away forever. He had to find out what was going on. The best would of course be he found out who stole this apparently top-secret material so GUN could arrest someone else…

The blue hedgehog sighed. He was sure there was no-one on his heels anymore. By now, he had been running far enough from the city to reach a tropical jungle. Thick leaves shaded his path from overhead and a lot of giant trees stood in the way. Sonic didn't mind. While he couldn't go full speed here any more, the jungle would make him invisible.

So, where to go from here? He needed to find out what was going on, and he needed someone he could trust to help him to get to the bottom of things. He needed…

Tails.

Sonic nodded to himself and turned in the direction where he roughly knew the Mystic Ruins would be.