Author Note:

'Lo all, and welcome to Le New Fic.
Following Awdures' example, I include a 'Version of Reality' note with this chapter, since there's so many conflicting versions of Sonic canon that it's often hard to tell what yours truly is citing as rock-solid canonical fact, and what are merely alternate-universe nods, or the inventions of my own fevered imagiation. It's down at the end of the chapter, just to keep you guessing; this fic IS classified as Mystery, after all. So it's not supposed to make any sense to you while you're reading it, is it?

As always, may you read without feeling the urge to kill yourself. Or me.

Command I.D.: EM10 j17/22.6
Timestamp: MY11.119 - 60.5.30
Database Inquiry: South Island Archipelago
Authorization: Doctor Ivo Robotnik

Database Inquiry:

Geologically, South Island Archipelago comprises at least seven thousand islands at low tide, both coral and volcanic, of which four-hundred and nine exceed five square kilometres in area.

The volcanic islands themselves, and the atolls' bedrock, is principally of basaltic -

Access cancelled

Parametric refinement…

Command I.D.: EM10 j17/22.7
Timestamp: MY11.119 - 60.5.42
Database Inquiry: South Island Archipelago 41.004 West, 21.229 South
Authorization: Doctor Ivo Robotnik

File access (last update MY11.095)

Designation: SIA-97-b
Geological feature: Volcanic island
Area: 11.2 km²
Indigenous population:
Mobian: sciurus mobius, sialia greenhillus: 1,100 (estimate)
Population roboticized MY5.053 to MY5.056
Development:
Medium-scale military/industrial complex
Mining and automated railcar network operative MY6.106 to Present
'Metal Island' automated aeronautics production facility operative MY6.108 to Present
Force deployment:
'Darkcastle' fortress complex operative MY6.189 to Present
Standard munitions – 1,130 (One-thousand, one-hundred and thirty) ton
Special munitions (nuclear, antimatter, acausal) – 0 (Zero)
Badnik deployment – SIA 12th Division (garrison)

View Zonal surveys? YES / NO
View production reports? YES / NO
View force deployment details? YES / NO

It was typical. Utterly, unremarkably, typical. This island didn't even have a name in the database. 'SIA-97-b', the cartographic programs called it. Robotnik hadn't coded his mapmakers for creative flair, back then; in those heady, early days, when his first badniks had torn across the archipelago, a relentless wave of order and metal. There were hundreds of others like it, that the machines had built in his name; metalized factory atolls which that Eggman had never visited in person. The island had been just another conquest; its ores another resource; its original inhabitants – another badnik legion.

Six years ago! It had been six years since the start of that first campaign... and he was back here, back in this loathsome island chain. Back where he had started. South Island itself was barely a horizon away.
What did he have to show for it, for six years of exertion? The Wing Fortress was gone; and the Flying Battery. All that remained of the Death Egg was fiercely radioactive slag in low orbit. The Floating Island evaded detection, the Veg-O-Fortress lay in ruins. Uncountable thousands of badniks had been built up and torn down. What had he gained?

The Doctor stroked his ginger moustache with one pudgy hand, as his other glove tapped the piloting controls. He had gained something in those six years: knowledge. And that was a commodity immeasurably more valuable than mere power, or territory.

Now, as it had six years ago, the Egg-O-Matic roared over gentle swells, its grav-plating's vortices throwing spray in the Doctor's face as he glared at the blinking screen.
Mid-afternoon sunlight painted the shallow sea a glorious azure; tropical fish scattered before his wake, and the chittering chevron of Buzz Bombers that flew ahead of the scientist's vehicle. Robotnik didn't spare the fish a glance; not even in contempt. He only had eyes for the data, pitiful as it was.
This was it? This was all the information he had on the island? A bland typicality!?
Whatever mundane part it had played in the past… from today, every square inch that un-named island, 'SIA-97-b' – it would crawl with sensor-bots.

Biting back a snarl of frustration, that he wasn't there already, the Doctor cranked his speed higher, listening to the whine of the badniks' engines as his wasp-like escorts did the same. The Egg-O-Matic, a squashed spheroid of grey and black, dropped even closer towards the surface of the sea, as the Lens-Thirring manipulators warped gravity forwards instead of upwards.

Eight days ago, the fox had arrived on SIA-97-b. Alone. Alone! He might… he should have gone then, gone to ensure the garrison destroyed that airborne pest. It would have saved the Doctor from his present, bedraggled state. And this desperate haste.

But he had been otherwise engaged, for the Battle Kukkus were mobilizing – at last. Consequently, the Doctor's attentions were required further east. The birds were using his weapons, and his charts… they were performing his work, irrespective of what their Fifteenth Emperor believed. And so Robotnik had to ensure that they performed it well, given his own forces were depleted and disarrayed.
Besides, SIA-97-b's garrison force could handle one pestilent sidekick.

Five days ago, Robotnik realized that they could not. He had unilaterally excused himself from a meeting with 'Doctor' Fukorokov, the Kukku's chief 'scientist' – much to the elderly owl's indignation – and surveyed the incoming damage reports with a mounting fury that had nothing to do with Fukorokov's insufferable obstinacy. The Doctor dispatched the 9th Division from Metropolis, to reinforce those badniks on SIA-97-b.

That should have been enough.

Three days ago, he realized something else, as well. Perhaps too late. A tiny fact, hiding subtly in the fragmented data-streams of 9th Division's surviving machines.
A tiny fact that made his skin crawl, made him leave Battle Kukku territory immediately.
Something that could not be. Something that MUST not be.

It was night by the time he arrived. Cloud cover had pulled in, blocking out the stars, and muting even the largest moons' light to a smear of silver in the east. Not that clear skies would have afforded him any advantage. He had no spy satellites left; they hadn't survived the Doomsday Zone.

That… that was something the Doctor tried not to remember too often. His entire form drenched in sweat, stuffed inside a spacesuit never designed for the punishing accelerations he was forced to initiate. The scratchy rattle in his respirator, as the suit struggled to keep pace with his ragged breathing. His mind afire with desperation and panic; and that… light, outside.
Hammering on the hull.
Hammering.
HAMMERING.

Grains of sand swirled beneath his floating vehicle, as the Egg-O-Matic climbed the beach of SIA-97-b. The dim moonlight offered scant illumination to this auspicious landfall; beyond the puddle of yellow from his pod's single headlamp, the Doctor was flying blind. A tang of sea-salt hung in the air, and the sickly petroleum scent of a transport barge.

His metallic minions had arrived on the island before him, of course: the South Island Archipelago 8th Division, scrambled from nearby SIA-43-a. His hastily-assembled escort, the Buzz Bombers, hovered noisily above the Egg-O-Matic, exchanging electronic protocols with the 8th's divisional network. Announcing that the Creator Himself was present on the island.

"Report!" Robotnik barked, impatience in his voice utterly lost on the robotic host. The mechanical wasps were not programmed to interpret such inflectional subtlety. Without voice synthesizers, they couldn't reply, either; the Buzz Bombers' collective response scrolled up the Egg-O-Matic's display, flanked by the appropriate identification serials.

"Destination: 2.45km southwest"

"And the target's status?" the obese scientist demanded, already turning his bulbous machine along the shoreline.

"Viable but deteriorating. Insufficient data to estimate remaining operating time."

"An exceptionally helpful assessment," Robotnik muttered, as he powered the craft forwards. As always, urgency eroded what little sufferance he cultivated.

More than once, as the mechanical party progressed down the beach, the Doctor glimpsed wreckage in the white sands. A screw, or a fragment of steel plating, already beginning to tarnish under the seawater's ruinous influence. The hedgehog was trouble enough; but if even his orange protégée could rip two divisions to shreds and escape unscathed…
Still. Those Mobians might be the least of his problems, if SIA-97-b held what he thought it held.

Presently, he arrived at the 8th Division's perimeter. Scavenging electronics from the island's ruined facilities, his badniks had erected a semicircle of floodlights around the target, banishing the oppressive darkness on this one stretch of shoreline. Over one hundred and fifty robots crowded at the edge of the electric brilliance, claws and spikes glinting as the Doctor's pod floated towards them. The rest of the 8th was combing the island, looking for more finds. Finds like this.

Robotnik lowered the Egg-O-Matic onto the beach, and hefted his spheroid form out of the pod. Grains adhered to the gloss-black of his lab shoes as their heels sunk deeply into the sand – but the Doctor barely even noticed. Incredulity tinged with dread; that was what occupied his thoughts, as he waddled towards the thing which had brought him all the way out here. Three day's travel, three days of sleeping at the controls, three days of eating nothing but the pod's emergency rations. The taste of powdered egg still clung to his tongue.

She was huddled over a campfire. It was a pitiful, flickering thing, of driftwood and kerosene, doubtless looted from one of the island's smashed robots. A shallow metal pan – the chest-plate from a turtle-bot, if he wasn't mistaken – hung above the flames. Something black simmered in there, giving off the scent of boiled cockles. Even as Robotnik approached, she prodded the fire with a crooked stick. The figure appeared completely oblivious to the badnik's presence, or the noisy trudging of their gargantuan master.

She was human.

To describe her as 'old' was, the Doctor thought, to squander a rare opportunity of using the word 'antediluvian'. The woman was a withered husk, with a face to rival the gargoyles of Castle Robotnik itself. She was garbed in a formless black robe of some unidentifiable fabric; a dirty scrap of cloth, that might have once been a cape, hung from her shoulders. Lank, silvery hair cobwebbed across the woman's brow; the rest was lost under the brim of an absurd, conical hat. That was black, too; bent and crumpled, like the crone herself.

The Doctor just stood there. Watching, as she pulled the stick out of the fire, and traced a spiral pattern into the sand.
He had not laid eyes on another human being for over a decade.
He had hoped never to do so again.

Without turning from the fire, she spoke; a scratchy, grating rasp. "Now, now, young man. Don't be shy," the woman – did she just call him 'young man'? – instructed.
"Come, sit down with old Wendy. Supper's nearly ready, it is, it is. Wendy bets a big lad like you wouldn't turn down a bowl o' soup, eh?"
The crone threw back her head, cackling: apparently hysterical at her own 'biting wit'.

Another human. Here, on Mobius.

His shoes crunched in the sand, as Robotnik circled around the flame: a bloated monster in claret and yellow, he prowled; prowled around the little old lady, and her makeshift fire. As monsters always had, since the very dawn of history.

"Wendy told them the same, she did," the wizened figure crooned, thrusting a gnarled finger in the direction of the badnik's perimeter. "She did, she did, she said that they could have soup too, if they came to sit with Wendy. Plenty for everyone, plenty for everyone, and mint candies for afters!"

"Tell me how you came here," the Doctor ordered, in a voice devoid of his usual bombast. Robotnik had never been one to ask nicely.

She either hadn't heard him, or simply ignored the demand. Murmuring to herself, the woman reached into the folds of her ebon robe. Behind, silently, mantisbots scuttled forwards, ready to defend their Creator by bisecting this ancient creature, had she somehow disguised a weapon from their tetrahertz scans.
But, true to her words, the crone's hand emerged holding… a sweet. It really was a mint candy, its white and green wrapper sitting in stark contrast to the parchment yellow of the crone's skin.

The Doctor had not seen one of those for closer to two decades.

"A good boy, a good boy, to come and see Wendy, come and see Witchcart, yes, yes, a good boy, the egg-man is a good boy. Not like the fox, no, no, the tricky fox, not like him, so he can have one before his soup, he can, he can. Only one, though, only one. Don't want to end up like old Wendy, does he?"
Toothless, blackened gums grinned at Robotnik, as the madwoman leaned forwards, holding the candy out for him. Her eyes wandered crazily, never lingering in one place for long.
They wandered… independently of each other.

The Doctor stepped closer, despite the anxious whirring of his steel children. His bulky hands dwarfed those of the shriveled witch, as he took the tiny sweet. Holding it up in the floodlight's megawatt glow, as if the simple, stripy wrapper were the most interesting thing in the world to him.

She was really here. On Mobius!? On HIS PLANET!?

"Yes, yes, candy, candy, the fox likes mint candy, the tricky fox, yes," Witchcart babbled. "Steal it, steal it, he wants to steals it, he does, but Wendy gives it freely, yes, yes. The egg-man, the egg-man, he wears red, he does, he does, but no, but no, but no, he's not the one Wendy wants. He's a good boy, the egg-man is, to come and see Wendy…"

Amidst her speech, Robotnik raised one foot out of the sand. And, casually; as though it were the most natural thing in the world; he kicked over the old woman's pan. The thin, watery soup tipped into her struggling fire, extinguishing it without even a whisper of smoke.

The witch fell silent at that.

He did something with his hands; sign language, of some sort. There was a flash of silver, and suddenly, the mantisbots were there, bladed limbs at her neck. The crone didn't so much as twitch, as the badniks wrapped their claws around her. With the kind of precision you only get from a razorblade held to the throat, the automata forced their prisoner to incline her head. Forced the ancient woman to face Him, the Father of Machines.

"You do not ignore me." Robotnik told her.

He crossed his arms behind his back, and bent forwards, leaning in close to the immobilized Witchcart. "It is a sad day, don't you think, when the young must teach proper manners to their elders? And appropriate decorum is so important when meeting new people."
Beneath the scent of filth, her breath smelt of mints.

"Now, let's try again, shall we? Tell me how you came here."

A dry rattle rose from between those withered lips. It took the Doctor a few seconds to realize what it was. She was laughing. At him.

The scientist's moustache twitched. And then:
"TELL ME WHO SENT YOU!" the Eggman roared, grabbing the witch's black-clad forearms, already restrained by the mantisbots' scythe-arms. He was a mechanic – that was one of his seven doctorates, anyway – and beneath the fat, there lay a mechanic's muscles; the strength enough to wrestle with metal. He could snap this frail woman's arms like matchsticks, if he chose. He could and he would, if she didn't answer him.
"Was it Regis? Did he find my equations? Or the Federal Council? Do they know I survived?! Nation; did Nation send you? Are they coming for me? Do they know who I am!? DO THEY KNOW ME!?"

He was shaking her, Robotnik realized, so the mantisbots were having difficulty not cutting into the parchment skin. And she was already dying, as the Buzz Bombers had pointed out. The Doctor corralled his rage, and exhaled, fixing Witchcart with that gaze that cowed even machines.
"Tell me how you came here. Do it now, before I decide to be… impolite."

But he had hurt her, he realized, and more than he had anticipated. The withered old woman didn't laugh this time; the rattling wheeze in her throat had nothing to do with levity. Witchcart's leathery eyelids fluttered, as she rasped out the words.

"No more candy… for him, no, no more. We goes now, Wendy goes. He's a good boy… but he has a temper, he does, the egg-man. The other one, no... Wendy didn't find him. Let nature takes its course, she will… yes; yes…"
The witch continued to draw breath, but it was shallow. Painful, no doubt.

She had finally said something funny. His voice was mirthful, this time, and he beamed at the dying woman, a half-moon grin blossoming under his walrus moustache. "Oh. Didn't you hear?" the Doctor asked, tipping his neck to match the crone's sinking head. Even as her senses faded, that made her focus. As the floodlights blazed in his glasses, the egg-man was smiling a smile she recognized: it was a smile of madness.

"Doctor Robotnik doesn't let nature take its course."

Author Note: The Promised Continuity Refresher

You've probably guessed by now; this actually is SEGASonic. Just... a bit warped, in that since this is set before Sonic Adventure, Eggman still is (or at least thinks he is) the only human on Sonic's planet. Plus there's a lot in that chapter that draws from the majorly-obscure games Tails Skypatrol and Tails Adventure. Even I've not played those through to the end, and I wrote this travesty. So:

Frozen Nitrogen's Refresher Course In Obscure Game Storylines!
From this chapter's point of view, the last two games to occur are Sonic & Knuckles, then Tails Skypatrol, with the events of Tails Adventure looming on the horizon. In Tails Skypatrol, it was essentially just Tails fighting some witch who lived on an island, and fuelling his flying spree by consuming an incredible amount of mint candy. In Tails Adventure, the fox fights some birds, the Battle Kukkus (who have a SUSPICIOUS amount of military hardware), while they're invading some other island.

And that's as complex as those game plots get. So there.
It goes into far more familiar territory with subsequent chapters. Games that more than 3 people have actually played. I promise.

And five points if anyone can tell me who Regis is.