Chapter Text
This world was lost.
The war had reached a peak; it wasn't their battle to fight. Not anymore. It was evident in the cracks, glow harsh as it was blinding, that carved the land, seas, and skies into shards upon shards. A slow crumbling of this reality with each weapon and attack. The fabric of existence strained to contain unfiltered power from crystals created by those long past — those who had also fallen to the might of their own hubris.
An unused gateway, half-complete, but usable. A one-way trip.
This world was not theirs.
But another could be.
"What a great turnout for our charity car wash," Amy beamed, soap-sudded sponge in hand. "That new daycare center will be funded in no time!"
Well, someone was cheerful today. Washing Dave the Intern's car wasn't exactly what Sonic would consider exciting, just mind-numbingly boring. Still, he knew better than to argue with Amy on this kind of thing — this time, anyway. And it wasn't as if he hated charity events. He was just of the opinion that he could get this all done in a snap with his speed, freeing up the rest of the day for a nap or actual fun. But no, they all needed to pitch in and set an example for the townspeople. As if the role model fiasco hadn't left a lingering bad taste in Sonic's mouth.
"Hey!"
Oh, goodbye, boredom. Eggman sounded ticked off today. Nothing too new but better that than more mindlessly scrubbing down of other people's cars.
"You jerks robbed me blind. I must have had a couple of bucks in my change holder and now there's a few stray coins! Figured you could leave two behind and old Eggman wouldn't notice? Well, I noticed, bucko!"
"Slow your roll, cue-ball. We didn't take anything," Sonic retorted, discarding his sponge. No point holding onto it with a confrontation, or even a battle, imminent.
"I could've bought something off Meh Burger's Just a Buck Menu with that money, like a half-handful of fries, or a thimble of chilli!"
A BOOM! resounded from somewhere off in the distance, and a plume of smoke rose up from wherever the source was.
"Woah! What was that?"
"Don't try to change the subject, you change thief!" Wow, so it was his fault again. huh? As if Sonic wanted Eggman's chump change in the first place. "Robots, attack!"
Scorpion bots scuttled toward them, heading an assortment of other bots, and Sonic let a grin appear on his face, hearing his team ready up behind him. This would be a bit more fun than the car wash.
He shot off into a series of spin attacks, easily smashing several of the bots to pieces. Routine this may be, but compared to a regular day, it was more exciting than anything else to happen on this island. He caught Knuckles and Tails' cheering after destroying one scorpion bot.
"You mangy marmots are a miserable menace," grumbled Eggman. "Gah! You got me so angry and agitated, I'm alliterating!"
Sticks decapitated a mantis. His little buddy helped Amy smash another scorpion. Sonic kicked the third to pieces, while Knuckles punched the head off a mantis bot.
Another spin attack took out a fourth scorpion.
"Nothing's more fun than turning your robots into scrapheaps," Sonic smirked.
Two more bots were scrapped by his spin attack, but before he could strike another, something slammed into him. He unfurled onto his feet, shaking his head, and spotted two more robots — the bigger one's arm returning, so that must have been what hit him. Red and bulky like Knuckles, some fancy scouter over an eye, it wasn't anything he had seen before. And the other was a compact green bot with short arms and big eyes that took up much of the face. Neither of them looked like Eggman's usual designs but hey, maybe the evil doctor was trying something new this time.
This certainly looked to be a challenge, even if Sonic doubted that for the second bot. It looked like it would fall to pieces with a single punch.
"Stepping up your game, huh, Egghead?"
"Yeah, sure." Eggman sounded almost hesitant as he said that. "Uh, this is whats-its-face, and that's, eh, whose-it-bot!"
What kind of names were those?
The small one's arms stretched past them to flip open the bonnet of Dave's car, fiddling with something. He heard the others yelp as they scrambled to dodge the runaway vehicle that then crashed somewhere — probably into a tree or a hopefully uninhabited building.
"Time to wrap this up!" the big red bot announced. What even was that voice? He sounded like he was mimicking some action movie hero — the Tommy Thunder thing was still a sore spot for him, okay?
The rocket fist came at him again, so Sonic dodged and turned to make a run towards his new opponent. But his foot caught on what was probably his own discarded sponge. He fell back with a yelp, narrowily avoiding the metal fist that shot overhead, bonking his head on the ground. He totally meant to do that.
Something yanked him up to be back-to-back with the rest of his team. And he could see the green bot wizz by on wheels, winding an extendable arm around them all, not unlike that time in Lyric's prison — where they first got their enerbeams. Sonic would have squirmed but that risked him poking his friends with sharp quills, unlike Amy who religiously softened and straightened hers for style.
"And Sonic goes down! That's a W for Doctor E. Boom-shakalaka!" Always with the gloating. "We better get out of here. He has a tendency to turn these things around on me."
At least Eggman was self-aware enough to acknowledge that, as opposed to pretending otherwise.
Sonic waited for the others to lean away from him before taking off in a run against the coil around them. It bent like a rubber band and refused to break. He curled up into a spin attack, slicing through the cord, and freeing them all. It all shrunk down into a veritable twig of a limb — its original size.
Tails plucked it off the ground, a thoughtful hand to his chin. "I don't think Eggman made this. We've never seen robot technology like that before."
"There's a simple explanation," Sticks declared.
They all knew exactly where this was going, paraphrasing like a bored chorus.
"The robo-apocalypse is nigh."
"No, not nigh," their paranoid badger protested, voice rising into a shrill agitation. "Now! The robo-apocalypse is now!"
"Why don't I gather some data and see if we can't come up with an alternate theory?" suggested Tails.
"Fine," she huffed. "But until you can prove otherwise, let's all agree that the robo-apocalypse is upon us and life on this planet as we know is doomed. Sound good?"
Not willing to get into this argument again, Sonic shrugged and made a vaguely affirmative sound. The others did the same. Best to let her get it out of her system than try to convince her away from this long-running conspiracy theory of hers.
At least with this new mystery of non-Eggman robots, and a crashsite to investigate, no one would notice that they left the car wash or forgot to clean up the scrapped bots. The villagers could do it themselves for a change.
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Trekking through the forest, Sonic kept his eyes on Tails who led the way with his handheld GPS. Leave it to his sidekick to figure this whole thing out piece-by-piece. He was sure that it wasn't a robo-apocalypse, no matter what Sticks claimed otherwise.
"That crash we heard came from over here. Maybe the debris will help us understand who these bots are and where they came from."
"And once we understand them, we can find a peaceful resolution," Amy smiled.
Sticks hijacked it right after with a sinister snicker. "And once we make peace, they won't see it coming, when we bash them with bricks!"
They came out of the treeline to the sight of a crashed ship, not too dissimilar to the Ancient biplane that brought them here from the mainland, but definitely different enough to be its own thing. It honestly looked like a spaceship more than anything from this world.
Tails immediately flew up to enter the cockpit from the roof, blue eyes wide and paired with an eager grin. Sonic followed right after him while the others explored the exterior.
"Holy Moly!" his best friend exclaimed, namesakes swishing with barely contained excitement. "This technology's out of this world! And by that I mean it's really groovy. I bet you thought I meant it is not from this world, which is also true."
"So, where exactly did this groovy ship come from?"
"According to the GPS, they came from somewhere in the sky."
Both of them startled as Sticks let out a frantic scream, followed by what sounded like a bit of a scuffle. Sonic shot Tails a confused look before hopping out to see what was going on. And of all things, Sticks being restrained from biting or smashing something with her wooden staff notwithstanding, this felt like something out of a sci-fi movie.
A shining metallic replica of their wild badger, armed with a steel staff of her own, bared sharp fangs at them. Behind her was a similarly robotic Amy Rose, hammer swung over the shoulder at the ready, and Tails crouched low with visible electricity sparking around a hand. The other Knuckles, who sported a metal bolo tie for some reason, loomed with crossed arms at the back of the admittedly defensive formation. And at the very centre, blue eyes meeting his, was Sonic's own metal copy who looked mildly alarmed if anything. The lack of hostility and having a visible mouth probably helped make him come off as friendlier than Metal Sonic.
"Woah!" Tails gasped, landing right beside him. "Are those robot duplicates of us?"
"Cyborgs, if you want to get technical," Cyber Tails answered. "But yeah, we're… we're copies of you guys."
Before Sticks could go on a tirade, or Cyber Sticks actually committed to bonking someone, Amy stepped in to prevent this first meeting from going downhill any further.
"Well, it's really nice to meet you all. And please don't mind Sticks. If you are willing, would you all mind coming with us to our Tails' workshop for questions?"
The five of them stayed quiet, glances made to the blue cyborg in their protective circle, as if waiting for a command. Sonic found it odd to see — his team definitely did not look to him for decisions like that. Amy tended to call the shots more than he did.
"I guess we can. But not for too long."
With that decision made, the cyborgs relaxed a little, parting the front of their defensive circle. But they stayed close to Cyber Sonic's sides and back which, again, was strange to witness. It screamed protectiveness that Sonic himself had no real frame of reference for. And there were so many questions about these guys?
Who made them? What had they been built for? When had DNA from him and his team been stolen to make these guys? Why were they here? How did someone make such advanced cyborg copies of them?
And those were just the beginner questions.
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The cyborgs seemed more awkward than threatening in the way they stared, or glared in Cyber Sticks' case, at everything around them. He could see the smile on Tails' face as he scanned Sonic's cyborg duplicate from head to toe without a single complaint. Where it would take minutes, if not an incentive, for Sonic himself to stand still long enough for such a thing, Cyborg Sonic had no issue with it from what he could tell. The guy was pretty mild so far which wasn't a problem, not at all! He even tolerated Sticks' non-verbal threats with barely a reaction beyond smiling.
"So, are you guys the nice kind of alien robots? Or the destroy-every-living-creature-on-the-planet kind of alien robots?" Knuckles asked.
"I vote the second kind," added Sticks.
Cyber Knuckles tilted his head to the side. "We're not aliens, and why would we destroy every living thing on the planet? You guys would do it to yourselves without us helping."
Wow, okay, that was a loaded statement. Grim, ominous even.
Amy answered the knocking at the door before calling to him, "Sonic, Orbot and Cubot are here! Probably wanna rat out Eggman!"
He zipped over, staring down the two henchbots.
"Are we really that predictable?" Cubot asked.
"Less talking, more ratting."
Orbot spoke up next. "Eggman is holding those charming spacebots captive in his lair."
"Maybe you can break them free or something?" added the other bot.
"Does everyone here think we're from space?" Cyber Tails groaned from further inside the workshop. "We really aren't."
"Either way, can't leave Mighton and Bolts to Eggman," said Cyber Sonic.
He shared a grin with his metal duplicate, then turned to the rest. "Who's up for a prison break?"
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"Not so fast, omelet breath!"
Eggman really should invest in better walls, given how easily Sonic could bust into the lair, even more so with Amy's hammer to help. And it wasn't too shocking to see both bots — Mighton and Bolts — suspended in some magnetic thingy that Tails understood better.
"Geez, how many times are you gonna smash that wall?" Eggman said. "Maybe I should get you your own key."
"Ooh, that'll be great," beamed Amy. "But right now, your 'stache is smashed, Eggman!"
"You leave my facial hair out of it! Minions! You know the deal."
Fire Bot, two ball bots and a pair of beetle robots, showed up to attack them. But before they could do anything, both bug bots were shortcircuited on the spot then subsequently flattened by a heavy hammer. Sonic punted a bouncing ball bot away with Tails doing the same into both getting either impaled by a metal staff or sent crumpling into a nearby wall. A flame was launched towards the last of their collective troupe which in turn set Eggman's couch ablaze — nice.
"I always forget Fire Bot is an outdoor robot," muttered the villain. "Wait a minute. Where did you get robot copies of yours? That's my thing!"
"Oh, yeah? Then where is Metal Sonic? Haven't seen him since last season."
Sonic took some satisfaction from Eggman's infuriated scowl, unbothered by the chaos happening around as the rest of his team and the cyborgs handled things. He paused as the lab doors opened to reveal Orbot and Cubot.
"Well, we're back from our afternoon constitutional and…" The red minion bot gasped in faux horror. "What's this? Sonic and his friends infiltrated the lair? How did they know about Doctor Eggman's scheme?"
"We told them, remember? When we ratted out—"
Cubot's mouth got covered by his friend, not that it would have helped anyway. If Sonic had heard them then Eggman definitely did too. He spotted Tails typing at a computer and soon deactivated the magnets holding Mighton and Bolts hostage.
"Oh, come on! Those magnets were password protected!"
"Maybe you should've picked something more secure than Password123," quipped his flying buddy, dodging Eggman's sad attempt at grabbing him.
Their adversary screamed when Mighton and Bolts began to encroach upon him, scrambling to hide behind Fire Bot. Not that it helped when he was immediately grabbed by the back of his coat, courtesy of Cyber Knuckles. Sonic revved up into a spin attack and slammed into Fire Bot alongside his cyborg double, turning their opponent into pieces of scrap.
"Now that I think about it, I don't need to know to know where Morristown is," Eggman whibbled. "I hate travelling anyway. I never bring enough underwear."
Mighton stomped the ground while Bolts fiddled with the computer. Eggman got yanked by his wrist controller into the magnet before getting electrocuted. Wow, deserved, but a bit much.
"Welp, that's our job done," Sonic said. He spotted Team Cybonic heading out ahead of them, his cyborg double once again guarded by the others at the sides and back. His friends seemed just as curious about it as him at the sight of it. "Come on, team. Let's go."
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"This navigation system is loaded with more malware than an email forward by that Old Monkey guy!"
As Tails and Bolts worked on the crashed shuttle, not spaceship according to Cyber Tails, Sonic spied the cyborgs huddled in a group off to the side. They looked to be discussing something and it didn't appear to be anything good. A glance at Mighton told Sonic that the red bot was just as curious about them and their whole deal. If the shuttle was any indication, Team Cybonic looked to be as advanced as Morristown technology — ugh, couldn't they have picked a better name?
"I owe you all an apology," Mighton said. "We had no idea that you primitive rodents were on the side of good."
"Thanks. I think…"
If there was a more backhanded compliment, Sonic would gladly shove his shoe right up the big red lug's tailpipe or whatever robot equivalent they had. And evidently, the cyborgs were done whispering amongst themselves, not looking too happy to see Mighton and Bolts — besides Cyber Sonic who was currently walking over to the smart duo still wrists deep in the shuttle.
"One might even say that you and Tails are the Mighton and Bolts of the terrestrial world."
"How about you're the Sonic and Tails of the sky?"
"Agree to disagree. Speaking of, are those bots yours?" Mighton gestured toward the cyborgs who had split off with Cyber Knuckles and Cyber Amy at their leader's back while Cyber Tails and Cyber Sticks were entertaining, well, Sticks.
"All finished!" Tails announced, grin growing wider as he took Cyber Sonic's offered high-five. Huh, maybe he should do that more with his buddy, if this was how excited he got with a cyborg copy. "This spaceship should be good as new!"
"Aha! Capital. Bolts, set the coordinates to the robot utopia in the sky, Morristown."
"Really?" Amy asked. "You didn't name your city something cool like Atomic-topolis?"
"Or maybe something cloud-based like Nimbus-ville?" suggested Tails.
Cyber Sonic decided to speak up with a raised metallic brow. "Why not Roboken?"
"Oh, that's good," he whistled. "Nice job, cyborg me."
The other quirked a slight smile, shoulders shrugging in a convincing show of modesty. And the rest of them agreed that it was a much cooler name than Morristown. Yeah, Roboken worked just fine.
"Well, it's a pleasure having met you," Mighton said, shaking Sonic's hand. "I'm glad we could make peace."
He spotted Sticks preparing to throw a brick at Mighton and quickly shook his free hand at her in a don't do that motion. Sonic sighed in relief as she dropped it and whistled innocently, thankfully none of it noticed by Mighton or Bolts, who board the shuttle. There was a pause where the departing pair glanced at the collective of cyborgs who all made no move to join, instead giving the most boringly civil nods he had ever seen.
The door closed and off the ship went, taking off into the sky smoother than before. It was likely thanks to Tails' handiwork.
He spotted Sticks glaring at the bushes, the cyborgs immediately on guard. Sonic inched closer with the others.
Lasers suddenly flew out at them, coming from all kinds of directions, half of them getting blocked or parried by metal. Sonic spied one soaring right towards Tails, his heart in his throat. But his cyborg double took the hit right in the chest and continued to shield his buddy from more attacks.
"Hold your ground, team!" Sonic called out.
Sticks cut in, "Forget the ground. Hold your weapons!"
And of all things, their attackers turned out to be all those Cubot prototypes from last season, armed with all manner of weaponry. Two showed up on the roof of the workshop, shooting a laser that got blocked by Cyber Sonic before it could hit Tails, while another helped herd Sticks towards Knuckles and Amy with a cattle prod.
"What the heck? These Cubot prototypes used to be cute and cuddly, like Amy," Knuckles said. "Now they're bloodthirsty and vindictive, like Amy when I move her throw pillows."
"I put those pillows in their spot for a reason. When you throw them aside, you ruin the whole tableau!"
"Ugh, but they're throw pillows!"
Sonic startled as Cyber Knuckles blocked an attack that had been aimed at him, Cyber Amy punting another Cubot prototype away from him with a swing of her hammer. He focused his attention back on the chaos around them.
"We gotta figure outhow to corral these guys without hurting them!"
Cyber Sticks whacked the button atop a prototype's head, making it explode into pieces. Oh.
"Or that," Sonic added.
"Of course," agreed Tails. His cyborg bodyguard intercepted the prod while he pressed the self-destruct button. "I'll put them back together later."
One by one, each of the Cubot prototypes were reduced to piles of self-destructed pieces. And without a word, Cyber Tails knelt down to examine the pieces with a thoughtful frown.
"I'm worried, Tails," Sticks admitted.
"It's okay, Sticks. I'll rebuild them and they'll be good as new."
"That's what I was worried about."
"What's caused them to go crazy?" asked Amy.
"Hypnobot."
Sonic noticed that none of the cyborgs looked surprised, and none of them argued with Cyber Tails' quick assessment. He walked over to Tails' side, who was wide-eyed at this revelation, and shaking his head.
"Hypnobot? No way. I- I never programmed him to be sentient!"
"Wait, how are you so sure about who it is?" Sonic asked.
They all seemed unwilling to give any answers but his cyborg copy bit the metaphorical bullet.
"Because he's the reason we were made in the first place. It's a bit of a story, though."
"Then talk," he returned. "And make it quick."
Cyber Sonic smiled wryly. "We'll keep it TLDR."