Author Note:

You won't have A CHANCE of understanding the ending here, if you havn't played Sonic Chronicles. A lack of Shadow the Hedgehog game knowledge will probably remove any hope of comprehension, as well.
Jus' sayin'.

A seagull drifted lazily over placid, azure waves. The waters were shallow, here; and good hunting, clear tropical seas bustling with brightly coloured fish. Easy to see, even from the airborne heights which the bird occupied. Easy to catch.
Mobius' sun crawled leisurely across pastel skies. The hours wore on, as the gull darted in and out of sparkling, coral waters. It snatched up south islands cuttlesquid; tiny, purple-white NiGHTSfish; the occasional live honker, migrating its way through the archipelago towards distant Adabat. Fishing was good, today.

And so it was with a satisfied stomach, that the gull allowed its wings to catch hold of a coastal zephyr, and let the cool, mid-evening breezes bear it back home. Above, brilliant reds and purple shades chased the blue out of the sky.

Flakes of brittle, red-brown iron scattered before the bird's flapping approach, as it made an ungainly landing on the weather-beaten promontory that held its home. Orange, webbed feet touched down upon a tarnished spar of steel; the rusted metal bowed dangerously, as the gull settled its full-bellied weight. It neither knew, nor cared, about the curious artificiality of its perch, as it waddled along, ducking its head beneath a metal awning. "Propeller turbine casings" meant nothing to the gull. It merely knew this place as somewhere reasonably warm, that kept out the elements when it rained, and offered a good night's sleep if you were willing to put up with the incessant creaking of metal fatigue.

"Metal Island automated aeronautics production facility" would have meant even less, to this unassuming resident of the now decrepit manufactories. Vines and tree roots crawled around and inside these old, metal ruins, like probing fingers - ponderous yet confident, that they would inevitably drag the buildings down; return the iron to the ground from which taken. Mobian grassnakes and Westside claw-voles made their simple homes within the corroded places, where once the deafening whir of high-tolerance rotorblades would've made life both noisy and exceptionally brief, for the creatures of the island without a name.

Settling itself down onto a sparse carpet of old leaves and windblown grit, the seagull gazed placidly outwards from its nest the with the kind of disconcerned serenity that only a belly full of seafood could really bring. The final colours of the day yet lingered, yellow and crimson hues clinging to the sky like garish, surly actors, refusing to relinquish the stage for twilight's next act.

Down on the beach, the waves lapped quietly against darkening sands. The seagull wasn't concerned one bit, by two black silhouettes, moving slowly along the shoreline.

It continued to be unconcerned, right up to the point when a crudely stitched glove reached down and snapped its neck.

"Here again, we is.
Remembers, Wendy does, she remembers, she remembersssssss…
They put Wendy here, put Witchcart here, the ones in black, with the carts, Witchcart, they did, with the carts, with the –
With the FOX, tricky, tricky, she remembers, she remembers, with the tricky fox, they put her here…

He was bad, he was bad, he tries to steals it, he does, Wendy's candy, he steals it…
Fatty didn't know. He wouldn't listen! Wendy told him, Wendy told him, "He'll steal it! He'll steal it! Hide your candy, Eggman, or he'll steal it!" but he wouldn't listen, never, ever, ever… But Wendy told him again, and again, she did. Sewed him, the fox, to show him, to make the Eggman see, she sewed his mouth shut! And…
Fatty took him away.
Fatty took him away. To teach him to dance.
But he couldn't sing, he couldn't sing. She'd sewn his mouth shut! Wendy's friend couldn't sing, he -

Hills!
Trees!
Ruin Wood!

She was here before, she remembers. Machines, machines, dancing, dancing! But they didn't see Wendy, no… didn't see her, never, never. She liked it here, with the carts, the carts, before Fatty took her shoes.
Gave her other things instead, he did, the furry ones, to play with, he did, but she didn't like them. Too tall! Too tall! He couldn't sing, Wendy's friend…
Sing, sing, sing for him, she made them! Made them, made them sing; the ones Fatty gave her. He liked it, her friend, he liked to hear them sing, right until they broke, they did. She had made them all sing, like the birdies…so fragile, their little bones...

He did so love to hear them sing.

Bob bob, bob bob, bobbed beside her. Floating, floating! Just like the tricky one, the tricky fox, but no, but no, this one, this one was Wendy's friend, Witchcart's friend… Wouldn't steal it, wouldn't steal it, no. Brings us things, for the soup, he does, soup f-

Here."

She was flanked by a pair of towering soldiers, and two more marched behind her. Some crude attempt at a snub, she assumed: bringing armed guards to escort her through the facility. Their heavy, metallic boots stomped out a crisp military rhythm against mirrored floor tiles. Above, set into the high ceiling, cerulean lights blazed with actinic radiance. It was a pace hurried, but disciplined, as they moved deeper into the complex, striding purposefully from one harsh puddle of illumination to the next.
Everything about this place was harsh. The makers had styled it in their own image.

"You're absolutely certain? It's not another of the artificer's sensor sweeps?"

Her voice was barely audible over the pervasive noise they all made. Never mind the clanging, thunderous lockstep of their marching gait - gigantic strides carrying the creatures further in one step than she could travel in five – no, it was simply by virtue of being, that they filled the air with an angry, hissing crackle. And without her uniform, their charges would make her fur stand on end in a most undignified and quite painful manner – a fact she had discovered, much to her figurative and literal shock, on the very first visit here.

"My subordinates are not incompetent," the High Dictator replied contemptuously. As they moved, his jostling agglomerations of grey-blue steel briefly eclipsed the lux-bulbs' artificial glow. "You would do well not to insult their efforts, Procurator."
These… creatures, if one could charitably call them that, didn't breathe. There were no lungs, to push out the words, no larynx to shape the syllables and send them on their way towards her ears. They spoke with lightning, tormenting the air with electric power to thrash out a buzzing approximation of vocals. It made every conversation an audio warzone – and quite a deadly one, if you were fool enough to stand too close. Which, she suspected, suited the giants just fine.

"Yes, Syrax, because your Legion certainly tracked the cat in a competent manner, didn't they?" the black-clad creature retorted levelly. It was without satisfaction, that she watched through her helmet-visor as the Dictator's static core seethed in irritation. The feline had been such an opportunity. For all of them. But totally squandered. By cruel chance or procedural ineptitude, it was impossible to say… but she knew full well, that the Imperator had reprimanded Raxos for that particular failure. And Raxos had in turn punished Syrax. No doubt that was the whole reason he was with her now, consigned to escorting a lone military attaché, instead of standing at the General's shoulder while Raxos planned for another xenocidal assault on the Hive.

Still; whether the towering behemoths believed it or not, this was by far the more important project. The military boundaries of Sector Scylla would mean absolutely nothing, to anyone, when the Imperator's plan came to fruition. It was audacious to the point of genius; but that was what they had to be, what he had made them be. The Tribe had arrived here with nothing; clockwork industry and crude automata, less than a match for any one of the other races. It was only his audacity, his political genius, that had saved them from slavery or extinction more times than anyone could count.
And just look at them now.

She had been humbled to the point of speechlessness, when he had selected her, for the momentous task of executing his greatest, most glorious vision. The youngest Procurator in the army; but he had selected her. The Imperator had held her eternal loyalty and unquestioning obedience since the moment she had donned the matte-black of military uniform – and now he held them twice over.

Vast doors of sheet-metal eased soundlessly open as the variably-statured party arrived at their destination. The warp labs were rife with frenetic activity; moreso than the Procurator had ever seen them before. She involuntarily wrinkled a tiny black nose, as the pervasive scent of burnt nickel infiltrated even through the environmental seal of her faceplate. Steel-shouldered technicians of the Fifth Rampager Legion toiled around blinking screens and great banks of whirring machinery, barging each other out of the way with that peculiar Zoah disregard for physical presence. On the converse, some of Syrax's men almost looked to have abandoned their armours altogether. Jumbled scraps of grey slouched formlessly within massive crucible-chairs, their electric-blue tendrils dancing between and around and inside the computer terminals, darting back and forth across the room in thunderbolt arcs that would have set her dreadlocks aflame if not for the sweeping horns of her Procutorial helmet. It was a dangerous illusion, her academy instructors had been determined to impress upon the cadets. No matter how convincing this appearance of discorporation might seem, it was merely that: an appearance. The Zoah always resided inside its metal plating. If you wanted to kill one, fighting the lightning was a fool's errand. You dispatched Zoah the same way you dispatched everything else: by leech blading them in the face.

She was forced to remain close to Syrax, sidling in the Dictator's wake as he barged and clanged his way through the bustling sea of underlings. Zoah tended to "forget their own strength" around members of her species; a curious, injurious phenomenon, incidents of which seemed to occur in precise proportion to the current political climate between their General and her Imperator. Still, from a species as infamously xenophobic as the Zoah, those few "accidental" knocks and broken bones she'd suffered during this assignment were the equivalent of a big welcoming hug.

The military engineers were already waiting for them, a core cabal of Syrax's higher-ranking scientific officers clustered around the machine at the centre of the laboratory. It looked extremely out of place, in the monochrome blue of the Zoah colony: a distorted, four-meter-high sphere of clashing components and wild pseudo-organization. No matter how many times she saw it, no matter how many times she used it, alone or with the rest of the squad, the thing never seemed to look any more familiar. Refined kernels of Kron ore gleamed burnished crimson amidst thousands of molded Voxai psi-krystals. Gossamer strips of black Nocturnus polymer – close chemical cousins to the substance of her own uniform – coursed in intricate spirals over the surface of the device. She could even see N'rrgal technology, in there; semi-intelligent organic superlubricant, glistening darkly in between the components. Raxos had almost shut the entire project down, when he learned they were using Hive cytoplasm – and she had to admit, she could understand the General's misgivings. Even now, the liquid shifted purposefully, wetting the interfaces of those sub-machines which had already begun to spin up, as the engineers coaxed this hybrid fusion of science through its pre-activation sequences. The greatest technology of five races – five mutually antagonistic races – brought together in a single machine… it was another political impossibility, a fantasy made reality only through the undefiable will of the Imperator.

One of the scientists – Haniman, she suspected, but it was hard to tell the difference between like-ranked Zoah – turned away from the device, addressing Syrax and herself with a noise like a jungle adder made out of sandpaper.
"We detected the signal fourteen minutes ago, High Dictator," he reported, as the Procurator busied herself in configuring the warp belt at her waist. "Distention's been holding at ninety-eight percent mean variable that entire time, which means…" the metallic giant paused, electricity crackling around the horns of his helmet-piece. You could actually see the Zoah think. "…it corresponds to about two days, exo-time. You arrived at the right moment. We'll achieve hyperspatial interstice in twenty-three seconds."

Haniman shifted his attention to her, twelve feet of iron and lightning looming over the diminutive creature in a way that probably wasn't intentionally threatening; but it certainly came out that way. She didn't flinch a single muscle.

"Procurator, we had to activate the generators without running an optimized calibration sequence, so I can only guarantee you somewhere in the region of nine hundred, maybe a thousand seconds. After that…" the Zoah spread his arms, a sparking gesture of abrogation.

She scowled inside her visor, but nodded curtly. Sixteen minutes wasn't long, but it would have to be long enough.

"It's not the roboticist snooping as usual? Your certain it's the real signal?" she asked again, hoping to get a genuine answer out of the technician, since Syrax had been resolutely unforthcoming. Beside her, she could feel the Dictator glower, a subtle (yet unmistakably angry) change in the texture of his statics.

"It's been almost three year since…" the scientist began; but Haniman stopped himself, acutely aware both of the Dictator's souring disposition and the fact that he had less than ten seconds left to talk through. "…Yes, Procurator. We're certain. It's a rather… distinctive trace, for the Voxai krystals. They wouldn't give us this data set by accident. Your agent-"

He'd gone over time.

A violent bang! of displaced air cut off the Zoah's sentence, as the warp lab's blues were washed out by shining golden light. It span lazily, just in front of the spherical machine: a huge, glittering ring, rotating lazily about its upright axis. And other axes, too, if you looked at it for too long. Turning in directions that didn't quite fit inside 3D.

She was moving before the thunderclap even finished, boots dashing across the tiled floor with indecent haste. Now, for Procurator Shade of the Nocturnus, every second counted. Every -

FLICKER

'Haniman, you incompetent –' was the half-thought that flashed through Shade's head, as she stepped out onto SIA-47-b. Stepped out… a little higher than preferable.

She could just make out a flash of green, through the visor; and then the canopy slammed into her. Fern leaves and branches lashed at the Procurator's polymer uniform, a percussive series of vegetative thwacks as she bounced off one tree limb after another. Air exploded out of the echidna's lungs as Shade felt her stomach connect with a particularly gnarled and unyielding piece of tree limb… before she was tumbling again, gravity's hungry claws determined to drag the Procurator all the way down.
Shade desperately twisted her wrists, a flailing attempt at manipulating the cog-like devices which bound the sleeves of her combat garb. The left cuff neglected to respond; but on her right, with a fierce flash of power, the leech blade buzzed to life. A pinkish wedge of force and magnetism and incomprehensible, Voxai principles; the phantasmal triangle sputtered indignantly, but Shade had no time to let the thing come online properly. Another violent impact smashed into her side; the Procurator swept her arm sideways, wedging her nascent energy-knife into the thick bark of a pine trunk.
Gouts of woodchip and sawdust blossomed outwards as the blade gouged a pencil-thin furrow into the fabric of the towering fir. The echidna experienced a grotesque, and above all painful tingling in her forearms, as the cuff-machines mindlessly attempted to channel plant vitality into her own body. Incompatibility hurt.
And the ground was still rushing towards her awfully fast…

It was only Ruin Wood's carpet of loamy mulch that saved her from crippling injury or worse. Shade hit the ground like a stone, throwing up a rustling cloud of dry leaves and pine needles. The armoured horns of her helmet clanged to rest against a rotting tree bough, sending a family of fist-sized wood-beetles scuttling away in alarm. The insectile sound of their hasty scurrying quickly receded into obscurity; and everything was quiet again.

Up above the fallen echidna, dislodged twigs and greenery still tumbled from the hole the echidna had ploughed through the treeline. At the other end of the gap, a twilight sky glimmered, pinprick stars scattered haphazardly against indigo.

She hated that sky. It was not at all unlike the place she'd just left.

Shade groaned, a sound born as much out of exasperation as pain, as she lay there amidst the mud and foliage. It was with a soldier's methodical diligence, that she checked over her arms, her legs, her chest, searching for injuries before trying to move anything that might snap when she put stress upon it. It didn't feel like anything was actually broken – the uniform was a robust construction - though that consolation didn't really help to dull the pain from her unscheduled descent.

"Haniman, you incompetent..." the Procurator repeated, her epithet giving way to a pained gasp as Shade levered herself up. The black fabric on her left sleeve had been torn open, exposing the echidna's peach fur and a not inconsiderable quantity of blood to the world. Her cache of stasis grenades was gone, as well; presumably the satchel would be snagged on a branch up there somewhere.
She couldn't really blame Haniman; she knew that, intellectually. The Zoah machinists operated the interstice machine precisely because they were more competent than the Nocturnus technical staff. That… and the fact that device's radiation would have killed flesh-and-blood operators within weeks. But still; sitting in a puddle of mulch at the terminal end of a ninety-foot drop, Shade could not help but entertain the hope that Syrax's chief engineer would end his days in a suitably ignominious fashion; perhaps peddling cut-rate charms to gawking idiots on the streets of the Zoah Colony.

Shade got up. Trees stretched in every direction, their omnipresence disrupted only by the occasional pile of mouldering, multicoloured stones that lent Ruin Wood the first part of its name. She touched the contraption at her wrist, again, bruised fingers skating over the dials with practiced ease. Her chronometer informed her that over two minutes had already elapsed.

Time to get moving.

The chameleonware still functioned, at least, although the gaping hole in her suit's shoulder messed up the adaptive camouflage's coverage. So it was under imperfect cloak that Shade crept tentatively through the bracken tangles, peering into the clearing's crimson firelight. Only three minutes to go. But she'd found her.
...Or at least found some of her. That… thing, that the creature was merged into… she had cut a bizarre figure even before, when the technicians had plucked her out of the space between spaces, tall and furless and babbling nonsense. They had sent her onwards, this strange old woman, to reach the world that they could not. But now…
It gave the echidna pause. Even with the seconds ticking away, Shade was reluctant to reveal herself; not until she could understand precisely what it was she was looking at. Because the woman was only half there. Vaguely silhouetted against the glow of her crackling fire, the ancient creature looked as though –

"No good hiding, dearie. She's seen you, Wendy hasssssssss…"

The Procurator stopped dead, her metal-shod boots freezing mid-step. That was impossible. The hunched crone had been stood with her back to Shade, this entire time. And in the dark; with the cloaking field, she couldn't have –

"Tick, tock, tick, tock, time time, tick tock," the crone sang, not even glancing up from the dancing flames.
"Outside the time, she is, so she doesn't have much of it… And Wendy has somethings for herssssss, she does."

The echidna grimaced inside her helmet. She was quite aware of the rapidly decreasing second count. And if she came back empty-handed… it would take at least a day, of Cage-time, to charge another interstice; months would pass, on Mobius. By which time this woman could well be dead. Shade was amazed she'd lasted this long, especially after all those… well, it must have been years, here, with no trace of her at all.
So the Procurator really had no other choice.
She turned off the chameleonware, smart polymers flipping from earthy greens and browns to the neutral matte black. And then stepped out, into the clearing.

Her conical hat perched atop a wizened brow; its peak tipped forwards, as the old human poked the fire with a stick. Above the flames, a dead gull sizzled disgustingly, skewered on a metal spit. Shade's feet trod across the carpet of sparse grasses, her fingers on the leech blade controls. A tingling sensation crawled up her spine; and not just from nerves still protesting their fall through the trees. She couldn't escape the feeling that something else was watching, from the forest. Something… malicious.

"Don't mind, don't mind, he's Wendy's friend, he is…" Witchcart crooned, again speaking as if she was reading the echidna's mind. "He's won't steal it, he won't. Not like the tricky one, is he? No, no no…"

The woman was still wearing them. That same set of robes: eldritch, Nocturnus fabrics, that they had given her, before. Passive stealth material, the kind they made the Velite's uniforms out of. Chemically, it was just fibres – nothing so sophisticated as Procutorial chameleonware – but the way it creased, and crinkled, was optimized, to reduce radar detectability. Shade had no way of knowing, how many times that subtle effect has saved the woman's life, as she'd trundled through the shimmering blue streets of a ruined and desolate city. Or even earlier, when the crone had first ridden the tracks that criss-crossed this very island.

As Shade drew level, the witch cracked a toothless smile, her eyes wandering randomly. With a surprisingly deft motion, she swept the hat from off her head; matted cobwebs of silvery hair shining in the light of the fire. The Procurator knew to keep her eyes on the other person's hands, in a situation like this. But she couldn't help glancing over her shoulder, as Witchcart mumbled to herself. She could feel the eyes of that unseen observer upon her. Shade almost thought she caught a flash of orange, through the trees… but it was gone.

The human was rummaging around inside the upturned cone of her absurd headgear. But with a victorious, slanted expression, she donned the piece back on top of her hair. Now cupped in Witchcart's withered, yellow hands, lay… things.

There were odd circles of shiny metal, encased in cuboids of clear plastic. "G.U.N. TOP SECRET", their lettering proclaimed. Five of them, indistinguishable but for the fact someone had scrawled "Found by Charmy on Prison Island! (Shadow helped)" in childish fonts on the top one.A sixth disk was larger, in a green sheath, with "ARK Computer Room ref224.23962" embossed upon the metal itself. And on top of that lay a red-and-yellow… well, a brick, seemed the best way to describe it - studded with electronic ports of one sort or another. Nothing to declare its purpose, except a small symbol on the side, which looked for all the world like the face of a toothy madman. It did not escape Shade's notice, that the same symbol was repeated on the front of Witchcart's mechanical lower half.
And finally, wedged between two of the G.U.N. disks: a tiny paper card.
"Chaotix Detective Agency
We never turn down work that pays"

"What… is this?" the Procurator managed. They all looked like pointless nick-nacks, to her. Human data storage was not a discipline well known to the Nocturnus.
Wendy Witchcart grinned again, stupidly. "Pays, pays, she paid them, Wendy paid. Remembered the shelly, Wendy remembered, when they do something for Wendy… The hider, and the buzzy, and the one with the teeth, teethy-teeth-teeth, they did, they found these, for Wendy, for Witchcart..."

Shade just looked at her. Information; that was what the Imperator had charged her with collecting, and what Shade had in turn charged Wendy. Not… shiny trinkets and broken equipment. She almost, almost didn't take them. But she couldn't return with nothing. Syrax would do more than just break her arm again. "A terrible, tragic accident, of course…"

The Procurator grimly removed the items Witchcart offered her, depositing them in a field satchel. Useless they might be, but at least it would give the Zoah scientists something to look at.
Only once the curios were securely tucked away, did Shade truly appreciate the lightness of those pieces of junk; and the terrible pointlessness of this whole journey. It cost in the region of fifty thousand rings, to activate the interstice portal, and escape that damnable Cage for all of what, a quarter of an hour? She had to get something substantive. She had to try, in the little time she had left.

Tapping her wrists again, Shade ordered her helmet to disengage.
There was a hissing sound, and a clang of metal segments folding together right next to her ears. The armour plates within the Procurator's curving horns collapsed together; sliding, retracting, setting her dreadlocks free. The faceplate slid up over her eyes, technologically-expanded sensorium reducing down to the mere visible wavelengths that her eyes could process on their own. She felt moving Kron steel scuff past the fur on her temple; and then it was over, the entire ensemble headgear compressed down to a thick band of metal and polymer, perched over her forehead.
It was, Shade realized, the very first time she'd breathed the unfiltered air of her home planet.
Mobius smelled of old mints.

"Did you find him?" Shade asked the wizened human, pointing to her face with an obsidian glove. "Like me? The other echidna. The one who looks like me. Did you see the red-"

"Red one, red one, red, two, red one!" Witchcart cackled, finishing the Nocturnus' sentence for her, as though sharing an incredibly funny punchline. "The red one, with the shiny, the green shiny! Outside the time, they know him, she knows, knows, but Wendy doesn't… they knew him too, that never turns down work that pays, but not Wendy, no, no. Land of the Sky, land in the sky! That's where, that's where…"

FLICKER

And Argus took her back.

"Gone, gone gone.

Gone again. She never did stays, for soup, she didn't. The one in black… tick tock, tick tock, always rushing, no time, no time…

He comes, bob-bob, bob-bob, Wendy's friend, he bobs. Watching, he was, always watching. Wendy's friend, Witchcart's friend…

Done here now, Wendy is. She likes it here, she does, they put her here, with the carts, the carts, but now she has her own. Fatty gave it her, he did, he did, gave it her and took her shoes, he did, and taught him to dance. He's a good boy, the Eggman is, a good boy, but he has a temper. Backwards, he was… Wendy knows, Wendy knows.

We can go, my dearie, foxy foxy fox fox. Things to do, things to do, Witchcart has.

Things to do, things to do. And mint candies for afters…"

END