Chapter 2: Wake-up
Call
KABOOM!
Stripes immediately sat
straight up in bed. “What the stars was that?!”
“Stripes!” The voice of
Stripes’s mother came through the doorway. “Get out here, quick!”
Stripes immediately jumped
out of bed and grabbed his hat and shoes while running out to the house’s main
room. “What’s going on?” he worriedly asked his mom.
“Look,” she replied,
pointing at the family’s viewscreen. Every household in and around the city of
And one look at the screen
told Stripes that this was unquestionably an emergency situation.
There was a Mobian chipmunk
on the screen, and she was talking in a tone that suggested she was barely
keeping her emotions in check. She was covered with tannish fur and wore a blue
vest. Her long dark brown ponytail and bangs were disheveled. Although she
dressed like anything but royalty, she was Princess Sally Eliza of the House of
Acorn – or more simply, Princess Sally. Her father was the semi-monarch of
Mobius, or at least the large region surrounding Mobiathon. Sally herself had
led that brave band of Freedom Fighters who had eradicated Robotnik years before.
But that didn’t matter now.
The things she was saying made that much clear.
“..I repeat,” she continued
as Stripes came into earshot, “Mobiathon is under heavy attack by unknown
forces. Any and all citizens are ordered to evacuate the area as quickly and
calmly as possible and head to the old Freedom Fighter bases.” As she spoke,
her picture became smaller and shifted to a corner of the viewscreen. In its
place, what looked like large blue starships were descending on the city,
firing bursts of energy that caused explosions in the streets and buildings.
Panicked Mobians were running every which way as the streets were overcome by
strange purple humanoid creatures. Stripes couldn’t make them out very well on
the screen. “Please,” the princess’s voice continued, “do not panic. I repeat: do not pan…”
BOOM!
Stripes and his mother heard
another explosion, but this one wasn’t on the screen. It was outside their
house, and it rattled the windows. The viewscreen went blank as all electricity
was cut off.
“Mom!” Stripes said in the
calmest voice he could manage. “We’ve got to get out of here. Dad already left
to tae Sis to school, right?”
The female tiger looked very
worried. Although Stripes’s senior by many years, she was only slightly taller
than her son. She had a sort of poofy hair-do on the top of her head that was
the same shade of black as the stripes on the rest of her orange-furred body.
She was dressed in a casual work suit, as she had been about to leave for work
herself when the warning came. “Yes, just a few minutes ago,” she responded,
“but do you think they’re…”
“They’re probably safer than
we are right now,” Stripes said reassuringly, though he was so sure himself.
“All of the public transportation systems have emergency routes to safety. We
learned that in school yesterday, so I’m not just making it up.”
“Al-alright…,” his mom
replied, obviously still uncertain.
“I think our best bet is to
take the old Freedom Fighters’ underground tunnels,” Stripes continued. “They’d
take us straight to old
“Well, actually…we have an
entrance to one in the basement. A lot of houses around here do,” the maternal
tiger said, hesitantly. “I guess we never told you about it when you were
younger because we were afraid you and Hedgey would go off exploring on your
own and get lost…”
BLAM!
Another nearby explosion
shook the house.
“Let’s go!” Stripes grabbed his mother’s hand and almost dragged her down
the basement stairs. “There’s no time to talk now!”
After hurriedly shoving
aside some boxes of Stripes’s old baby things, they found the entrance to the
tunnel and hurried inside.
“Stripes!”
The tiger jumped and whirled
at the voice.
“Hedgey! What are you doing
down here?” he exclaimed at the sight of his friend coming down the tunnel.
“Well, I was just about to
leave for school when Princess Sally came on-screen with the warning,” Hedgey
explained. “I remembered overhearing my parents talking about this tunnel one
night, so I decided to come and see if you guys were okay,”
“That was very thoughtful of
you, Hedgey,” Mrs. Tigre responded as Stripes flicked on the flashlight he had
grabbed on the way down. The three of them hurried down the tunnel in what
Stripes determined to be the direction of the
The only visible light came
from the flashlight. The tunnel must’ve been near an underground river, as the
air was quite humid. The sound of dripping water could be heard every few
seconds. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, and Stripes’s feet were starting
to ache. They couldn’t hear explosions anymore. Either they were too far away
for the sound to carry, or the attack had ceased.
The came to the fork in the
tunnel so suddenly that Hedgey rammed face-first right into the end of the
separating wall.
“Oww!” he yelled. His voice
was muffled because he was holding his swelling nose. “Stupid wall!” He then
kicked the rock-solid wall and succeeded in stubbing all of the toes on his
left foot. “Aargh!” he cried, hopping on one foot while still holding his nose.
His yelp of pain echoed far down the tunnel and back.
“Hedgey!” Stripes hissed
urgently, “Quiet! There’s no knowing what could be down here! For all we know, the
city’s attackers could’ve found a way down here and…”
“Hello?!”
The three Mobians froze at
the echoing voice. It was coming from far down one of the forks.
“Is there somebody there?”
the deep and somewhat nasal voice continued in a confused tone. Soon the three
Mobians could hear the sound of working but unoiled machinery coming closer.
“There’s no one there, you
bucket of bolts,” a second voice echoed. It was high pitched and squawky,
virtually the opposite of the first voice.
“Hey,” the other voice
responded, “I’m the one with the specialized auditory sensors here, remember,
bird brain? I know that I heard voices. One even sounded a little familiar…”
Just then the owners of the
two voices came into view from the fork on the right. “See!” the shorter one
with the deeper voice said. “I told
you that there was someone here.” This speaker was a robot. He was short,
squat, and sported a very worn coat of green paint. Instead of legs, he
traveled on a pair of treads attached to the bottom of his torso. His eyes had
sort of an eternally-confused look to them. The robot’s nose and hands looked
like silver cones that would normally be found on a drill.
“Well…I was p-probably just
a lucky guess,” the other squawked back, clearly surprised and annoyed that his
companion was right. This one was also a robot, though very different from the
first. He was nearly twice as tall and resembled an animaloid chicken. He was
mostly a faded silvery-blue color, with faded yellow beak and legs. On top of
his head was a tattered red chicken comb.
Both robots were clearly
both badly in need of repair, cleaning, oiling, and repainting. The shorter one
opened his semi-circular mouth to continue the argument, but Stripes
interrupted them.
“Excuse me…but who are you? And why are you down here?” he
asked.
The two mechanicals looked
up in surprise at the voice, as if they had forgotten that the three Mobians
were there at all.
“Er…um…,” the chicken began,
wearing an expression that suggested memory trouble, “I’m….uh….S-…Scratch,
yeah, Scratch, and this hunk of metal over here…Grounder…yeah, his name’s
Grounder.” After this apparently large stress on his memory processors, Scratch
suddenly stopped and stood there in a stupor.
Grounder continued in his
counterpart’s place. “Uh, well, we’ve been living down here…for years, I guess.
It’s been so long… We used to be Dr. Robotnik’s favorite henchmen, but we
failed to catch that darn Sonic the Hedgehog“ – Hedgey’s eyebrows rose at his
cousin’s name. “–so many times that the Dr. sent us to
“Wow…,” Hedgey gaped. “So
you’re really the same Scratch and Grounder that my cousin told me about when I
was little? He would tell me stories of what losers you guys were – no
offense.”
“Uh...none taken…I guess,”
Grounder replied, uncertain.
“Wait,” Hedgey continued,
“Wasn’t there another one of you? What was his name…Bananas? No…Coconuts! Yeah
that’s it! Cuz told me that he was some weird monkey robot who would follow you
around sometimes. What happened to him?”
“What?” Scratch squawked,
suddenly snapping out of silence, “that
banana brain? He was always getting on our and Dr. Robotnik’s nerves with his
half-baked schemes and his hot temper. Robotnik kicked him out before us. Last
we heard, he left
“Wait a minute,” Grounder
interrupted. “You said your cousin knows us, hedgehog. What was his name?”
BOOM!
Before Hedgey could respond,
a large explosion rumbled the surface directly overhead. Small pieces of stone
and dirt rained from the cave ceiling onto the Mobians and the floor around
them.
BLAM!
“We need to get out of here,
NOW!” Stripes yelled over the roar of another explosion and the rumbling it
caused.
“This way!” Grounder called.
He made a U-turn and rapidly disappeared down the left fork, which seemed to
have been casting sunlight on them the entire time. The three Mobians hurried
after him, but Scratch’s legs were too run-down to make the quick maneuver he
attempted. The robot tripped and his metal body slammed hard onto the cave
floor. “I’m a goner…,” he moaned.
Suddenly Hedgey was standing
next to Scratch. “Not today,” he said.
“You…came back…for me?”
Scratch asked in disbelief.
Hedgey’s response was to
grab the robot’s wing and half-drag, half-carry him as he ran back toward the
sunlight.
CRASH! CRRRUMBLE!
There was another huge
rumble and large chunks of rock rained down all around them.
----
I’m already working hard on
Chapter 3, so keep your eyes open! We’ll be returning to Toonearth then…and
meet the semi-antagonists of the story.