Chaos Uncontrolled

Chapter 3

With the addition of Knuckles' help things had been progressing slowly but surely. They had managed to confirm that the strangeness with the emeralds was connected to the strangeness with the master emerald. It was a mild relief to find out that the master emerald was more or less normal now, even when exposed to the emeralds. Knuckles had done some "talking" with the master emerald and managed to find out that it seemed to have been the chaos emeralds themselves that had tapped into the master emerald. Which, well, shouldn't be possible. The chaos emeralds weren't sentient things. Honestly the master emerald wasn't really either despite how Knuckles would talk to it and such.

The working theory at the moment was that Sonic had maybe unintentionally done it when he was trying to get rid of the emeralds, but none of them were particularly convinced that was the case. It's not like Sonic even knew how to do that, emeralds or not. Him managing to do it subconsciously? Yeah unlikely. An interesting thing they did figure out was that the emeralds seemed to have overwhelmingly positive energy at the moment rather than their normal balance between positive and negative. I mean, none of them knew what that meant. But hey! It was something right? It seemed likely that it was related to what was going on somehow anyway.

Sonic sighed heavily as he put his face into his hands. Alright it was official, he felt pretty useless right now. Robot smashing? He could do that. Stopping ancient, vengeful gods? Sure, regular Tuesday for him. Figuring out why some super powerful rocks were on the fritz? Yeah that wasn't his thing. At this point he was only really useful when they wanted to test how he reacted to the emeralds. It wasn't the greatest feeling in the world to essentially be a glorified lab rat, but at least he was being helpful that way.

Thankfully nothing too strange had happened since his "chat" with whatever it was. It was likely connected to the emeralds in some way but none of them had any idea as to how or why. Whatever they were, it bothered Sonic that he knew practically nothing about them. Yet he'd just known they were dangerous. It didn't make sense, Sonic felt confident about some things regarding the mysterious voice, generally vague feelings, and had no clue on others. The information would often feel like it was there but just slip through his fingers like sand whenever he tried to reach for it. It was frustrating and entirely unhelpful. It was already pretty clear that Sonic was somehow related to them. Whether it was by chance or not wasn't something any of them were sure about though.

Releasing another frustrated sigh Sonic stood up. Moping like this wasn't gonna do him or anyone else any good. His communicator beeped, helping to pull him further out of his thoughts. "Hey Tails, whatcha need?" Sonic asked, answering.

"Hey if you want to come back to the shrine we might have something. Nothing... solid, but it's something." Tails' voice came over the communicator.

Well that sounded like progress to him, and any progress was welcome at this point. "Sure thing bud. I'll be right over. Still by the shrine right?" Sonic asked, preparing to dash over.

"Yep! See you in a sec." Tails confirmed.

Sonic was skidding to a halt beside his brother not long after the confirmation. "Alright, what do you have for me?"

Tails chuckled. "Someone's excited."

"I feel like I have a right to be excited in this situation." Sonic huffed, smirking.

"Just come over here." Knuckles grumbled as he arranged the two chaos emeralds in front of the master emerald.

"Sooo what are we doing this time?" Sonic asked as he walked over and watched Knuckles adjust the emeralds.

Grumbling, Knuckles gently pulled Sonic to the ground and sat him in front of the emeralds. "If we can figure out how the emeralds managed to tap into the master emerald on their own we'll be closer to figuring out what caused this."