Chapter Text
Agent Stone had made a huge mistake.
He had gotten into the habit of making two lattes with steamed Austrian goat milk at exactly four o’clock each afternoon, one for him and one for Dr. Robotnik, complete with a latte art portrait of the two of them, surrounded by little hearts. After eight years of working for Dr. Robotnik, he could make the doctor’s usual coffee order from memory, and he had the exact shape of his mustache engraved in the back of his mind. Dr. Robotnik rarely acknowledged Stone’s latte art, but he never objected either, and for Stone, it was his way of showing the doctor that he cared about him, that he loved him, even if he doubted that Dr. Robotnik felt the same way.
And then Robotnik’s long-lost grandfather showed up, and it was as if Agent Stone didn’t exist. He was watching them now, eating cotton candy and enjoying a fireworks display, and the doctor didn’t even turn his head to acknowledge Stone’s presence, too busy spending quality time with the professor to drink the latte with steamed Austrian goat milk that his assistant had prepared for him. Agent Stone gazed longingly at the doctor for a few minutes longer, and then he threw his painstakingly crafted lattes into the garbage and removed his virtual reality headset, pangs of jealousy and heartbreak running through his chest as he looked back at Dr. Robotnik and his grandfather, enjoying their one perfect day together.
Just as Stone returned to the Crab’s computer to chart their route to the G.U.N. headquarters in London, the professor suddenly turned to Dr. Robotnik and said, “Grandson?”
“Yes, Pop-Pop?”
“I just got a low battery warning on my headset.”
“Agent Stone!” Dr. Robotnik called out to his assistant, who was sulking in front of the computer. “Go get some spare triple-A batteries for my grand-popsicle! They should be in the Closet of Abandoned Inventions, next to the Egg Dealer.”
“Yes, Doctor,” Stone said, and while Dr. Robotnik went back to bonding with his grandfather, Agent Stone headed towards the walk-in closet. However, as soon as Stone opened the door, dozens of the doctor’s old projects spilled onto the floor, everything from rejected Badnik designs to a dusty old robotic arm to a tiny model of the Crab. He dug through all of the doctor’s brilliant creations, smiling as he remembered the day he’d built each of them, and finally, Stone found a set of triple-A batteries on the top shelf, lying on top of some kind of strange contraption that he’d never seen before. It appeared to be a metal box with a red button on the side of it, and there was a label on the button that said, in big block letters, “MULTIVERSE TRANSPORTER - DO NOT TOUCH.”
The top shelf was well within Dr. Robotnik’s reach, but it was too high up for Agent Stone, so he set up a stepstool and carefully reached over the top of the Multiverse Transporter. However, just as he placed his hand on the batteries, he slipped off of the stepstool and accidentally knocked the red button on the metal box with his elbow on his way down. As he got up from the floor, cursing under his breath, Stone noticed some strange flashing lights on the Multiverse Transporter, and then, he felt a powerful electric pulse running through his body. “Doctor!” he screamed, hoping that his boss could still hear him from inside the Closet of Abandoned Inventions, that the doctor wasn’t too busy riding a rollercoaster or going trick-or-treating with his grandfather to help Agent Stone. “I don’t know what I did, but something’s very, very wrong here…”
That was when everything went black.
When Agent Stone awoke, he felt waves crashing against his skin and water filling up his lungs. His suit was dragging him down, but he kicked up to the surface and tried to tread water, and for a moment, he managed to get his head above the waterline. He gasped for air and spit out all of the sewage-infested water that had gotten into his mouth, and before he went under again, he spotted Big Ben and the London Eye in the distance.
He was in the River Thames.
Drowning.
Stone attempted to resurface and swim to the edge of the river, but the current was working against him. Nevertheless, he splashed his way towards the nearest dock, and when he lifted his head to breathe, he spotted a woman standing on the shore. She appeared to be in her early sixties, she had blue eyes and blonde hair streaked with gray, and she was wearing a lab coat, a dark blue dress, and the exact same control gloves that Dr. Robotnik had. “Hey!” she shouted to Agent Stone as he desperately treaded water, struggling to keep his head up. “I’ve got you, kiddo. Just come a little closer to the dock, and I’ll pull you in.”
“I don’t know if I can make it…” Stone said.
The woman glanced around for a moment, trying to figure out what to do, and then she looked back at Stone and said, “Throw me your tie.”
Agent Stone frantically removed his tie and tossed one end of it out to the blonde woman, and sure enough, she snatched it out of the air and pulled him to the shore. “Are you okay?” she asked him as she helped him climb onto the dock. Stone noticed that she had an American accent - she clearly wasn’t from around here either.
“I-I don’t know,” Stone said, shivering and gasping for air again. “Where am I?”
“Just outside of Battersea Park in London,” the woman said as she took off her lab coat and wrapped it around Agent Stone like a towel. “I don’t know what happened - it was like you magically appeared in the river.”
As he dried off his face, Stone at least took comfort in the fact that he hadn’t gone very far. He must have gotten thrown out of the hideout after he pushed the red button, and all he had to do now was find the Crab, or possibly just meet Dr. Robotnik and his grandfather at the G.U.N. headquarters.
“Listen, I-I’ve got to go,” Stone said as he gave the woman her lab coat back, even though he was still dripping wet from his impromptu swim in the River Thames. “I have to find my boss, he’s probably wondering what happened to me…”
“What’s your name?” the woman asked him just as he was about to leave.
“Agent Stone.”
“Agent?” she said skeptically. “Which agency do you work for?”
“It’s just my first name,” Stone said, much to her relief. “I work for Dr. Ivo Robotnik. I’m his assistant.”
“No, you’re not,” she said. “Ivo doesn’t have an assistant - unless you count me and Shadow, but I’d say that we’re more like moral support.”
Agent Stone suddenly looked back at the woman, and he wasn’t sure whether he was more shocked by the fact that she supposedly knew Dr. Robotnik or the fact that she thought he didn’t exist. He was about to say something, but all of a sudden, he remembered the label on the metal box, and the gears began to turn in his mind…
“Have we met?” the woman asked. “Your voice sounds kind of familiar.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Stone said. “Uh, this is going to sound crazy…”
“Please. I hang out with anthropomorphic aliens on a regular basis,” the woman said. “Whatever you’re about to say, I’m sure I’ve heard worse.”
“I think I’m in an alternate universe.”
The woman took a few minutes to process that, and then she said, “I told Ivo not to test the Multiverse Transporter without me! We agreed to wait until we could replace the flux capacitor, but no, my baby cousin decided to play around with the fabric of the multiverse instead of fixing the espresso machine…” She then laughed and said, “Who am I kidding? I’d do the same thing if I was in his shoes.”
“So…how do I get home?” Agent Stone asked. “I’m supposed to be picking up some spare batteries for Dr. Robotnik. In my universe, not yours.”
“We’ll get this sorted out once we get back to the lab,” the woman said. “I don’t know if it’s quite what you’re used to in your universe, but we have hot tea, snacks, and a couple of very comfy lounge chairs in the break room, and I’ll work with Shadow and Ivo to get you back home.”
Stone sighed with relief, glad that this nightmare would be over soon, and then he turned to his newfound companion and said, “Thank you. You didn’t have to do…well, any of this.”
“No problem, Agent Stone,” she said, and as she typed something into her control gloves, Stone took in his surroundings. The park they were in appeared to be empty, and it was enclosed on all sides by a large, chain-link fence. There was a construction project happening on a nearby street, blocked off by rows of orange traffic cones, and there was no obvious entrance or exit to Battersea Park.
“Wait, how are we going to get out of here?” Agent Stone asked. “How’d you even get here in the first place?”
“Don’t worry about it,” the woman said as she continued typing. “I can use these gloves to replicate Shadow’s teleportation abilities. All I have to do is snap my fingers, and we’ll be in the lab.”
Sure enough, the woman snapped her fingers, and she and Agent Stone instantly appeared in the middle of a science lab. It was about twice the size of the Crab, but it was about three times as messy, with beakers, telescopes, and unfinished egg-shaped drones strewn about the lab benches. Stone spotted Shadow out of the corner of his eye, although he looked a little different than he remembered, a little older, grayer, and grizzlier, and then he looked all over the lab for Dr. Robotnik, hoping to find another familiar face, but he didn’t immediately see the doctor anywhere. Stone panicked for a moment, but he reassured himself by remembering that Dr. Robotnik at least existed in this strange alternate reality, if what the blonde woman had said earlier was true.
“Welcome to Robotnik Labs,” the woman said. “Oh, and, by the way, I think I’ve forgotten to introduce myself.” She reached out to shake Stone’s hand and then said, “I’m Dr. Maria Robotnik.”