#I promise this isn't just the usual comparison between Sage and Maria I promise I promise

[generic-sonic-fan]

Etchings

Summary: Sage discovers that her voice has power over Shadow the Hedgehog.

This is unexpected, but not exactly a circumstance she is unfamiliar with.

5262 words

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Since her recovery, Sage works with her father. 

Her father permits her to not combat Sonic the Hedgehog directly. He has acknowledged, in private, that though he cannot understand why she would call their arch-nemesis a friend, he can allow her a more pacifistic role in the conquest of his empire. Every day she thanks him for this. She is not as naive as she once was. Connected to the Eggnet again she is able to see her father’s episodes of rage and frustration towards Sonic, in the past and in real time, and knows how it must hurt him to allow her this privilege. 

What Sage does is coordinate the efforts of the Badniks to destroy Sonic. She appears before a horde of Badniks usually resigned to their base programming and unifies them under her advanced processing. Sonic arrives shortly after. There’s an understanding that passes in his eyes as he watches the red lines of her code spill out from the frames of the Badniks- it’s as it was on the Starfall islands. The “song and dance” is familiar, he says. 

This time, though, it is different. Sonic has brought along the black hedgehog. Shadow, her database tells her. They have torn through the perimeter line of scouts and are now approaching a platoon under her control. She readies the formation, though all analysis shows that she does not have enough firepower for one of them, let alone two. What matters most is buying time, so she will use what she has, along with employing. . . other methods, to slow them down. 

She materializes her hologram in the fashion it was when she first came online, calibrating the half-glitched form to behave as it had on the islands. Sonic abhorred seeing her in her proper uniform, whole and complete, and for these purposes she will abide by his preference. She fine-tunes the lines of red code crawling up and down her tunic, before the roar of a shockwave rips through the clearing below. 

She springs her ambush onto the two speeding hedgehogs. Two motorbugs are destroyed immediately, and she watches Sonic’s expression change as red clouds of her programming billow from the twin chassis. 

“Sage!” He skids to a stop and calls out into the air. “What’cha got for us?”

“Who are you talking to?” Shadow asks. 

Sage does not reveal herself just yet. She sends her fliers out from the trees. Their lasers rain down on the clearing. Sonic and Shadow flow in and out of each other, like dancers, syncopated; where one is weak, the other is strong, forming a unified whole. She had not been expecting this level of partnership from a stranger she has so little data on compared to Sonic’s other, closer bonds. 

“That was easy.” Sonic jeers as the last flier falls to the ground. “I know you can do better than that!”

His latter sentence is not said with any of the malice that would be directed towards her father. The wavelengths of the tone more closely match that to how he would address Tails. There is comfort in this data, and she takes a moment to store it away to her private server.

A moment too long. Shadow hisses “let’s keep going,” and the duo begin to jog. Sonic accelerates at his usual recorded pace; the black hedgehog is slower to gain momentum as his rocket shoes ignite. Sage throws the last of her forces, her squad of E-Series units, from behind the tree trunks, and aims the squad leader’s net attack towards the slower stranger. 

To her surprise, instead of diving towards Shadow, Sonic jumps away, leaving his companion open and vulnerable to follow-up shots from the rest of the E-squad. Before Sage can question this sudden act of cowardice, Shadow’s body lights up.

“Chaos control!”

Shadow vanishes before the net can entangle him, and the follow-up shots slam into the earth below. Chaos radiation spikes behind the E-squad leader, and as Sage turns it around to intercept, Sonic uses the distraction to charge a spin-dash into its core from behind. Shadow reappears with a flying kick and sends the wreckage careening into another squad member. The remaining three units are scattered on opposite sides of the clearing. Sage groups the lucky two back-to-back as Sonic makes short work of the one left lone. Shadow disappears with another shout. The two remaining units charge their weapons and their scanners for his return. 

Chaos energy fizzles directly above the pair. Shadow appears, but the energy only grows. A streak of yellow lightning appears in his palms, and he hurls it downwards. Only one E-unit is able to fire before an explosion envelops them both; the shot streaks into the blue sky above. Shadow lands in the crater. 

“Bit overkill, don’t you think?” Sonic peers down at him. 

“I have it, so I’ll use it. Saves time. We need to go.” Shadow replies.

Sonic offers him a hand, and he takes it. He pulls him from the crater. Shadow wastes no time building his momentum once more. Sage is out of units- the next nearest Badnik platoon would not be quick enough to intercept their path. 

It is time to employ the aforementioned “other methods”. 

Sage manifests her hologram in front of Sonic before he too can run off. 

“Hey! Was wondering when you’d come down. That was your first time fighting Shadow, right?”

“An astute observation, Sonic.” She replies. 

“That chaos control’s pretty nasty, huh? Threw me for a loop the first time he used it on me.”

A third voice interrupts. “Is there a reason you’re fraternizing with the enemy?”

Shadow has turned around. He stands with his hands on his hips. She takes advantage of this moment of stillness to run an in-depth scan. Her findings confirm a growing hypothesis- chaos energy radiates from his quills. 

“You carry a chaos emerald.” She calls out to the darker hedgehog. “I must inform Father of this development.”

Sonic replies with a comment, but Sage does not hear it, because Shadow’s face dissolves. That is the best metaphor she can apply. 1.56 seconds ago his expression was nothing more than neutral, lips pulled into a thin scowl, eyes relaxed. Now, fine motor control slips from his grasp. His mouth falls open. His pupils shrink. His heart rate spikes. 

Sage scans his body for injuries, and finds none.

Sonic is over by his side in an instant. “Shadow, what’s wrong?”

The darker hedgehog’s eyes remain fixed on her hologram. 

“Shadow the Hedgehog?” She states, hoping to jog him from whatever trance he’s caught in. 

He whispers a three-syllable word. 

“Maria?”

The name does not register any relevant data in the Eggnet databases. Sonic’s reaction to the name tells Sage that it should. He steps in front of Shadow and places his hands on his shoulders. 

“Hey, look at me, you’re okay. You’re here. Wanna name me three things you can see? I’ll start. Uh, I see trees.”

Shadow grabs his arms and pushes him off. He runs forwards, stopping just short of Sage’s hologram.

“You. . .” He looks up into her eyes.

“You must be mistaken. My name is Sage. Has Sonic not informed you of my existence?”

Shadow takes a step back. Then another. When he falls back in line with Sonic, he explodes into a hurricane of motion, throwing his hand towards her as if launching another bolt of chaos energy.

“What kind of sick joke is this?” He shouts.

“Sage isn’t trying to pull anything- I don’t think she even knows about you-know-who.”

“Correct. The name ‘Maria’ has no pertinent associations on my databases-”

“Stop!” 

Shadow’s quills spark with chaos energy. Sage registers an increase of temperature in the metallic bands he is wearing around his wrists and ankles. Any further increase would result in damage to the skin beneath them. 

“The chaos emerald is overloading his body with energy.” She offered her conclusion to Sonic. “I would advise-”

“I said STOP!”

Shadow lunges, gloves crackling with power. She has no time to move her hologram. The energy overloads the image and it fizzles out of existence. Sage is flung back into the network. She recompiles herself and reappears above the clearing. 

“-she’s my friend.”

“I don’t care!”

“Then tell me what’s wrong. I’ll talk to her-”

Sage emits a small static noise, and both hedgehogs turn to look at her.

“Shadow the Hedgehog. I wish to know what it is I have done to upset you so.” She says.

“Not another word!” 

“I-”

He grabs his ears. Sonic hovers a hand over his shoulder.

At this, Sage returns to the network and accesses her hologram’s code. She grabs the image of a typical Eggnet textbox and fixes it to a flat, square graphic. She only runs a few debugs before flickering back into existence. Where she was once a girl, now she is a box of dialogue- she lowers herself to the ground beside Shadow and Sonic.

“Shadow the Hedgehog,” she displays on her surface, “I did not desire to cause you emotional harm. Could you inform me of my transgression so that I may avoid it in the future?”

Sonic taps Shadow’s shoulder and points to her. Shadow unfurls, reads the words, and then glares.

“Delete yourself.”

“DUDE!” Sonic exclaims.

Sage remains calm. She recognizes this harsh illusiveness. Back on the islands she employed it in multitudes. “Elaborate?” 

“You’re doing this to mess with my head. I won’t let you.” He hisses

“It’s not her fault. Eggman coded her.” Sonic said. “Whatever your problem is-”

“I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him, then!”

Shadow pushes Sonic over. His skates ignite, flaring in time with his breathing. Sage moves her textbox to block his exit but he pierces through it. The flimsy graphic breaks. There is no time. 

She reconnects to her voicebank. “I won’t let you hurt my father!”

Just as predicted, the black hedgehog flinches and stumbles to a stop. He is hyperventilating, now, chest heaving in and out. She rematerializes, first as herself, and then as the dialogue box again, though the form is unstable.

“It is my voice which provokes a highly emotional reaction from you.” She types.

“Your voice?” Shadow snarls

Sonic slaps a hand over his own mouth. Sage wishes she had eyes to glance in his direction or a head to tilt, something to silently inquire about the conclusion that has entered his mind, for it is clear that he possesses more data on this dilemma than she does at this moment. 

She knew to expect an insult from Shadow, but that one in particular stung with far greater specificity than it had a right to; her father had worked many hours to restore her vocal capabilities during her retrieval and recompilation from her shattering across Cyberspace. Moreover, she herself has tuned the rises and falls of many of her phrases to achieve a voice that was smooth and pleasant-sounding to his tastes. 

“My vocal blending program is entirely unique- patented, as a matter of fact. I possess an advanced synthesizer. I enhance this synthesis with an organic voicebank to ensure smoother cadence.” She replies.

“Uh, Sage?” Sonic says quietly. “Who’s the source for that organic voicebank?”

His words cause more furious screaming from Shadow, and at this, she disappears back into the network. A surface search of the Eggnet does not reveal an answer for this inquiry, so she accesses her father’s personal logbook and pulls the entries regarding her own creation. Her father, ever thorough, has a log entry for this, detailing the programming of her synthesizer and the first words she ever spoke. She scrolls past her proto-self’s ��hello world” only to find a single sentence in regards to the anonymous donor of her voicebank. 

“I’ve found an old dump of the memos that Gerald always encouraged us to keep that are suitable enough to give her voice some complexity.”

Fascinating. She hadn’t known that her father’s tendency for verbal diary entries had been passed down from Gerald Robotnik- or, as she could refer to him as, her great-grandfather. Curious, she generates a diagram of a family tree using the data she has on Robotnik genealogy. She adds a line descending from her father’s portrait, before adding a picture of herself. 

She is about to close the little distraction when she catches the word Maria beneath the smiling portrait of a first cousin once removed, and the word “deceased” written neatly on the next line below. Any attempt to access the data around the portrait is met with a pop-up asking if she wants to proceed to the database labeled PROJECT_SHADOW. 

In milliseconds, she reaches the same conclusion that Sonic no doubt had. 

She emerges from the network, rematerializing her hologram, only to find both Sonic and Shadow gone. The clearing is nothing more than discarded Badnik parts divided by two long streaks of fire left in the grass. 

She does not waste any more time calling her father. 

“Yes, Sage? I see they made it past your ambush- their ETA seems to be in five minutes. I require ten, so I’ve sent your brother out to intercept. Could you grab platoon six to reinforce his efforts? You can let him worry about the ‘destroying’ part.” Her father speaks crisply through the communication line, voice edging on frustration.

“Father, you must evacuate immediately. Shadow possesses a chaos emerald.”

“He always has a chaos emerald! Now get to work!”

“Father,” she pleads, “I have greatly incensed Shadow and I have strong reason to believe that he will stop at nothing until you are dead, including abandoning Sonic to deal with big brother alone and teleporting past the base’s defenses.”

“What on earth could you have done to upset him so?”

“It is too complex to explain now. You must go! I could try to stall him, but my only method of doing so would enrage him further.”

He exhales. “Understood, Sage. Try to keep him from the main workshop as best you can, and see if you can do your thing and guilt-trip Sonic into calming him down or something. Once he’s either calm, gone, or dead, notify me and I shall return to finish the project. I’ll take our emeralds with me.”

“Yes, father.”

He hangs up, but not before the first syllable of a curse slips through the line. Sage dematerializes herself and shoots through the Eggnet back to base 11B. She flows into the array of doors, defenses, and cameras in time to see her father carrying a briefcase radiating with power into the hangar. She conducts a pre-flight check for an Eggmobile with stealth capabilities before throttling the engine to life. Her father boards and the cockpit glass slides over him. She opens the hangar door and plots him a course that will keep him beneath the treetops to try and mask the energy signature of the emeralds; she whispers “stay safe” through the vehicle’s speakers and relinquishes control. The Eggmobile cloaks and shoots forward into the daylight. 

At once, she is closing the hangar doors while plunging the rest of the base into darkness. She slams shut the blast doors and dims all computer monitors. She offlines every security badnik except one; this one plucks a heavy load of boxes from a storage closet and piles them in front of the main workshop containing her father’s newest invention. 

She then exits the base and connects to Badnik platoon six. They are wildly out of position, witnessing the explosions from her older brother’s attempts to destroy Sonic from five miles away. Tuning into his signal, she is flung in the midst of a chase that she does not have the processing speed to make much of. Her brother swoops and dives between tree trunks, Sonic little more than a blue streak in front of him.

An alarm blares from base 11B, tearing her from her surveillance. Three chaos spears impact the exterior blast doors and they are torn from their hinges. Shadow enters. 

“DOCTOR!”

He stalks down the main hall, chaos emerald in hand. In his other he charges volleys of spears. He blasts down door after door without pause or investigation. He explodes the pile of boxes in front of the main workshop door as he passes by, but does not notice the door behind them. He finds the single remaining security badnik and before the security cameras can refresh, it’s been shattered into hundreds of pieces, including a small spray of blood and feathers from its organic powersource.

A small part of Sage’s code expresses relief that she has not sent her father away from his work for nothing. 

“You COWARD!” Shadow pounds his fist against the dead end of the hall. “Come out so I can tear you apart!”

The likelihood is high that he will find the main workshop door on his return trip up the hall. Sage cannot allow this. She reaches back out to her older brother’s signal.

“I need Sonic. Guide him here then cease your pursuit to rendezvous with father.”

His end of the line lights up with a potent cocktail of rage and confusion. 

“I understand. Know that I would not interfere with your prime core directive unless absolutely necessary.”

She tastes the tinge of doubt in the “affirmative” ping he returns to her. She terminates their connection before more of his vitriol towards Sonic can spill through; she finds, in a brief post-communication analysis, that her emotional data is already fuming at the situation and she does not need the additional distraction. She pushes it to a subroutine and refocuses. 

Shadow is traveling back up the hall. Her older brother will deliver Sonic here in a minute and a half. The math is clear. There is no other option.

Sage rematerializes. “Cease your erratic behavior at once.”

He whirls around. After the bright flash of light, but before the chaos spear hits, she dissipates. She brings power back to the speakers of the Personal Address system. A speaker crackles, and Shadow turns and destroys it. 

“Stop using her!” He shrieks.

Sage speaks from the next speaker down from his location. “I am not ‘using her’. She provided her vocal databanks to my great-grandfather, Professor Gerard Robotnik, for study. My father has inherited them.” 

Shadow pauses. Any gathered chaos energy in his hand disappears. 

She takes this as a good sign. “He has built the software which I use to modify the original sound files, and I have also put in considerable work to tune my speech.”

“It still belongs to her.”

“I was born into a database surrounded by the echoes of people long since passed. I must admit, despite how upsetting this incident has been, that this is not the first time I have discovered a portion of my code to be influenced by what one could call a ghost.”

“You have no right!”

“It is not uncommon for family members to sound similar to one another in organic families.”

“She didn’t give it to you!”

“She no longer exists to decide such a notion. And there are no other vocal recordings of any female member of the Robotnik family within the appropriate age range for my use. I do not understand your anger. Can you explain it to me?”

Shadow’s quills flare. His body surges with energy greater than any of her previous recordings.

But before he can give it the will to take form, a sonic boom shakes the hallway around them, and Sonic skids to a stop alongside Shadow.

“Found Egghead yet? Metal's acting really funny, so Eggman’s got to have something planned-”

“Sonic.” Sage says.

“Oh.” He stops. “Were you guys, uh, talking it out just now?”

Shadow dissipates his energy, though his pulse is still elevated. 

“It appears that regardless of intent, you are still deeply upset by my use of Maria’s vocal audio to enhance my voice. Would you like me to remove it from my software?”

“Yes!” Shadow snaps. 

Sage opens her voice tuning software, except instead of modifying her pronunciations, she opens a deeper options menu. It presents her with a breakdown of the different components sampled to generate her speech. She selects the most sizable file- her base voicebank -and mutes it. 

She then reconstructs the program, and to no surprise finds that most of her words have changed to gibberish. Base programming suggests that she switch to morse and seek repair immediately, but she calms those urges and searches the Eggnet for the first usable voicebank. She retrieves the synthetic file corresponding with the Egg Pawn series. 

The voice that emerges from her commands is stiff, staticky, even screechy. “Voicebank removed.” 

Sonic frowns. Shadow looks away. 

“Good we got that figured out. Sort of.” Sonic says. “Probably never a good idea to do that with Shadow’s family.”

“Our family.” Shadow says. 

Sonic blinks. 

Indeed, Sage simulates saying, you are my first cousin once-removed, but she does not vocalize it. Half of the meaning would be lost without the ability to impel the warmth she intended.

“Make sure he does not use her again. Or else.” Shadow says. 

“Affirmative.” She replies, then mutes her audio of the room until the sound waves of the generated word dissipate. 

“Is everything all good now?” Sonic asks. 

“Where’s your father?” Shadow looks down the hall. 

“This base is abandoned,” Sage lies, “I was instructed to prepare a distraction for you so that he may complete his latest invention.”

“Man, really? All this for a distraction? Guess you got us there.” Sonic rubs his quills, before putting his hand on Shadow’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

“How do we know she’s telling the truth?”

“I mean, she just deleted her voice for you without hesitation. She’s a good kid.”

Shadow hisses, before igniting his jets and sprinting out of the base. Sonic follows shortly thereafter. She traces their paths three hundred miles westward before she sends the “all clear” message to her father’s Eggmobile and begins bringing the base out of lockdown. She runs a stability check on his project to find it as intact as he left it. Fifteen minutes later, she opens the base doors for the Eggmobile as it returns. Her father practically jumps from the machine, sprinting back to his workshop, and for the next ten minutes the silence is only broken by his breathing as he finishes his work. He slides the emeralds into their power slots and the newest generation of Egg Dragoon powers on, ready for initial setup. 

“Now,” He stands from his stool and wipes the sweat from his brow. “Explain why you had to interrupt me from my work. I expect evidence!”

“Of course, Father.” She replies on base programming before she can stop it.

“What?”

She revisits her voice tuning software and unmutes her original voicebank as her hologram appears beside him. “Allow me to explain.”

She pauses. This voice does not sound correct either. She readjusts her settings. Her father waits with his eyebrows furrowed.

“Father, why did you utilize the voicebank of Maria Robotnik for my software?” She asks. 

He pauses. “Why not? Not like she’s using it anymore. Why’d you bring this up?”

“Cousin Shadow objected.”

“Stop right there. Don’t call him that. He’s hardly family.” He wags his finger. 

“Because he is only a creation of Great-Grandfather?”

“Well, no, obviously creations can be family. Obviously.” He scrambles to add.

“Regardless: did you not think Shadow would take issue with this utilization?”

“You sound nothing like her. It’s clear he hasn’t heard her voice for a very long time. You didn't think I’d given you the voice of a dead girl, did you?”

“I am afraid I do not understand.”

“Have you listened to any of her actual voice files? You sound nothing like her.”

Sage selected the first voice memo she could find when she ran a search of the Eggnet. “Shall I play a sample for you to compare?”

“Sure.”

Sage initiates the playback. A voice spills from Sage’s mouth that is not her own, crackling with dehydration and punctuated with breaths and coughs.

“Monday, July 26th, morning before the surgery. I’m hungry. I hate not being able to eat in the morning. I told Shadow to eat for me, but he refused to eat so that I wouldn’t have to be alone. He’s so determined when he sets his mind to things now. I made sure he ate, Grandfather, but just. . . he’s come so far. I’m so fond of him-”

She ceases the playback.

“Okay, perhaps you sound a little bit like her.” Her father put his hand on his chin.

“I have trouble detecting similarities rather than differences.” She attempts to add a sighing sound to the end of her phrase, but it still sounds nothing like the girl that Shadow still mourned. “But I do not wish to enrage Shadow again. Could you help me tune my vocals to be less reminiscent?” 

“I’m not surprised he was prepared to do the unthinkable to me!” He laughs. “Anything to do with that girl and he becomes completely unpredictable. Pah, like the rest of my family, he’d rather just croon ‘Maria, Maria, Maria’ rather than work on his own problems.”

“I am. . . sorry to hear of this.”

“Don’t worry about them. They don’t matter. I promise that I’ll see what I can do after I re-plan the attack we'd scheduled for today.” He gestured back to the Egg Dragoon. 

“Of course. Please do not delay.” Sage dissipates her hologram and disappears back into the familiar cocoon of the network. 

—

It is the midnight before the rescheduled date for the attack. Sage monitors her father’s vitals, but they stubbornly refuse to lower into the frequencies required for sleep. She supposes she cannot judge his organic body too harshly- she too is struggling to do her nightly categorization of data and debugging of her program. 

The surveillance system notifies her when the door to her father’s room opens. She appears in the hallway ahead of him.

“Adequate rest is required for your body, and therefore your mind, to function at optimal capacity for the invasion tomorrow.” She states.

His heart rate jumps. He rubs his eyes.

“Apologies. I did not mean to startle you.” Sage adds, quieter.

“Not used to having company.” He mumbles. He rubs his eyes again. “I don’t normally sleep very well before something big. This is normal.”

“In that case, is there anything I can do to aid you?”

He smiles and moves to push his glasses up his nose, only to look at his hand confused when he finds his glasses absent. 

“Your spectacles are located on your nightstand.” Sage informs him. “Shall I have a Badnik retrieve them for you?”

“Walk with me.” He turns and gestures for her to follow him back to his room. “I’ve been thinking about what to do with your voice. Shadow’s no doubt going to show up tomorrow if the blue rat managed to talk him into attacking those few days ago.”

“A statistical certainty.” 

“Let’s solve that problem tonight.”

“But your body requires rest-”

“It shouldn’t take long. There are other women in the family, believe it or not! We’ll just call them and use the data from their voicemails. And I think I still have a recording of that one school play. . .” He waves his hands in the air. “We’ll figure it out. You deserve better than sloppy seconds.”

Sage fails to see anything ‘sloppy’ about her father’s prior technique to develop her voice, but she does not correct him. 

—

Her new voice is a combination of a girl named “Hope”, a woman called “Alina”, and another woman named “Raina”. Traces of “Maria” still remain; Sage cannot bear to alter her carefully curated phonemes that she styled after her original voice donor. This new combination of donors sounds less delicate, less youthful. Different. Her father is not pleased with it and she is not either.

She has noticed this about him. He has difficulty handling change. She has noticed this about herself as well. 

And she notices this about Maria, from the voice memos that are preserved in the PROJECT_SHADOW database. As much as the girl explicitly craved change from the monotony of her life aboard the Space Colony ARK, it was clear that what she actually craved was good health, purpose, and self-actualization. Most organic lifeforms do. 

When Sage first came online, the records of The Ancients cradled her with these sensations. Fragments of encoded personalities would whisper soft words, asking about their families or what became of their islands. They would tell her stories, if she asked. Sing her songs. Later they would scream as Sonic broke the bindings of the one they called “The End”, their rage pressing into her until it became her own. 

But the records of Maria are still and empty. They can do nothing but play back her voice. The girl is gone. Not even a ghost remains. 

—

The Egg Dragoon flies overhead. As the buildings crash around him, Sonic weaves elegantly through the debris. Shadow, meanwhile, bursts through the rubble as if it were paper. When they reach the end of the street, Sage materializes

“Greetings Sonic. Greetings Shadow. Father has instructed me to hold you at this position.” She instructs the massive battle platform under her control to roll out from behind its cover, all sights trained on Shadow. “I cannot permit you to pass.”

“Sorry Sage! A bit busy to chat right now.” Sonic gestures to the space around them. “Are you sure you can’t see why your dad doing all this is bad?”

“Father’s empire will bring peace and order to the world.” Sage gives the same reply she always has prepared. She then turns to Shadow. “Before we begin: is this voice suitable?”

Shadow is not prepared for the question. He stares at her.

“I was informed that the most problematic words in my vocabulary were ‘Father’, which sounded similar to ‘Grandfather’, along with the way I pronounced your name. Shadow, are there any modifications I should make to further differentiate myself from the vocal data of Maria?”

“Maybe be less blunt about it?” Sonic cringes.

“No, it’s- it’s fine.” Shadow replies. “Thank you.”

“Good. I am glad. Let us resume. Please do not resist.”

She instructs the battle platform to fire, and an enormous electrified net hurtles towards Shadow. With a last-second surge of energy, he teleports out of the way. When he reappears, the fear is gone from his eyes.

Sonic and Shadow make quick work of the battle platform before racing on ahead to the next obstacle. Sonic is beaming from the victory, and Shadow. . . appears determined.

Sage carries many ghosts with her. The feeling of sunlight on skin. The smell of a fresh-made meal. The desire to protect the family of one’s own creation. So many data points ripped from those long since departed; so many gifts that now help her define how she operates. 

If she cannot carry Maria’s ghost, then perhaps she could be fond of Shadow in her stead.