Chapter Text
“Let me get this straight,” Maria said to Agent Stone as the four of them sat around the table, drinking their coffee. “In your universe, I died as a child, Shadow was trapped in stasis for fifty years and just now woke up, and Ivo is evil for some reason.”
“And you work for me,” Ivo said to Stone. “Or, more precisely, you work for some alternate version of me, who is an unrepentant, card-carrying, world-conquering supervillain. And he’s bald, apparently?”
“Why is that the part you care about?” Shadow asked him.
“I told you that you needed to do something about that receding hairline,” Maria teased Ivo. “But this…this is all so weird.”
“Maybe you could tell me about your universe, since I’ve already told you about mine,” Agent Stone said as he sipped on his latte.
“Uh, sure,” Maria said. “As far I can tell, our universes diverged when Project Shadow was cancelled. You said that I died in an explosion and that my grandfather and Shadow were imprisoned, but…we escaped. We left in the dead of night, and G.U.N. couldn’t find us when they came to shut down the program. While we were in hiding, Grandpa tracked down his long-lost grandson…”
“Otherwise known as me,” Ivo interrupted. “Out of all of Papa’s precious grandbabies, I was always his favorite.”
“You know that’s not true,” Shadow said.
“Well, maybe if I say it enough times, it will be,” Ivo said.
“Anyways, Ivo came to live with us, and we all had a pretty normal childhood from there…or at least as normal of a childhood as it’s possible to have while also hiding a hedgehog from the U.S. military,” Maria said. “The ACLU eventually took up our case, and the Supreme Court ruled that Shadow was legally a person in The United States v. Shadow The Hedgehog.”
“Is your grandfather still alive?” Stone asked.
The three Robotniks exchanged confused looks. “Is he alive in your universe?” Maria asked.
“He would be 110 if he were alive today,” Ivo said, pretending to type into a calculator as he did some quick mental math. “Only about one in five million people survive for that long, although we Robotniks do have a tendency to beat the odds.”
“Except for when it comes to male pattern baldness,” Maria said, earning her a death glare from Ivo. “I’m sorry - you set up that joke way too well!”
“If you bring up my impending hair loss again, I will use the Multiverse Transporter to go to Agent Stone’s universe, find out where you were buried, and dance on your grave.”
“Yeah, right,” Maria said, laughing. “I’d like to see you try.”
“Our grandfather died of a rare lung disease in 2005,” Shadow said to Stone.
“2005?” Ivo said. “I thought it was ‘04, and our grandgeezer only made it that long out of pure spite.”
“He wasn’t at my wedding, so it must have been ‘04,” Maria said.
“He wouldn’t have been invited to your wedding even if he was alive,” Shadow reminded her.
“My relationship with my grandfather was…complicated toward the end,” Maria explained to Stone. “He said something once about all of my troublemaking being cute for a little girl but uncouth for a grown woman, and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I mean, between the three of us…we really did love our grandfather as best we could, but he wanted two spoiled grandchildren and a science experiment, not two disaster bisexuals and a brooding hedgehog.”
“And yet, you found a cure for pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis for him,” Ivo pointed out.
“No one deserves to die like that,” Maria said sadly.
“What about the Badniks?” Agent Stone asked. “You don’t work for the military, you’re not trying to rule the world…what exactly do you use them for?”
Ivo grinned, and from the sheer manic delight in his smile, Stone could tell that this universe’s Dr. Robotnik didn’t get too many opportunities to pontificate about his robots. He leaned closer to Stone and then said, “Finally, someone has their priorities straight! My precious babies might look like oversized hard-boiled eggs, but they’re actually autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles, perfectly programmed to execute a variety of complex tasks that would be frankly impossible for the common commercial drone. My machines are capable of virtually anything from conducting search and rescue operations to distributing humanitarian aid to assisting people with disabilities - all thanks to me and my genius-level intellect.”
“That’s incredible, Doctor…I mean Ivo,” Stone said.
“Thank you, Agent Stone,” Ivo said as he took one last sip of his drink. “And thank you again for the latte. It was truly delicious.”
Stone glanced at the empty cup in front of Ivo, and he said, “I could make you another one if you’d like, sir.”
Ivo thought about it for a moment, anxiously fidgeting with his coffee mug as he did so. “As much as I would enjoy that, I think I would prefer to have you stay at the table,” he said, staring intently at Agent Stone. “And please. Call me Ivo.”
Agent Stone suddenly turned bright red - was this universe’s Dr. Robotnik trying to flirt with him? He couldn’t help but think that Ivo was just toying with his emotions - the disparity of their intellects was too great for Ivo to be genuinely attracted to him - but whatever he was doing, it was definitely working.
“Uhh…so what about the Pacific Northwest blackout last year?” Agent Stone asked in a desperate attempt to change the subject. “Did that happen in your universe?”
“Yep, the Department of Defense hired me to investigate, and I brought Shadow and Ivo along for the ride as usual,” Maria said. “We found Sonic in about five minutes, talked to him and the Wachowskis for a bit, confirmed that he wasn’t going to cause any more trouble, and then told Sonic to call Shadow if he needed anything.”
“Sonic and I remain very close friends,” Shadow said. “Tom and Maddie are still his parents, but sometimes, he needs another mentor figure to talk to, hedgehog-to-hedgehog, and…I’m always here for that.”
“To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Sonic being raised by a cop instead of a perfectly competent hedgehog, but that’s just my two cents,” Maria said.
“To be honest, I’m not a huge fan of that dork-upine in general, but that’s just my two cents. Tails, on the other hand, at least has a functioning brain - I help him build gadgets from time to time,” Ivo said. “Also, Maria, is there any chance that I could hire an assistant?”
“We don’t have the funding for that,” Maria said.
“Can I apply for a grant so that we have the funding to hire an assistant?”
“Is Ivo…volunteering to do paperwork for us?” Shadow said, and he high-fived Maria while Ivo’s gaze lingered on Agent Stone.
“Let’s at least try to stay on track here,” Maria said as she gently elbowed her younger cousin. “Ivo, how close are we to having a working Multiverse Transporter?”
“The Multiverse Transporter is about as close to completion as Robot vs. Biolizard 3, which is to say that it’s 98% finished and has been for the last several decades. I just need to…run some tests. You know, to make sure that Agent Stone doesn’t get blasted with cosmic radiation or split into his constituent atomic particles on his way back to my bald-headed doppelganger, who, for the record, just so happens to have impeccable taste in both lattes and baristas,” Ivo said as he glanced back toward Agent Stone with a smile. “A lesser man might take years to finish it, but I can have the Multiverse Transporter done for you by tomorrow.”
“Stone, can you wait that long?” Maria asked.
Dr. Robotnik couldn’t wait that long. The doctor was supposed to be at the G.U.N. headquarters in Stone’s universe in less than an hour, and he would need his trusted personal assistant to deliver him his laser-bending thermo-distortion suit. As for Stone, however, he had absolutely no desire to betray his boss in his hour of need, but he wasn’t sure that he had much choice in the matter. He could ask this universe’s Dr. Robotnik to test his Multiverse Transporter on him right now, and maybe it would send him home, but he would be of no use to his universe’s Robotnik if something went horribly wrong. It would be best to wait until the Robotniks were sure that the transporter was working properly.
Besides, just from the way this universe’s Robotnik was looking at him, Stone was starting to think that he could get used to this alternate reality, even if only for a day.
“I can wait,” Agent Stone said.
“Great, glad to hear it,” Maria said. “We have a spare bedroom down the hall, since we always seem to end up working in the lab at three o’clock in the morning, and it’s easier to sleep here than try to catch the Underground that late. You can stay there for tonight.”
Ivo was about to say something, but all of a sudden, a loud buzzing noise rang through the lab. “That’s the dryer,” Shadow said to Agent Stone. “I think your suit’s done.”
“I’ll go get it,” Stone said, flustered, but as soon as he left the room, he could hear the Robotniks talking about him behind his back.
“Ivo, you have got to stop staring at Agent Stone!” Maria said. “He’s going to think you’re a creep. Why don’t you just ask him out to dinner like a normal person?”
“Because I’m his boss in an alternate universe?” Ivo said. “I wouldn’t want to…make things awkward.”
“You’ve already made things awkward, Ivo,” Maria said.
“Well, what do I do now?” Ivo asked.
Maria thought about it and then said, “You’re his boss in an alternate universe, but I think the key words here are ‘in an alternate universe.’ And I’m pretty sure Stone wouldn’t look at you like you just hung the stars in the sky if your evil twin paid him any attention, so maybe you should just shoot your shot and see where this goes,” Maria said. “Right Shadow?”
“I think you’re playing with fire with all of this multiverse stuff,” Shadow said. “And I don’t want Ivo to get his heart broken.”
Maria sighed and then turned to Ivo and said, “I just want you to have what me and Elise have. I want you to be happy, so…do whatever makes you happy, okay?”
“Okay,” Ivo said. He was quiet for a moment, and then he shouted, “Agent Stone!”
“Yes, Doctor…I mean, Ivo?” Stone said as he ran back into the break room.
“Would you like to go out to dinner with me this evening?” Ivo asked. “There’s a lovely French bistro just down the road from here. C’est très romantique.”
Stone felt his heart pounding, remembering all of the times he’d imagined this exact scenario, barely able to believe that it was happening now, in real life, but as he locked eyes with the doctor, Ivo must have noticed his hesitation.
“If this is too forward of me, or if you’re not interested, just say so,” Ivo said. “I promise I won’t be offended in the slightest.”
“No, that’s not it at all…” Stone said before his face broke out into a wide, joyous smile. “I would love to, Doctor.”