Jump 227: Classic Sonic

Jump 227: Classic Sonic
>Page of Wands: Inner fire that can drive away fear and replace it with fury.
>Location: Little Planet
>Identity: Freedom Fighter
>Drawbacks: Super Drowning Skills (+100), & Knuckles (+100), Metal Destruction (+200), The Eaten Time (+600)
I'm not taking the metal version of me along, so I get the points. But no, he's not coming with me. Especially not if it took multiple Robotniks to put the thing together to chase me around. I don't care about getting the credit, either. But damned if I'm going to go into the water - if the Hydro City Zone ends up dry as a bone, don't blame me for it.
>Super Attitude (Free, Freedom Fighter)
You know, it takes a lot to keep up the attitude that the heroes of the Sonic series have. These guys have seen some shit, without question.
>Super Peel-Out (Free, Freedom Fighter)
Well, I technically can already do this. But now, I can do it with style.
>Blast Processing (1800, Freedom Fighter)
Amped-up reflexes, reacting a few hundred times faster than anyone else normally could... this is going ot be very useful.
>Fastest Thing Alive (1500, Freedom Fighter)
Well. Perhaps not technically the FASTEST considering some of the Sonics that are out there, but I definitely rank up with them. Especially because I have the Blessing.
>Power Enriched By The Heart (900)
This is the silliest phrase that means "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit" that I have ever seen in a video game. No, second silliest. Silliest was "nanomachines, son." Still, in all seriousness, being able to harness such energies is promising, not to mention being able to use a super form far more easily, thanks to being Blessed.
>Smooth Criminal (Free)
A pity I didn't have the points to spare for my own level, or I'd happily get music for it. But there is just NO WAY TO EVER HAVE ENOUGH POINTS. Jumping is suffering.
>The Blessing of the Little Planet (600)
It's where I started, I can hardly do less. Not to mention... going super with one emerald? Top speed being in the range of Mach 25? Yes, this will work nicely. I could run from Los Angeles to New York in less than ten minutes if I wanted.
>Super Shoes (Free, Freedom Fighter)
I'm overdue for a good set of shoes, honestly. I think I've got clothing that I've bought with points for literally everything except shoes, and I'm going to need them now.
>A Forbidden Treasure (0)
Now this, I can definitely use. The price for this is running the risk of destroying the local multiverse if I screw it up too much, but the reward... most definitely useful.

As my eyes opened for the first time on the Little Planet, I found myself immediately beset on all sides, surrounded by machines of all shapes and sizes. Some clearly purpose-built weapons of war, some comical in appearance, some robotic mockeries of what should be. Every one of them armed to the teeth.

"Now this isn't right," I started to say, right before they all simultaneously opened fire on myself and my companions. We scattered, we retaliated, and we triumphed. Even against an army, quite honestly when you have companions who are themselves adepts of various magics and have had hundreds of years of practice in combat... it takes more than an ill-designed mechanical army to defeat them.

The problem, of course, is that the average zone in this universe has around three or four dozen badniks on average, give or take. Looking around at the field of combat, I counted a number that was a couple orders of magnitude beyond that, and as such, I quickly told my companions to make themselves scarce - to head into the warehouse and prepare for the worst.

This was scarcely done before the next wave arrived, largely more advanced machines. I called up and Sajuuk moved into position for fire support ... then suddenly it wasn't there. Problematic. Well, I could still deal with it, it just meant breaking out some of the more advanced magic I seldom use and my beam saber for close-up work. It worked well for the most part, though doing it alone took much longer than it would have taken with group working together. Still, in the end I was still standing, even if bloodied.

By that point, the villains of the hour made their appearance. A show of force in sheer numbers, though they remained at a distance. I raised my saber before extinguishing it, offering, "Parley?"

It was all rather surprising to me, honestly - it's not as if I know what is going to go wrong in advance, and seeing Robotniks in plural wasn't something I would look forward to seeing any day. After all, it isn't every day that you can look up and see multiple Death Eggs in the sky, several copies of the Flying Battery and Air Fortress, and... quite frankly I was pretty sure that I counted just over a hundred and fifty Robotniks in total. More than a gross of Eggmen. And that's not even including the various Metal Sonics standing with them.

You ever have one of those days? I feel like I'm about to have ten years' worth of them all at once.

I did the math, incidentally, about the assorted Eggmen you end up getting with The Eaten Time.

You get 153 of them. A hundred and fifty three. One from each present, Good Future, and Bad Future. 51 times you face off against Robotnik in the pre-Dreamcast era.

Also, while I didn't count for precision for their sake, I'm reasonably certain that there are about two dozen or more Metal Sonics, and about thrice that number of mini-bosses.

The best part about the Eggmen getting to cheat with time shenanigans, though? They can put their forces in storage in the past in a zone, wait until the Futures, bring them out from both good AND bad futures, then go back to the Present and bring them out, then go back to the Past and not store them at all. And it all works.

You know why time's getting eaten? Because those guys are paradoxing the hell out of everything. Time isn't running in a line, it isn't in a knot, it's not a wibbly wobbly ball of timey-wimey stuff, it's twisted into a five dimensional ouroboros that's chewing its way through its own sides and then going back into its mouth ending up looking like it's Saturday night and time is some kind of whore desperate for rings but we're not going to name any bat-faced rogues' names.

I had to basically run a shell game with my clones because of the shattered timeline, and the end effect of that was that there was ten years of the jump that basically took place over the course of what I perceived as less than six months in linear time, but with one or two of my various clones in each zone at each time.

Sajuuk got exploded by a hundred Robotniks. The reason that the Eggmen exploded Sajuuk was that all of the ones there had already been dealing with me through the entire jump and confronted me on my entry, when I had just arrived. Apparently, Eggman's perception of the timeline was completely linear - it confused the hell out of him initially how I was grabbing emeralds REPEATEDLY, until it dawned on him that I wasn't respecting the proper rules of time. And so he shattered the timeline, grabbed all of himself, and... well, master plan.

Basically it was a grandfather paradox writ large. It wouldn't have happened if I wasn't already doing it, and if I wasn't already doing it, it wouldn't have happened.