Metal waited for Dash to finish. When he finally did, the metallix peered out of the opening, eyes darting around as he reconfirmed what Dash had seen - everything looked clear.
"... Thank you." he said at an awkward length, then hopped out the opening, using his engine to cushion his landing. Wasting no time, he marched over to the terminal and began connecting himself to it. He was prepared to attempt hacking the system if he had to, but to his great relief, just like everything else so far in the city had, he was being mistaken for the dimension's version of himself and allowed prompt access.
His eyes dimmed as he turned most of his focus into searching through the database, immediately looking around for the thing that, at that moment, he deemed the most necessary - a satellite uplink for his GPS. After a second or two of searching, he found it and quickly connected to it, remembering to place a mask on his signal after remembering what had happened earlier. There was an immediate sense of relief and security as a sense of the world began to emerge and for the first time in awhile he could actually
navigate. Running through the local area's data, just as he had now come to expect, the geography was quite different from what he was familiar with. While this piqued at his curiosity, he has more important concerns at the moment.
Still being connected to the database, he found number of other signals and frequencies, most associated with communications, and decided those might just be invaluable to have as well. He quickly downloaded them and masked his signal over those as well.
Okay, what else is in here... Metal thought inwardly. Some files he was finding out were restricted, he would need to request access to them or try to hack them and risk a security breach. And considering he was trying to keep a low profile that wouldn't have worked out so well.
Ah ha, he thought. Historic information, that would be useful, and so downloaded it for later review. He then noticed a database of profiles and began to dig into those. The first one he opened, labeled 'Maximum Priority', caused him to wince as information about
Sonic appeared. Of course, he really shouldn't have been surprised. He knew by now both a version of himself and Sonic existed here, and as he scanned over the info (Something about that Knothole place and Sonic's abilities, him being a freedom fighter and blah blah blah), the fact that this wasn't quite the same Sonic he knew suddenly became clear.
Other files included that Sally person Dash had mentioned, revealing her to be a princess and Knothole's leader. There was also a file on a cyborg rabbit named Bunnie, apparently a partial roboticization victim. There were several other files, but most contained only sparse information and in many cases didn't even include names.
Curiously, there was a file on Tails, but it only listed him by his nickname with a brief bit of info stating that he was sometimes only seen accompanying Sonic. Odd, the metallix couldn't help but think. If this Tails was anything like the one he knew, wouldn't he have been given a higher priority?
He decided to peek into his newly acquired history documents now, the profiles having piqued his curiosity. His eyes widened slightly at the information. Everything from the Great War, the Mobotropolis coup, and all that had happened since.
Yeah. Definitely not his home world.
After shifting around a bit more inside the network, downloading some information on various patrol units in Robotropolis and other miscellaneous things such as the roboticizer, he began preparing to disconnect, feeling he's retrieved all he needed. His eyes brightened, however, as one particular file suddenly caught his attention. It was a file on
himself. Or, as he reminded himself, this dimension's version of him.
Without wasting a moment on thought the file was downloaded, opened and scanned over. Modeled after Sonic, blah blah blah, built to be his superior, blah blah. He noted that this robot seemed to be
a lot younger than him, less than a year old in fact. Interestingly he also seemed to have been designed with a stronger manipulative control over electricity. However, what
really caught the robot's attention was the fact it mentioned this Metal's abnormal ability to think intelligently for himself without the use of an emotive AI. He paused, thinking about that, recalling what Dash had just been saying and wondering just what kind of person this Metal could have been like.
As Metal went to look up more on this inter-dimensional doppelganger, his brow flattened in irritation when he suddenly found himself blocked and the rest of the information classified. Oh no, he thought. Ignoring the blocks, the metallix made an attempt at by-passing them.
[dice=2]
(1: failure, 2: success)Aaaaand he was in! Surprisingly easily too, he noted. It seemed the backdoor he had tried to use, oddly enough, already existed... Downloading the rest of the file, a list of history, assignments, even schematics and other miscellaneous information was suddenly presented to him. One of the interesting things the robot noted was that this dimension's Metal seemed to have been created using biological data that had been extracted from Sonic himself and used in his programming. It's purpose seemed to be in helping him to preform Sonic's abilities and even adapt based on experience and observation in addition to a fuzzy logic AI. Interesting.
With this information, in addition to satisfying his own curiosity, he decided would be perfect for helping him get an idea of how he was expected to behave should any awkward situations turn up between Robotnik or his soldiers.
Okay, NOW he was sure he'd gotten all he was going to get that was useful at the moment. Cutting the connection Metal headed back toward the vent.[rand=64907089558841782375488938538676898037624558505293266314146363636]
Navigating his way back through the unusually large ventilation system of Robotnik's citadel, Merce paused beside every grate to get his bearings before moving on. He'd made a map of the directions down the hallways he'd been taken down from the prison unit, and now he was trying to retrace his steps back.
The tenrec-bot apparently snapped out of a trance when a puddle of quick silver goo started appearing. 'Blinking' he looked up towards the vent.
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