26 Interlude: What happened to Starline (short chapter)

<div id="i4c-draggable-container" style="position: fixed; z-index: 1499; width: 0px; height: 0px;"><div data-reactroot="" class="resolved" style="all: initial;"></div></div>If there was a word that could describe Doctor Starline at the moment, it would be a combination of 'livid' and 'determined'.

'But times can change, if you try hard enough' He said mentally as he oversaw the creation of a new army.

After being forced to use the Warp Topaz to flee from an enraged and superpowered Eggman after the electroshock session failed to bring him back his memories or even kill him, the platypus ended up in an abandoned warehouse that, by sheer luck, turned out to hold several offline Badniks. Apparently it was a storage for when the Empire was at its peak. Better still, it also had a foundry and an assembly line to make the most advanced Badniks, plus enough metal reserves to build an entire army. That, however, wasn't what made him realize not all his efforts were in vain.

His machine didn't just electrocute people by pumping their brains and bodies with emerald-powered lightning, it could also, with some finesse, delve into their minds to some point as long as the 'patient' wasn't aware.

While he was tying down Eggman while he was unconscious to prepare him for 'the session', he also had the courtesy of exploring a bit of his brain, not just to see if he could indeed recover his old self, but also to search for possible plans and schemes as precaution in case the session did irreparable damage and made him forget or killed him.

And what he saw surprised him.

It was practically empty of evil. As in, nothing of what it had (the Ark, the occupation) wasn't in first person (done personally in that time), but third person (basically being told to him later). Sure, it could be chalked to the fact that the machine wasn't designed to make such hasty observations, and Eggman himself admitted that he had forgotten much about his past sans the important parts, but Starline was fairly certain that something else was happening, something much more sinister. Which in this case was not evil, which in turn was bad for them.

Did Eggman really forget that much? Or was he, indeed, a clone of the original? He would have to capture him again to inspect him further, and for that he would require soldiers to bring him to Starline. However, not even the most dangerous Badnik classes would even survive against his fists and intelligence combined, not even in groups. Which was why he decided that, rather than an army, there would be a squad of elite machines, powerful yet intelligent, and more than capable of taking on the Resistance by themselves, and best of all, they had safeguards that would make sure they wouldn't go rogue like a certain E-Series robot.

Eight robots that would help him in bringing Eggman back or, if that failed, manage to actually kill him and... well, reconstruct him.

Best of all was that, by virture of being the only thing not related at all with evil, yet still found in Eggman's mind, and even then they didn't look like good guys: a soldier without eyes, a giant even bigger than Eggman himself, a cyclops, a wheeled medic...

'What will happen, will happen' Starline thought with a smile as the first machine came out of the assembling line and it's receptors glowed as it activated, before it screamed.

"I LIIIVE!"

He also made them wholly indepedent which, despite the safeguards, was possibly the most stupid thing he could do with them.

You can guess what happened days after.

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