#imagine knuckles using the master emerald like a wifi router

[chaispicelatte]

I was thinking about how one of my favorite genres of Sonadow content is Shadow realizing Sonic is way more fucked up than him (the alien hybrid made in a lab in space). And then I had the thought of Shadow realizing ALL of Sonic's friends are sort of weird and terrifying in their own right.

Sonic:

Him being freaky is a given

No one really knows much about his origins, yet he has power on the same level of Shadow, who was engineered in a lab with the help of an alien dictator

Is usually chill but relishes any opportunity to flex his powers and push them to the limit

Only thing keeping him from being an interdimensional threat is his altruism, which Shadow has somehow learned to just trust (which honestly scares him more)

Tails:

First off, why is this child flying a plane? Does he have a license? (The subject was quickly changed last time Shadow asked)

It takes months for Eggman to come up with new tech for his schemes only for this kid to reverse engineer it and come up with a new counter in half a day

Shadow has seen him make weapons that violate the Geneva Conventions out of a mechanical pencil and box of scraps

Also has better aim than GUN snipers with 10 years of training

Shadow takes him out first when it's him vs Sonic team because he doesn't want to risk either Tails getting a clear shot or him having time to pull out some other bullshit

Knuckles:

Knuckles being insanely strong is nothing new, Shadow is also strong

The difference is that Shadow's strength either comes from momentum, precise control of chaos energy, and/or knowing exactly where to aim. Knuckles doesn't need to do that, he's just strong enough to lift a mountain on his own

Shadow would think that Knuckles just doesn't know how to use chaos energy in that way (he's too dense to figure out Rouge is flirting after all)

Until one day Shadow's Chaos Emerald is acting weird. He reluctantly brings it up to the group chat to see if they're having the same issue. Knuckles says "Hold on" and goes quiet for a couple minutes

Then Shadow's Chaos Emerald goes dark. He would have thought this was a harbinger of another disaster if it didn't regain its color a second later. It's also working perfectly fine again

Knuckles used the Master Emerald to fucking turn them off and on again ("Yeah, it's the Master Emerald for a reason.")

Sonic asks if that's tied to the time Knuckles punched the Super out of him and that only causes even more questions that Shadow is too exhausted to ask about

Amy:

At first glance, she seems the most normal. She's got an apartment in the city, a day job, and is an active member of the community

Is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to abilities

Shadow held her hammer once, and it's easily over a ton, but she's swinging it around all day with no problem

At first Shadow thought her bracelets were similar to his limiters, but they're just bracelets. But they are almost solid gold and crack the ground when they drop

Even weirder is that while she has more muscle than the average girl, it's nowhere near the amount needed to be as strong as she is. And he doesn't sense that her body's being augmented by chaos energy the way he does

And when Shadow thought about that, he started thinking about where she stores that hammer. He stores small stuff in his quills all the time, but no way could Amy do that with something of that size. Even when he watched closely, he just saw her hide it behind her back, and it was gone

It becomes obvious that Amy has some control over chaos energy, but the way she used it was so weird that Shadow can't make sense of the how or if she even knows she's doing it

And then there's how she always seems to know exactly where Sonic is. Shadow was starting to think she put a tracker on him with how precise she was

That was until Shadow noticed that every time he ran into her on accident, she instead seemed to be...expecting him

Amy chalked it up to her tarot cards, Shadow isn't so sure

Just what exactly was she seeing when she mixed him or Silver up with Sonic?

Cream and Vanilla:

Shadow hadn't had many run ins with Cream, but had heard she was stronger than she looked

Sonic once joked that she'd become a more popular hero than him if her mother let her go on more adventures

Shadow didn't think much of it until an incident in which he was fighting Eggman's badniks

A couple had escaped and were heading to a Chao Garden. Shadow goes after as fast as he can, but when he gets there, he's cheerfully greeted by Cream, sitting on a pile of destroyed badniks

Shadow walks her home, and is greeted by her mother and her overprotective pet robot. Gemerl is easy enough for Cream to calm down though

Though Vanilla is a...different story. She seems friendly enough on the outside, even invites Shadow to stay for dinner. But something about her unnerves him enough to gently turn them down

The look in Vanilla's eyes was too familiar, he'd only seen it in very experienced GUN agents. Like she was sizing him up, looking for any weak spots, and considering the best way to dispose of him if necessary. But not out of any malice, just as a force of habit

On his way home, Shadow remembers tales from an older GUN agent about the legendary Agent V. Said agent had been said to be dangerous enough that few knew their face, but had gone missing several years ago. But the lack of records on them or any urgency for GUN to find out what happened to them led many to believe that they were just a myth

But Rouge once said with certainty that she did exist

Shadow decides not to make that connection