Chapter Text
Dr. Ivo Robotnik, M.D. Log 6
Full physical recovery has been confirmed. Complete examination and analysis of anatomy now underway.
End Log
Robotnik is rhapsodic. His subject is finally healthy – well, physically healthy, at least – and they can move onto Phase Two of his deconstruction of the alien’s everything.
With the pesky rebellious flame quelled for the time being, he taps his palm twice and the robots carry Sonic over to a large MRI machine; the very machine he’d asked Agent Stone about, upon his arrival here. The hedgehog eyes it warily. Robotnik would scoff at the continued display of complete and utter ignorance, but he’s in too good a mood to care enough to even react.
“Stone!” He calls out loud. “Any day now!”
“Sorry doctor, coming doctor!” The assistant responds with cheer, hurrying through the opposite door with a stainless-steel tray in his hands. It holds several medical syringes as well as a variety of bottled liquids, all marked clearly and carefully.
“Is that everything I asked for?”
“Yes sir! I have anesthetics of multiple kinds for general, local, and regional anesthesia. Which one would you like me to prepare?”
“Let’s get some of the stronger stuff going first,” the mad scientist says, watching how Sonic’s breathing has picked up minutely at the sight of the tray and its contents. “Don’t want our evolutionary miracle ‘running out’ on us right when we’re just getting started, do we?”
Agent Stone giggles like it’s the funniest thing he’s heard all day as he sets the tray on a table and begins filling a syringe with propofol. Robotnik smirks and turns to his captive, who has started wriggling at his restraints again in a panic.
“Remember when I said I could keep you asleep all this time, and I’ve chosen not to thanks to my plethora of patience?” The man asks, placing his pen back on Sonic’s chest. The hedgehog stops his movements only to stare at the pen like it’s going to bite him. His ears are alert and facing Robotnik, signaling that he has his full attention.
Just as it should be.
“I may have fibbed just a teensy bit. You see, I want to have the whole picture of what your body looks like, inside and out, and I can finally get that now that your injuries won’t potentially muddle up the results. Unfortunately, magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography scans can’t be done while metal is present on the object being scanned.”
He makes a show of tapping his pen against one of Sonic’s wrist restraints. The teen’s mouth thins into a grimace.
“And since you’ve proven from the very beginning that you can’t be trusted to obey as expected quite yet, I’ve decided to take some precautions.”
Stone squirts a bit of liquid out of the syringe, drawing Sonic’s wide gaze at the action. Robotnik’s upper lip curls and he grabs the hedgehog at his jaw, forcing his attention back on the doctor.
“Didn’t anyone ever teach you it’s rude to ignore someone when they’re directly speaking to you? Oh, right, of course no one did.”
The scientist holds out his unoccupied hand without turning away from his subject. Stone gives him the syringe, and he flips it around expertly so that it’s in a prime position to be used.
“W-Wait! Wait,” the hedgehog gasps, his chin still in Robotnik’s iron grip. “I won’t run!”
His captor raises an eyebrow even as he tilts Sonic’s head to the side, exposing his neck. “You won’t run?”
“Cross my heart! I’ll be still as a statue, slow as a sloth, subsent – subservent…uh.”
“Subservient?” Stone supplies helpfully.
“Yeah that! I’ll be the most of that that anyone’s ever been! Honest!”
“Oh, of course you will.” Robotnik lifts the syringe so that he can observe the opaque white fluid inside through the fluorescent lights of the lab. “You’ll lie perfectly still for upwards of two hours, doing absolutely nothing with nothing restraining you, and when we’re done, you’ll let me snap those cuffs and collar back on without resistance until we repeat the process all over with another scan.”
He gives the teen a flat, unimpressed look. Sonic tries to smile innocently back. It comes out sheepish and nervous.
“That’s what I thought. Stone, hold his head exactly like this while I find the jugular vein.”
“Yessir.”
The little alien hisses and squirms as the scientist presses his gloved finger against his neck, and desperate babbling fills the space between them.
“I’m a hedgehog of my word, you know, I would never ever break a promise I make. Ask anyone! Crazy Carl or Donut Lord or that skunk I ran into two years ago. I promised him I’d never do it again and I didn’t, I haven’t even seen the guy since then, you should call him up if you want proof of my –”
Robotnik finds the spot. He pricks it with the syringe. Sonic’s babbling reaches a higher pitch.
“My! Honesty! Let’s talk about this, no reason to be hasty! You know I never thought I’d hear those – those words come out…of my mouth, but you know what…they say…about desperate measures….”
His speech slows and slurs, and his eyelids grow heavy as the drug starts pumping through his body at a much faster rate than any human or animal. The doctor watches with unadulterated fascination.
It’s barely twenty seconds before the hedgehog is out like a light. He mumbles nonsense in his sleep as Stone removes the collar from around his neck and the robots lie him down on the MRI’s bench. A few well-placed inputs of Robotnik’s glove remote makes the restraints at his wrists and ankles release with a solid click.
Another press of a button, and the machine whirls to life, pulling the limp teen into the cramped round space to document the inner workings of his tiny body.
It’s almost an hour of total silence between the scientist and his assistant as they watch image files start to fill the computer screen connected to the MRI. Both are riveted by every millimeter of scan that comes through. The teen’s anatomy almost perfectly resembles that of a human, barring his skeletal structure, and already Robotnik’s mind is whirring with new things to examine, aspects to probe, and questions to answer about this remarkable little creature in his possession. And that’s not even considering the tests involving the limits of his strength, speed, and generation of energy.
Oh, it’s going to be so much fun.
The MRI finishes its process, and the doctor is quick to move onto new analyses while his subject is still unconscious and compliant. They set the hedgehog onto an examination table, lock his restraints back into place so that he can’t sit up even if he was to wake up, and Stone wheels in a cart of empty vials and surgical tools.
All the things he’d painstakingly waited to pull from the alien are now being painstakingly pulled. Skin samples; muscle samples; organs; bone and bone marrow; another large sample of blood. Anything and everything is fair game as Robotnik works his way through Sonic’s anatomy one section at a time. He’s careful not to take much of any singular sample – the purpose of this is examination and study, not debilitation, and he doesn’t want to have to wait too long to move onto all the other exciting things he has planned that will require his captive to be at full health to give accurate readings.
The teen himself remains comatose during the entire procedure, although his face twists whenever a particularly invasive cut is made, minimal as it is. At a single hand signal, Agent Stone injects another dose of propofol and the expressions of pain smooth out.
Half the day has passed by the time Robotnik finishes stitching up the last incision he’s made and disinfecting the shaved area. They litter the hedgehog’s body top to bottom; tiny patches of shaved fur and precisely-sutured incisions that make him look more like Frankenstein’s monster than the healthy thing he’d started out as just this morning.
The scientist wipes his brow as Stone takes the cart away to preserve the samples for analysis and clean all the tools he’d used. He leans his forearms on the metal table beside Sonic’s head, watching in fascination when the alien’s left ear twitches subconsciously at the stimulus.
He drops his own head, leaving only an inch or two between them, and takes in every detail of the hedgehog’s face as though burning it into his memory.
Slowly, his lips curl back into a terrible grin.