The hallway took a left turn and the twins came upon the living area of the staff and guards. It actually looked hospitable, with the large courtyard lit by a very long shaft that let the sun in and lined with shrubs and trees. Along a balcony at the top were tables where the cafeteria patrons could enjoy their food with each other, while the bottom floor was lined with doors leading to various quarters. Ricky and Krause might have stopped and rested on the benches for awhile if the place hadn’t been swarming with guards getting ready to blast their butts out of the galaxy.

"Over there!" Ricky shouted, pointing to a narrow hallway while he ducked behind a bench. Ricky ran along, stooped over, while Krause took up the rear, shooting as much as possible with minimal accuracy. After several close calls, the twins finally reached the hallway. Krause fired a few shots at the entrance to deter any pursuit. Then Ricky turned around and gasped.

"Please don’t shoot!" said the man standing behind him. He stepped further into the light and the twins recognized that the muscular, middle-aged man was the officer whose will had been broken by Krause. He still carried his laser gun, but he was clad in street clothes that looked much more comfortable than the armor.

"You gonna shoot us?" Krause asked.

The man blinked heavily. "What makes you think that? I’ve given my lifestyle a little thought and realized that no degree of militarism will ever truly satisfy me. You think that after inspiring me like that, I’d shoot you?"

A laser bolt exploded on the wall and the ex-officer motioned for the twins to hide in an alcove. They hastily followed his advice while the man held off the advancing guards.

"So what are you planning on doing for a living?" Krause asked. The man nailed a guard in the helmet and he ducked back into the cramped alcove to dodge oncoming fire.

"I’m going back to my family in Fourside," he said, firing around the corner and hitting a guard in the chest, "Then maybe I’ll look to pursue," he shot another guard at point-blank range; his target reeled and let out a scream of agony, "A career in real estate perhaps."

"That sounds cool! Maybe you’ll be the CEO of the Fourside Real Estate Agency someday," the man shot a guard in the arm and whipped him in the helmet with a bone-chilling crack, "and have a tower named after you."

"No," the man said, blasting yet another guard, "I never want to be in a position of that much power." Another guard bit the dust, "Because that much power is far too stressful for a simple man," he took several shots at a guard, finally hitting the target in the head, "such as myself."

"By the way, what can I call you?"

The man took another shot, shattering a light and spraying a shower of sparks down on a guard shooting at them. He then shot him thrice in the torso before answering. "Brandon, please."

"Nice meeting you. I’m Krause, and that’s my brother Ricky."

The laser blasts finally stopped and smoke was everywhere. The sounds of many nearby footfalls told them that they wouldn’t be safe for long.

"Thanks," said Ricky, "Listen, we’re trying to get to the Burning Spring and then jet. Could you help us?"

"Of course. Follow me, you two, and try not to hurt yourselves."

Brandon loaded another ammo clip into his laser gun as they ran down the narrow passage lit here and there by bare light bulbs. After about a minute, they came upon an intersection and stopped.

"I thought you knew the way!" Krause shouted.

"Please don’t shout!" replied Brandon. "It interrupts my thought process when people badger me like that!"

Suddenly the familiar sound of laserfire echoed nearby.

"This way!" Brandon said, pointing right. They began descending a steep staircase and Brandon took up the back. Ricky had his bat out now and Krause borrowed another ammo clip from Bandon’s belt pouch and struggled to put it into the gun. The mood became very tense as their guide explained that he hadn’t ever seen Burning Spring, but knew that it was guarded by more than humans or animals. After a long time, the stairs finally stopped and gave way to yet another hallway. But this was different from the drab hallways they had gotten used to previously, for it seemed that a strange kind of heat was radiating from the walls around them and a curious red glow illuminated the place despite the absence of lights. The group starting moving at a more cautious pace as the hallway widened and became increasingly warmer. Suddenly Brandon told everybody to stop for a moment.

"If it’s okay with you," he said, "Could you tell me what the heck you two are doing in a place like this anyway? From what we heard from the Pigs, you two are terrorists seeking to dismantle their "righteous revolt" and continue human dominion over the world. If this is true, why are you infiltrating a secret psychic energy research facility instead of suicide bombing the PORK Fortress?"

Ricky shook his head. "Actually, it’s more complicated than that. We might be terrorists to our enemies, but we’re more like the Chosen Four all over again."

"The Chosen Four? Could you…elaborate?"

"Back in the nineties, there were four kids who saved the world from an alien invasion with the help of mystical powers and something called the Sound Stone, which Uncle Flint said had some ties to special places on Earth. That’s pretty much all I’ve been told. What’s weird is that now I have this stone and I have to get to four locations to gather enough strength to stop the Pig Threat. And Krause is helping me out."

Brandon sort of shrugged. "Good as any reason. Now if you really want to get there, we have to move before we get caught again."

As they trudged on through the intensifying heat and light, Ricky seemed to feel something strange inside of him that he hadn’t felt before. It was a bit hard to describe, but it was a sense of feeling much stronger, yet utterly overwhelmed by an even greater force. At long last, the passage seemed to finally end at a large black door that, despite the temperature around them, was cool to the touch. The door lacked a very important thing, and that was a knob, handle or latch.

"What now?" said Krause.

Brandon cast his head down. "I forgot to tell you guys, but I now I remember that the doors leading into Burning Spring can only be opened from the CPU."

"Oh, now you tell us!" Ricky exclaimed, and suddenly the strange sensation he was experiencing left him like a fire meeting a pail of water. "Hear that, Krause? We have to go back to that computer room and open it from there! With any luck we won’t be caught by guards or pigs or whatever else is in this place!"

"Don’t have a cow, bro!" Krause snapped, "If you start panicking now, we’ll all panic and we won’t find a way through! Maybe a high-powered laser beam could break it. It worked before, right?"

Krause and Brandon began to bicker with each other while Ricky drew a deep breath, slung off his backpack, sat down and opened it in hopes of finding something useful. Right at the top sat what the adventure relied on, the Sound Stone. He hadn’t gotten a look at it since Coal Town, and it was now quite different. In one of the circles around the carving of the Earth came a greenish glow and, even stranger, it emitted a strange melodic noise. Ricky blinked and slowly picked it up and the strange sensation returned, but this time it seemed stronger. He rose to his feet and held the Stone to the door. Krause said something, but Ricky didn’t really hear him. The door began to shudder, then a mighty WHUMP was heard and it flew off its hinges and was hurtled to the smoking ground twenty feet below. Brandon caught Ricky just in time before he could be pulled in by the intense convection current.

"You’ll never cease to scare the crap out of me, Ricky," said Krause.

Ricky grinned back and put the Sound Stone back in his pack as he slung it on. Somehow he knew what had happened. The Sanctuaries were essentially locations where the energy that we call psychic power surges stronger than usual. As to why this is, nobody really knows. Some theories speculate that a high concentration of a certain element, such as the gold in the Golden Tunnel or the sulfur in the Burning Spring emit a certain field of power that can be manipulated in certain ways. Some theories are even weirder. But Ricky knew that he had conquered a Sanctuary and another seemed within his grasp. Now if they could only solve the problem of descending a twenty-foot slope into a pool of smoldering sulfur without killing themselves.

"I’ll go first," said Brandon, putting the gun at his belt, "You’ll know whether or not I find a safe path."

Cautiously, he took a step onto a stone, braced himself against the slope and began to climb ever slowly towards the pool. There were quite a few close calls, but the only injury he suffered were to his palms, which blistered in the heat. Finally, he crawled onto a boulder near the bottom, turned to the twins, and smiled.

"Good job!" Krause said. "I’m next!"

"No," Ricky cut in, and Krause gave him a funny look, "It feels like the place is drawing me in…I’m going to answer it. Stay up here."

So Ricky got on all fours and began his crawl down into the slope. The feeling inside of him was now overwhelming and a sense of peace rolled over him. He hardly felt the rumbling that broke out all around him, but it was enough to get him to fall face-first into a rock and shake sense back into him. The whole crater was shaking violently as if in an earthquake and the pool of sulfur was spewing itself all over. Brandon was behind the boulder at the bottom, clutching his head and yelling for Ricky to get out of there. It reeked of rotten eggs more than ever.

"Ricky!" Krause shouted, "Get your butt out of there!"

Ricky drew his bat and began to scramble up the slope. About ten feet from the top, he turned his head and saw a large, misshapen mechanical thing rising from the sulfur. It appeared to stand tall on two leg-like metal pillars and have a box with a PORK Snout design built onto it that moved about like a turret. Thick, acrid smoke poured from everywhere there was an opening and a hose attached to the bottom of the thing wildly spewed a blazing inferno.

"Brandon! Get outta’ there!" Ricky shouted. Brandon fired a laser blast at the behemoth of a machine and shouted something back, but it was lost in the raging fireball that he dodged by ducking back behind the boulder. Ricky kept on scrambling up the slope, grabbed Krause’s outstretched arm and was finally pulled up, coughing in the smoke. The robot turned itself around and suddenly a concealed rocket battery opened up and unleashed its rockets at the twins. The ceiling above them exploded and came down where they would’ve been if Ricky and Krause hadn’t hit the dirt with seconds to spare. After that, everything happened very quickly. Brandon struggled up the slope, firing crazily at the robot with little success while being shot at himself and taking one or two beams. Krause set his gun on the highest setting and fired a shot, which exploded a few feet away from the target in a flash and bang and knocked him backwards. Ricky did his best trying to hide behind rocks and find a place to possibly blast the fiend with a PK Fire.

"It blocked our retreat, didn’t it?" Brandon shouted as he ducked behind a boulder next to Ricky. Ricky responded with a ‘yeah’ that was drowned out by a howling ‘bling’ noise coming from the robot. Ricky jumped over to Brandon, saw that he had a laser wound on his arm and quickly healed him with a PK Life-up.

"How are we gonna beat this thing?" Ricky shouted. Krause fired another blast that exploded against the armor and left a crater which sulfuric smoke poured from. Brandon tried to take a deep breath before responding, but he just ended up doing a lot of coughing.

"We can’t do much."

Just as he said this, their foe seemed to falter for a moment as it was about to unleash a barrage of rockets at the boulder giving Ricky and Brandon cover. Deep in the labyrinth of the base, the bloated brain awoke in the middle of a surgery and had shut down the robot’s systems. With its newly recovered psychic powers, it swiftly took control of the machine and commenced the assault. Before anybody could ponder why the thing had stopped shooting, twelve rockets sailed from batteries and hit the base of the crater. All at once, the walls began to collapse and take our intrepid heroes right with them. Ricky, Krause and Brandon screamed as they tumbled through the darkness, being beaten and bruised by debris and blinded by sulfur. They all agreed that this was a most uncomfortable adventure.

"Yes, it would appear by all accounts that both of the whelps are dead, Good Human," the robot said to the image on the screen, a shadow of a fat man’s face. "Would you care to explain to you their demise?"

"You have failed me, Brain. I would eliminate you, but having a mind such as yourself on my side is a hard thing to replace. Just don’t screw up again; do you understand?"

"Yes, Good Human. Long live the Pigs."

The robot scoffed to itself internally. Humans got themselves too caught up in personal agendas and desires to be capable decision-makers. They were too close-minded to see the bigger picture. He had hardly cared that the twins were presumably buried alive and no longer a threat to his plans, but he made a huge screaming deal about the fact that he hadn’t the pleasure to kill them himself. He laughed internally once more when he realized that he had done the same sort of thing. All this thought took approximately 6 milliseconds.

The Good Human continued. "Just to prove your value, I would like you to mobilize a sizable force of whatever you can find in your area to move south, towards Fourside particularly. I am in preparation to launch a campaign massive enough to bring humanity to its knees. I have already captured Winterhaven and started the production of a new line of aircraft that will leave the pathetic populace too stunned to even wet themselves. All I need you to do is get as many troops as possible and wait for your orders. Shall I elaborate any further?"

"It shouldn’t be necessary, Good Human."

"Okay. I have to go make a pre-campaign speech soon and I may be running a bit late. I can assume that there’s enough in you yet for me to say ‘thank you’ in advance. Thank you."

The screen blanked out and the robot laughed again, but this time out loud. It was a horrible grating sound that would make any mortal’s spine go numb. The Good Human deemed him unworthy of tasks that would he better suited to its intelligence level. If he would not get the respect he deserved as a most trusted general, he just had to laugh and plot even further.

Brandon moaned and twitched his arm slightly. It was still dark, and he felt as if he were being crushed by a great weight, which he was. Slowly, he pulled himself out from underneath a pile of debris and flopped down on the moist floor.

"Brandon?" Krause’s voice said from nearby. He turned his head and saw Krause sitting on a boulder above him in the light of the flashlight he held.

"Right, that’s my name…I think. How long have we been down here?"

Krause shrugged. "I just got up a couple of minutes ago. I was on top of all the rubble, so I didn’t get as much of a beating as Ricky, but my head feels like it’s gonna be split in half."

"Ricky? Where is he?"

Krause paused for a moment. "Over here. He’s still unconscious and I don’t know much about first aid, but it looks like he got busted up pretty wicked."

Brandon struggled to his feet and limped over to Krause. The fall threw his left leg a bit out of its normal position, but he managed to keep his balance until he actually saw Ricky. His pale head was propped up against a rock and a small stream of blood ran out of his open mouth, where a hoarse breathing noise was heard. Brandon bent over his body and waved his hand.
Ricky groaned and cringed. "Ow…"

"Ricky!"
"Where are…we? Ow! Ugh! Pain!"

Brandon pulled himself to his good foot. "Don’t worry about a thing, kid. The worst is only behind us. Better in a damp cave than facing that robot, right?"

"Oh crap!" Ricky exclaimed. He pushed Krause away, bolted upright, grabbed his brother’s flashlight and shone it towards the rubble. "Crap! We need to get back there!"

Ricky set the flashlight down and started to move the stones away until suddenly he painfully remembered that he had been beaten and bruised and stopped.

"I was so close…" he lamented, then he turned to the other two and raised his voice. "Are you just gonna sit there and stare at me? We need to save the world!"

"Okay, now’s not the time to have a cow, bro," Krause said, "If you can’t remember, we were blasted out by that robot up there, survived a giant cave-in and now we’re probably at least a hundred feet below Burning Spring. We can’t dig our way of there."

"I have to save the world!" Ricky retorted, his voice cracking into a cough. With that, he fell back onto his knees and took several deep breaths. "But a good drink would hit the spot right now…"

The twins ate while Brandon, despite his bad leg, volunteered to scout ahead. An hour later, Ricky was feeling good enough to stand without shaking all over and Brandon had returned with the best news they had heard all day. The cave led towards what looked like an old, dried-out sewer tunnel. Krause had lost his gun during the fall, but Brandon’s seemed serviceable, so if they ran into any trouble, they wouldn’t have to worry about much. While they followed Brandon through the darkness, Ricky felt lower and lower in spirits. There was no way to turn around and reach the Sanctuary now, unless maybe if they had a bulldozer with a turret gun on top to dig through the rubble and kill the robot respectively. Sadly, nobody in their group normally carried these on their person and all seemed lost. The others would never understand how he felt then. Although he had failed to reach a sanctuary and gain more of the power to destroy their enemy, something in the back of his brain game him a sense of slight hope. He decided that having a small amount of optimism was better than being sickeningly melodramatic and dwelled on that glimmer of hope for the rest of the day. Their progress was slow and they camped out in an old sewer tunnel after about an hour and a half of trekking.

The next day, Krause let out a whoop of joy when he saw light other than his dimming flashlight. A few iron rungs led up to a manhole that was leaking out bright light around the edges. Brandon climbed up the rungs carefully, gave it several shakes, said screw it, and blasted the heck out of it. With Krause bracing his bad leg from below, he heaved the cover up and off, then climbed up into the middle of a small, unkempt public bathroom. But the air smelled as fresh as any mountain air and they barely heard the Hispanic man at the urinal scream something at them in Spanish. Krause smiled apologetically at the angry Spaniard and tossed him a quarter before they all walked out the door. To their mild surprise, they were standing behind a bar in a darkened café. This wasn’t nearly as surprising as the man standing on a table in the middle and giving what sounded like a rallying speech in a voice that Ricky and Krause knew. Nobody seemed to notice their presence, so Krause walked up to a woman listening to the man and tapped her on the shoulder.

"Um…’scuse me ma’am, do you know who that is?"

"Quiet! I’m trying to listen to what he has to say!" she snapped back softly. "And for heaven’s sake, boy! Take a bath! You’re downright filthy."

Krause rolled, then widened his eyes in indignation and surprise, respectively. "Hey, Ricky? Doesn’t that guy up there look familiar?"

The young man turned towards them as he explained that he had faced the likes of pigs in the recent past and stopped. It dawned in both of their brains that the speaker was none other than the Espeon with a whip at his belt, albeit unshaven and wearing more comfortable-looking street clothes as well as a pistol.

"‘Lo, Espeon," Ricky said with a grin.

Espeon turned to the little crowd, a surprised smile spreading on his weary face. "Sorry, but I just saw two friends of mine that I told you were dead."