Author's note:
Game universe, set soon after Sonic Adventure 2. More info will be posted on my profile page.
Enjoy!
Edit 23-06-2013: Edited the chapters. Thanks to Lord Kelvin for pointing out a humble part of the typos present in this story!
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters and locales. SEGA does.
Chapter 1: Diamonds.
.w.
Central City was celebrating.
It wasn't every day that the planet was in danger of colliding with a falling space colony and then escaped its fate by mere seconds. The President, being a personification of generosity itself, let his country boil with pure excitement for three days.
Rouge the Bat appreciated the gesture just as much as school students and office workers did. She wasn't interested in spontaneous parades and fancy fireworks, though. While people's heads spun with glee and alcohol in city streets, she could stop by their homes peacefully and see if they had a present for her.
This time, her target was a rich building at the border of the business district and a local park, hidden in the trees so very few city noises and random glances would reach it. Three-storey, pearly white, obviously modern, but trying to look old-fashioned in a way that made the artist in Rouge cringe. She quickly repressed an urge to file a report about an aesthete's hurt feelings nevertheless; today, all those columns and gargoyles were going to help her find her way inside.
Clinging to a tree on the opposite end of an alley and using her scope, she watched several servants leave the building leisurely. It looked like someone was generous enough to give a day off for almost everyone at once, even those of the service staff who usually stayed for the night. Rouge nodded approvingly; she always appreciated it when people were eager to make it easier for her.
She left her hiding spot, glided above the alley, flew over the two-meter-tall wall on a zigzag trajectory, and found herself a place behind a column next to the second floor's window. Had there been people below with an urge to look up, they would have seen just a quick shadow, nearly indistinguishable in the midnight darkness. Her favorite dark purple stealth suit was hiding her identity from the lurkers.
Alarms and indoor cameras didn't have days off, sadly, but they were not to spoil a thief's mood today. From her sources Rouge knew that the alarms wouldn't be turned on until the chief maid was done with inspecting the rooms before the night. Before that, a thief's opponents were just cameras, two or three old ladies in the corridors, and security personnel in the room on the first floor. Piece of cake for someone with a bat's abilities and armed with a multi-functional treasure scope.
Rouge cringed, remembering her failure during the Prison Island operation; G.U.N. wasn't an opponent you could easily play with. Thankfully, a humble city manager couldn't afford protection of such level. No heavy battle machines or laser weapons, just your average security system. A walk in the park.
The window by her side opened: the old maid was refreshing the air in the rooms before the house went to sleep. Rouge waited for her footsteps to die down and peeked inside. In the corner of her eye she noted a strip of a glass break detector. It was inactive for now, but if she was late with her searching, passing it would be a problem.
Inactive was an infrared motion detector as well, but the camera in the room was flashing a warning red light. Activating her scope's filters, Rouge studied the camera's viewing angle from her safe spot. Most of the door and a part of the room were inside the view, while the window, the ceiling, and the top right side of the doorframe were left without attention. The servant lady was gracious enough to leave the door open, too, and for a bat the way alongside the ceiling was as comfortable as a red carpet.
The camera in the dimly lit corridor was installed with the same level of inaccuracy, so Rouge could float up next to an ugly chandelier without being detected. Her first problem was already looming in front of her anyway: to get past a door she needed, she would have to enter the camera's field of view this time.
Rouge possessed an info that the service staff members were not allowed to enter the house owner's study on the second floor. It didn't take having an IQ of 300 to guess the most delicious loot lay there. What really annoyed her was the fact that the only window in the room was walled up and observed by several cameras on the outside; for someone not equipped with a catapult and an army of robots of back-up, the door was the only way to get inside.
The door she needed was just next to the one she had just entered, but there was the camera.
She glided towards it and pressed into a wall next to it. Chopping the wires would leave her with too little time to operate, because a black screen would instantly attract security's attention. Rouge didn't possess the equipment needed to cut into the video feed and make a video loop – and even if she did, the process would take too much time. Not that she didn't have a solution, though. She licked her lips; the next part was going to be tricky.
Reaching for the compact backpack made of the same dark purple material, she took out a small plastic box with a lens. She placed it right above the camera, making sure fields of view matched, and took a photo.
There was a 'print' button next to a 'take a picture' one.
"C'mon," the bat girl whispered breathlessly. "Make it quick."
To her despair, it took full sixty seconds for the portable photo printer to produce a small photo card. The quality wasn't stellar, but Rouge wasn't about to place it on the wall in her bedroom anyway. With a piece of two-sided scotch tape and a bit of tinkering, she placed the picture in front of the camera, making sure enough light from the chandelier reached it. She had no idea how it looked on the security monitors; she hoped a decrease in quality wouldn't cause too much movement instantly.
Now invisible to the ones sitting on the first floor, she landed in front of the target door and studied the lock. The contraption was a no challenge for her picklock set, but before making an advance she stepped back and scanned the door fully with the scope. What she discovered made her frown: there was an opening detector on the inside part of it which would alert the whole building unless she used a contactless key to disable it, which she naturally didn't have.
Of course, there were no wires accessible from the passage.
She ran a quick calculation in her head. The scans showed the device didn't have any advanced circuitry to fry with an EMP. Making a hole in the mass of wood with a special agent's compact plasma knife seemed the second best option – unless there was an active heat detector installed inside as well, which would instantly react to a blade of heated plasma. What she had learned about the house so far told her this was more than likely.
Time was running thin, and Rouge didn't feel like taking such a risk.
A small flask guised as transparent nail polish container appeared from the backpack. The thief felt anxious for she hadn't yet tested this liquefier on goods made of oak. She prayed to all seven Chaos Emeralds and the Master one as she dripped several drops of substance on the door's surface.
Her grin became apparent under her suit's mask as a horrifying dark hole formed before her in a matter of seconds. She waited for the liquefied wood to stop dripping, and slipped inside, careful not to touch the remnants of the door. The evidence of the crime was more than plain obvious by now, so she couldn't hope for the whole escapade to remain unnoticed until the manager returned home.
The scope instantly warned her about the heat detector in the corner. She nodded contentedly; clad in her stealth suit made of material originally designed for fire proximity suits, she didn't have to worry about her body heat giving her presence out. In any case, she had made sure of that while flying over the outer wall, fit up with a similar heat detection system.
Next part was just too easy. Her faithful treasure scope gave her out the location of the only safe in the room: behind a heavy bookcase. So cheesy.
Rouge was in the process of making her way through the books when the gadget gave her another tip: there was a source of a weak reflected signal somewhere under the massive wooden table, below the floor level. The thief dropped her activity altogether and fell motionless for a moment.
If she was an apparently-not-so-dumb greedy manager, where would she hide her treasure?
Just a few minutes later the old maid went back down to close the windows on the second floor and noticed a glaring hole in the door of her employer's workroom. The security she immediately called up found a disabled heat sensor, a displaced table, an accurate hole in the floor tiles under it, and a smell of burned wood.
Of course, nothing was inside of the hole, and no one was in the room.
.w.
Rouge listened to alarms going off hysterically in the distance, giggling quietly in delight. She didn't go to the park after she was done with plucking the safe out of its nest, deciding that it would be the first place to be searched for the thief, so she found herself a safe spot on a roof several streets away. There, she could finally crack the safe open in peace and look what her today's treasure was.
The safe had a mechanical lock she had some experience with. Putting one of her sensitive ears closer to it, she began spinning the wheel until a series of barely audible clicks told her what the key combination was. This way, she could easily open it without damaging the contents.
A stack of paper in the lower section was of no value to her; a small black bag in the upper half was her target. Her fingers shook slightly upon undoing the tie, and her eyes went wide as she saw what was inside. Rouge tore the scope's mask off her head to have a better view of what lay on her palm.
Vivid city lights gleamed off a brilliant-shaped jewel. So her sources were correct after all, and the man possessed that twenty three carat deep blue diamond after all…
Had possessed. Now it was the biggest one yet in Rouge the Bat's humble collection.
Unless you counted in a Chaos Emerald she had been provided with during the ARK operation and lost during it. She frowned with annoyance; she'd have another chance to get it back.
Rouge took a moment to catch her breath before the last leap home and turned the brilliant in her fingers, admiring the color. She knew this one wasn't the biggest gemstone in the world – a visit to a certain floating island ensured her that; but a feeling of new treasure in her fingers coupled with adrenaline was all it took to make her day. Well, night, more likely.
All jewels in the world already belonged to her anyway. She just had to decide when to come and get the rest of them back.
As she was done with her admiration, she put her haul back into the safety of the bag, frowning momentarily. It looked like she had told the echidna Guardian something about being done with stealing jewels... Eh, it's not like you could trust everything a pretty agent told you. Anyway, it was a good move on her part, given that she was going to drop by later on, and having the Guardian lax and trusting would be a delicious bonus.
She didn't feel sorry for the today's treasure's previous owners, either; that couple, the manager and his dearest spouse, had relieved the federation's budget of too much money for anyone righteous to frown at her. Naturally, the blue diamond was the result of one of those schemes the public would gasp upon learning about.
The manager would think otherwise, of course, but only after the security informed him about the theft – and Rouge would be long gone by that time.
Collecting information about the house and preparing the munitions was a bit of homework, but she was proud of how she handled it.
Something made Rouge tense all of a sudden. Her sensitive ears hadn't picked a single sound, but the skin on her neck crawled as if there was someone else next to her on the roof. Trying to not make any sharp moves, she turned her head back to where she thought that someone could be.
The bag slowly slipped out of her fingers.
Floating gently in the air in front of her was a cluster of diamonds. Of different proportions, from speckle-like to fist-sized; all tear-shaped, partially transparent, partially radiating a noble white glow. In a heartbeat the batgirl realized the light wasn't a reflection; it came from within the gems itself, in a way light would emerge from a Chaos Emerald after someone with a pure heart would call upon its power.
Rouge had never been able to evoke that light…
Nothing she could net in a citizen's house, or maybe even G.U.N.'s most valuable stocks would possibly match this beauty. A thought about the Chaos Emeralds entered her mind and was rejected; the memory of those parrot-colored clumsy stones was just too awkward to bring up before the whiteness of pure brilliance.
It was a gift the heaven itself gave her.
Something on the back of her head gasped. Diamonds did not just fall from the sky and floated towards you, they always were safeguarded like any treasure would be, that was wrong, crazy, unnatural...
The diamonds still levitated before her eyes, waiting for her to make a decision patiently. She gulped, licked her lips that were instantly dry, and reached forward.