Lauren the Echidna
Chapter 1
The Softer Side of Evil
Being used to a wide world of disasters, I have gotten to the point where natural crimes wouldn't scare me. I've been protecting my own town from any disaters that would happen, and no one seems to care anymore.
I wander these streets to find out if there was any kind of crime going on, but nothing was happening at the time. People had been staring at me, whispering and muttering to one another, telling secrets about how I had become nothing but a freak over the past few years. I knew this wasn't true...well...at least I thought it wasn't. People have seen that I had been friends with the one and only Sonic the Hedgehog and all the others for quite sometime. Being me, I would just ignore them, only until some people would come up to my face and tell me that I was the freak of the town, but I just glared at them and walked away.
But that day wasn't as well as I thought it would be crime-wise. The sky had suddenly turned a dark color, almost completely black, and a giant yellow circle appeared in the sky. I looked up and blinked, knowing exactly what this was.
"Uh oh...that looks like a Warp Ring..." I grit my teeth together and growled. The sky turned darker and a figure began to fall out of the ring. It looked familiar to me, from reading many adventures about Sonic and the others, but I already knew that this guy was trouble. My feet lept off the ground, speeding toward where the figure was falling. Since it was night time, it was a bit harder to find where he was, but as soon as I did, I noticed exactly who this was.
His eerie smirk was similar to Sonic's, but showing nothing but a row of fangs all around his mouth. Those red sunglasses glistened off of the light of the moon, followed by the black leather jacket and flamed designs on the sleeves giving his outlook a bit like a biker. He looked the type but was found just standing there glancing around for anything he could get his hands on. I did nothing but stare at this green hedgehog as I was hiding behind a wall of one of the buildings in my city of Hillsborough, North Carolina. My eyes narrowed as I wasn't aware of what was going on behind me.
A robot about a few feet taller than me had snuck up on me, its body in the shape of a lizard like serpent, its two claws reached up and grabbed me from behind and lifted me in the air. My yelp in shock had gotten the ears of that green hedgehog to twitch. He looked toward where I was hiding and saw that I was shouting for help, unable to defeat the robot that had grabbed me.
"GAH!! LET ME GO YOU SCRAP HEAP!!" I shouted louder, kicking at it. The robot hissed at me and grabbed on of my legs. My eyes widened and I shouted again for help, but all it did was toss me aside, making me land on my back, hearing a small cracking sound that left me motionless on the flat hard ground under me.
"..Ngh...ungh...ouch..what the..." I barely looked up and saw that green hedgehog standing over me, lowering his sunglasses and glaring down at me with his light blue eyes. My eyes widened again and I grunted from the pain in my back. He just snickered slightly and smirked.
"My my...you must have such a hard time keeping this city under control by yourself. Hmhmhm...with those rats gone from here, you decide to take things in your own hands...Lauren Berry." He said with a wide smirk across his face, lifting his sunglasses back up. How...how did he know my name?! He's never been to my world before. I couldn't speak at the time, because of all that pain in my back, but I tried to get up, only to have that same claw swipe across me, knocking off of a nearby cliff outside the city. The cliff led down into a somewhat bottomless pit that would be doom to any passing car to fall off of, or if anyone fell down into it. I screamed as I grabbed the ledge with both hands, pulling myself up slightly, but kept slipping. My grip was slipping every second, but I kept reaching up higher to get up, but wasn't making any progress.
"HEY! BACK OFF YOU PIECE OF SCRAP! THIS GIRL'S MINE!" This hedgehog was known as Scourge, the anti-version of the blue blur, Sonic the Hedgehog, but had his fur and eye color altered so he wouldn't look anything like the blue hedgehog he hated. Scourge raised his fist and slammed it down onto the head of the lizard bot, leaving a deep dent in it, then curled up in a ball, and spindashed into the bots main circuitry, shorting it out and finally spinning through it and landing on one knee, sunglasses covering his eyes and smirked, one hand placed on the ground. As he landed the lizard bot finally exploded into many pieces, that missed Scourge by inches, but he kept his cool and stood up, looking back at the bot, who was nothing but ashes and a few wires.
"AH! S-Someone, help me up!! I--" I then gasped finally feeling my grip slip off of the edge and a drop of cold sweat fell down my face, feeling the wind pick up under my body as I fell from the cliff. But at the same time, I felt a swift hand come out of nowhere and grab mine before I got too far down. I cringed then looked up, seeing that that hand was actually a white glove, with the black jacket attatched to it. Scourge...had saved me...but why? He wasn't the nice guy. Scourge quickly pulled me up over the side and I gasped, panting as I stared at the ground, then looked up to see Scourge walking away.
"Hey...w-wait! Why did you save me..." I asked. He stopped and looked back at me, glaring through his glasses.
"Hmph...I didn't save you, kid. I have dibs on you and no one else does. Leave it at that." He began to walk away again. I lifted my hand up, but he just kept walking away. If this was the real side of evil...then wouldn't there be a way to convince him that this wasn't the life for a hedgehog like Scourge?
