CHAPTER NINE

Every Rose has its thorns


Amy awoke with a searing pain in her back, feeling groggy and weak. She gazed around the area listlessly. Metal everywhere... "So tacky," she thought. Feeling an abrasive itch on her arms, she realized she was tied to a wooden chair. "Wh... where am I...?"

"I'm glad you asked!" said a voice somewhere in the room. Amy hadn't realized she was thinking aloud. Suddenly she felt a presence behind her back. Straining to turn around, she could barely make out the figure in her blurry, peripheral vision.

"Dr. Robotnik?"

"The one and only!"

The fat, egg-shaped man danced into her field of vision, his gaudy clothing and impossibly long moustache a sight to behold. Standing in front of Amy with a triumphant grin on his mustachioed face, he said, "Since I'm in such a good mood today, I shall answer your question! Little pink hedgehog, you've been taken by my EggRobo servants and brought to my secret lair underneath Mount Gimmick! I'm sure you're wondering how I constructed such a glorious abode after being defeated once again by that wretched Sonic the Hedgehog. The truth is, it's made entirely of parts from my previous base in this area, the Scrambled Egg Zone! Everything is entirely refurbished and beautiful! It's my most lovely-"

"Will you SHUT UP!?" interrupted Amy in a shrill scream. "My back is killing me and these ropes are itchy and I am NOT in the mood to listen to your stupid stories that no one cares about! And my darling Sonic will be coming to rescue me any moment now, so you'd better give up and let me go right NOW!"

"My, my, what a recalcitrant little girl you are," said Robotnik, mildly irritated by her outburst. "You would do well to stay on my good side, for I can make your roboticization more painful if you don't co-operate... and I wouldn't bet on Sonic coming to save you - he doesn't even know about this place!" Robotnik laughed and turned around to leave the room. Without looking back, he added, "Enjoy your last moments of non-mechanical life, you little brat! Muahahahah!"

Amy hung her head in desperation. "Sonic, where are you?" she thought, moping for a while. Then, she lifted her head back up. "No. I got myself into this, I can get myself out. Sonic will never be impressed by a pathetic little girl who always gets herself captured. He's already saved me once, and that will be the last time... but how do I get out of this mess?" The pink hedgehog thought for a while, and couldn't come up with a solution. She struggled against the ropes, hoping they were loose, but she wasn't so lucky.

Then she remembered the Chaos Emerald.

Fumbling around, Amy realized, much to her relief, that it was still in her possession - it was a miracle Dr. Robotnik hadn't noticed it. "He probably thought I was too harmless to be worth searching... seeing as I haven't proven otherwise," Amy reflected. Fingering the flawless gem in her hand, she confirmed that the bottom point of it was sharp. Very sharp. Being extremely careful not to drop it, Amy slid the pointed end of the emerald against the ropes, moving up and down, cutting into the rope with ease. In only a few seconds, she had released herself from her bonds. Gingerly rubbing her constricted arms, she scratched furiously until the itching went away. Glancing around, the hedgehog quietly made her way out of the room, through the same exit Robotnik had used.

She walked through a dilapidated hallway, dimly lit with red lightbulbs on the ceiling. "This place gives me the creeps," Amy thought, "I'd better get out of here quick." Peering around a corner, she saw Dr. Robotnik typing excitedly into a computer terminal, occasionally glancing up at a giant screen on the wall which had a map of the world displayed. "What a creep," thought the pink hedgehog in disgust. "He's gonna pay for this..."

Amy quietly reached behind her and pulled out her Piko-Piko Hammer, holding it in both hands as she slowly approached Dr. Robotnik from behind, checking first to make sure there weren't any robots in the room with him. She crept closer, making sure to walk as quietly as possible, and then...

"TAKE THIS!"

The pink hedgehog whacked Dr. Robotnik on the back of his head with as much force as she could muster, screaming "THIS IS PAYBACK FOR KIDNAPPING ME, YOU CREEPY OLD MAN!"

Robotnik shouted in pain, and fell down face-first against the terminal. "You wretched little brat... you're not going to get out of here alive..." He slammed his hand down on a large red button on the keyboard, and a cacophony of alarms went off throughout the base's entirety, before he fell to the floor in a heap, clutching his swollen head. "You will pay dearly for this..."

"That's my cue to get outta here!" Amy said, rushing out of the room as fast as her two feet could take her.

Running down the hallway, she came out in the room where she had been tied up before, only to be ambushed by three robots. Amy panicked for a split second. "Get out of my way!" she cried, smashing one with her hammer. It exploded in a flurry of shrapnel, and she ran between the other two before they could get their metallic hands on her.

Amy was scared. She slightly regretted alerting Robotnik to her escape in such a manner, as now the entire facility was on the lookout for her. She tried to calm herself down. "You can do this. Just get out as fast as you can," she thought.

Amy dashed out of another exit and came out in another long, winding hall. Coming to a fork, she took the path on her right. Red lights were flashing and alarm systems were blaring, notifying any robot within a large radius that an escapee needed to be captured. Pipes jutted out of the walls, which Amy broke with her giant hammer while running, and various boxes littered the floors, most of which she destroyed as well. "As long as I'm here, I may as well trash the place, so that creepy fatso has a harder time with whatever he's planning! That'll teach the old fart to mess with me!"

The hedgehog swung her hammer in no particular direction, letting her anger guide it. Amy broke everything she could. Walls, buttons, pillars, computer systems, robots - nothing was safe. Within two minutes sparks were flying everywhere, steam was shooting from broken pipes and multiple small fires had been started from explosions. "Robotnik is gonna be furious when he wakes up..." thought Amy, a smug smile on her face. To her, it felt like she was picking daisies in an open field.

Coming to the end of the hallway, a two interlocking metal doors blocked her path forward. Noticing a button on the side, she pressed it, hoping they would open.

No such luck.

"Rats," Amy thought.

Behind her, two more robots approached.

"Uh-oh." The pink hedgehog froze.

The badniks stepped closer.

"Guess I have some more fighting to do..."

With two well-aimed swings, she decimated the mooks with her Piko-Piko Hammer.

"Ugly architecture, ugly robots... A little wallpaper and some kittens could really liven this place up!" Amy looked back at the door. "How am I gonna get through here..."

It was then that she noticed what appeared to be a scanner above the button. Analyzing it, she read the words "Eye Scan Required For Entry During Lock-Down" etched onto it.

Thinking for a moment, she wondered if what she was about to attempt would even work...

Amy grabbed what was left of one of the robots and dragged it over to the scanner. She positioned it so that its "eyes" would be scanned. "Do robot eyes even count as real eyes?" Amy wondered.

Luckily for her, the doors slid open with a loud "Whoosh", and she rushed into the next room, thankful that the mooks who attacked her had sufficient security clearance to enter the room. The hedgehog quickly ran in, the door closing behind her.

She stopped in her tracks, and gasped at what she saw.

Dozens of metallic replicas of Sonic, each contained within some sort of futuristic-looking tube, and each looking exactly like the one that had kidnapped her on the Little Planet so long ago.

"This is bad... this is REALLY bad! One of these things was enough to fight on equal terms with my darling, real Sonic; this many of them would be too much, even for him!" Amy frowned in disbelief. "I've gotta do something about this!"

Amy ran up to a nearby computer terminal, tripping over a can of oil in the process. She noticed wires trailing on the floor from the terminal, all the way to each separate tube. Amy grabbed and severed each wire individually. Then she smashed the tubes. Then she destroyed the terminal. Then, for good measure, she smashed everything else in the room.

Sparks flew everywhere. The room quickly caught fire due to the overturned oilcan.

"Yikes! It's getting hot in here!"

Glancing around, Amy saw her way out - a ladder on the wall leading up to a trapdoor in the ceiling.

The pink hedgehog climbed up, unhooked the latch and pushed the trapdoor up. The dank smell of dirt told her that she was clambering up into a cave. Amy could see the cave entrance a few dozen feet in front of her.

Shutting the trapdoor underneath her, Amy ran toward the light at the end of the cavern. A tremendous shaking knocked her to the ground, coupled with a loud, yet muffled noise. Stalactites and rocks fell down from the roof of the cave, nearly crushing her. "That explosion must have come from that room full of Metal Sonics," Amy thought, picking herself up and dashing out of the cave. She came out in a large, mountainous area, but with a striking trait: everything, including the mountain itself, was made out of metal. "Where am I now?" Amy said to herself.

Looking back behind her as she ran, she watched the cave entrance crumble, sealing off the cavern. "That'll set him back quite a bit, I hope!" thought the pink hedgehog, contemplating the damage she had done to Robotnik's hideout.

Amy noticed a sign along the metal path, and she scanned it as she approached. It read simply: "GIMMICK MT. ZONE".


That was a fun chapter to write :) I wanted Amy to be actually valuable, instead of the one-dimensional "OMG SONIC U SO KAWAII" that she is in the games, while still trying to keep her relatively true to her character. She's been kidnapped before, but she's not exactly a damsel in distress - I mean, she has that gigantic hammer and she's quite spunky, so I can imagine such a scene happening in the games if Sega gave more of a damn about her character :B