She slept long and peacefully with her wings draped around her body like a blanket. The occasional mutter rose out of her relaxed breathing – some secret nightmare of her past that sought release – but she did not stir.
Not until a small buzzing noise flickered through her ears. She twitched and grumbled angrily, batting her hand for the alarm clock. Rouge hit nothing, and the abnormality jolted her out of sleep.
Her eyes flashed open and she remembered where it was she had sought shelter – The Hall of the Robot Lord, now only an abandoned crypt of metal.
So why do I hear something moving?
She lay still, feigning sleep. The buzzing motor grew louder and the robot came closer.
One… Two… Three.
"HA!" Her legs swiped the air and connected. The small badnik flew across the room. Rouge rolled away, climbed to her feet and drew her flashlight like a gun. She struck the intruder with a beam of light.
Her attacker was far smaller than she assumed: A little box with tank treads squealed helplessly on its back. Rouge exhaled and marched over to the pool of light to examine her find.
The badnik was anything but dangerous – a tiny little scarab, it watched her with wide, yellow eyes and flicked its droopy antennae in a fashion that suggested fear.
"You're a funny little guy," she muttered, and she smiled, watching how he struggled to move. She popped her flashlight in her mouth and devoted both hands to checking for and tearing off weapons.
Ho-wuummmm. Rouge jumped and tossed the robot away as it began emitting a low, sucking noise. The scarab landed on its wheels and started rolling across the floor. The sucking continued – joined by the clink of tiny particles moving down a tube.
Rouge watched on the edge, but after a second she found the power to laugh at herself. "Look at me, jumping like rabbit! You're nothing but a little vacuum cleaner!" The scarab ran across the floor, lapping dirt and dust into its tube mouth.
The bat grinned, and nabbed the cute robot again. It's antennae squirmed and it beeped at the distraction, but Rouge went right ahead and examined the straggler. "Did your big brothers leave you behind?" she teased. Well, Robotnik could be excused for not being totally thorough, especially with such an unimportant little thing as this garbage picker.
She played with the badnik awhile, discovering its secrets. The antennae that hung before its face were probably to scan the path and avoid objects. The back shell was like a miniature dump truck: it angled on a little piston and the wing-covers split to release all the trash collected inside. It really was just an automated vacuum cleaner.
What other leftovers and scraps were forgotten, she wondered. A ship maybe, to fly her out of this disgusting jungle?
For the time being, she decided to amuse herself with this little toy. With her flashlight, Rouge followed it suck up junk, and after a few passes, she would crawl over, pick it up and dump out its cargo, laughing as the bug struggled to clean the mess again. She picked out some dust bunnies and tossed them around the room and watched her little puppy retrieve the bundles.
"Good boy," she laughed, and let it suck up the crumbs from her hand. Then she emptied his shell and made him do it all over again.
Rouge laughed and enjoyed her game, but she grew bored after awhile, and so she stopped her antagonizing and watched her pet scurry about its duties. She laid on the ground and trailed her flashlight after the bug, thinking about how pathetic the thing was.
The scarab's antennae twitched. It's treads halted to avoid a crash with a larger piece of contamination. A velvet pouch.
Rouge blanked. Her hands patted her belt, but her gem-sack was not there. The beetle hovered on the spot and considered its latest find.
"Don't even think about it," Rouge hissed. She crawled forward, raising a trembling hand to seize her belongings. The beetle prodded the bag with its feelers, deciding how to approach this problem. Its vacuum hummed at a low, tentative speed. Rouge slowly crept closer, fearing swiftness might provoke the bug, and stretched her fingers.
"Got it!" Her hand snatched the drawstrings and plucked her purse off the floor.
Clink… clink-clink. It was the sound of something precious dropping out of the bag. Rouge shone her flashlight and found her black pearl ring, helpless before a monster.
"No…"
The beetle zipped forward and slurped up her treasure. Job complete, it turned around and rolled away. Rouge watched, transfixed with horror.
Rouge never worried. She had cast aside fear long ago and now, anxiety was always channeled out as rage. If she had a problem, she would not sit down or tremble. She would make someone else tremble!
"You little creep, get back here!" She crawled on hands and knees after the robot, which accelerated and charged at the walls. Rouge saw nothing but the beetle. She would grab him, tear him open and rip his head off, that insolent little speck of dust! Where did he think he could hide? In the walls?
The scarab toddled off through a doggy-door in the wall. Smack! Rouge knocked her forehead into the bulkhead. The maintenance panel locked shut, sealing her away from her treasure.
Rouge rubbed her head. She couldn't believe it: someone actually had the gall to rob Her! Rouge the Bat, greatest treasure hunter in the world! She was the tomb raider around here, not some abandoned vacuum cleaner! Her feet connected with the hidden panel and started smashing it off its hinges. She seized the door with her nails and ripped it away. Down the little vent, she could see the twin head-beams of her mechanized janitor, rolling down the path.
Robotnik may have built the maintenance tunnel too small for humans, but with her wings scrunched, and her body flat, Rouge could squeeze in and inch her way down into the scarab's lair.
"I'm coming, you little thief!"
The tunnel was not very long, on account of the scarab's small size. At the back of the nest was a larger chamber – enough surface area for the little tank to turn itself around and exit, and high enough for it to raise its dump-truck shell, spread its wings and let all its garbage filter down a hole in the ground.
Rouge caught up in time to witness the horror. She actually caught the glint of her ring just before it got dumped. The scarab folded up and shone its eyes in her face, maybe wondering how it could suck up this enormous obstruction.
It never thought another thing. Rouge grabbed its face in her hand and slammed it into the wall again and again, crushing the little bugger until its lights shut off and its treads spun no more.
Justice delivered, Rouge slid into the chamber and peered down the garbage chute. She tore out one of the scarab's antenna and dropped it down, listening for the impact. The rattling descent only faded away, and even her ears could not pick-up the final drop.
It was a tight squeeze, but Rouge got her entire body in the room and her legs down the hole. She didn't stop to think, she only knew this had to be done. The moment the bug had taken her treasure, her mind had fixated on a single target: the ring. It was her favorite, and she wanted it back with all the ferocious love of a mother for her child. And when Rouge the Bat wanted something, be it the mighty Master Emerald or a tiny band of gold, she got it! Her mind would close out everything else and she would scheme and fight with her entire being for the prize.
Her ironclad determination was what made her a top agent for the Intelligence Division; at least, until something more lucrative than her work showed up.
Rouge secured her pouch to her belt – she wasn't going to lose anyone else! – and clipped away her flashlight. She wiggled her way in, pressing her feet to hold her body up. She would go through The Doctor's trash if she had to; she would have that ring!
Rouge tucked in her limbs, folded her wings, and plunged into the abyss.
Sparks flew from her steel-plated boots as Rouge tried to control her drop. Her heart was beating for the ring, but her tactical mind knew this could not be done quickly. Hands and feet against the walls, she made a slow, spider-walk down the garbage tube. She wasn't sure how long her muscles strained against gravity, or how many floors she descended in this fashion. It was black as pitch.
The chute finally began to angle sharply. She released the walls and let herself fly down the metal slide, whizzing out the tube and into a heap of ashes.
Rouge pulled out her flashlight and assessed this lightless room. It was a vast container filled with mounds of various trashes: scrap metal, plastics, paper; all covered in a more recent layer of brown dust. That scarab and whatever other custodians still swept the place had been busy.
Rouge got to work and started digging. Her hands plunged into the trash and sifted through the fine dust. The ring had to be here, somewhere in the latest payload. The dust was so deep that it might have been sand and she a beachcomber. At one point, her body sunk through the garbage and she waded up to her hips in dirt. She never stopped, no matter how filthy she grew or how irritated her nose became.
And then, she grabbed a fistful of dirt and felt something solid at its core. Rouge opened her hand and swept away the impurities until her flashlight revealed a glint of gold. The shine was muted by dust, but there it was: the ring, topped like a flower with its black pearl.
She gasped and hugged it in her palms. The soft touch of the ring satisfied, and the beating lust of her heart began to fade. Her mind opened once more and her obsessive tunnel vision relaxed and spread its view. Rouge looked around this new room.
"Now what?"
After a long search, and a bit of digging, she found an exit. The room was surrounded by long, compressing plates that would crush the garbage into manageable chunks. These would then be pushed out through a gateway in the fourth wall. The opened gate was near buried in the collection of garbage, but Rouge made an entrance large enough to squeeze through the top. It was easier than risking a broken neck by climbing back up the garbage chutes.
The room she dropped into was a vast collection of conveyer belts and extinguished furnaces used to sort and process the waste. It was a recycling plant, but one could hardly credit this as earnest resource conservation. Robotnik simply took in everything he could, and he sucked it dry until it was no longer any use to him. Not one scrap would be spared when it might hold some value.
Her flashlight could find no end to the cavern: not even a floor or a ceiling. Rouge shrugged and jogged down her path and through the labyrinth of smelting machines and suspended walkways. The ex-spy could not remember whether G.U.N. had discovered this chamber, but it would surely take years to uncover all the rooms and secrets of Final Egg. Rouge wondered how Robotnik could possibly use so much space.
There was no conventional exit at the far end of the recycling plant. Rouge didn't mind, because she found something better: an escape route and a trail marker rolled into one. One level below, there was a hole blasted through the wall. The scorched metal bent outward, so whatever had made the impromptu exit had traveled out of the room.
"Sonic the Hedgehog," she nodded in a satisfied tone. She could almost picture the blue speed-addict racing down the catwalks of this room at lightning speeds and shredding through the walls. It was he who had obviously found this place and forced the good doctor to vacate the premises. "And if that dim-bulb found his way out of here, then I'll just follow his lead."
There was only a rusty corridor on the opposite side of the hole. Scorches in the wall and skid marks on the floor all suggested the Hedgehog had been through here. Rouge followed his progress down the hallway, and came to a thick, wall-to-wall door with another hole smashed through. She could feel a breeze blowing, and the bat hopped through excitedly.
Beyond the armored wall was a long chute, almost like a hollow skyscraper within the tower. Again, it was too dark to tell the dimensions, but it was tall enough for air currents to circle through, and Rouge felt a wind on her face. Large, yellow numbers on the wall marked this ledge as floor 90, and there seemed to be a panel of buttons for accessing an elevator of some sort.
"You couldn't fly, Blue Boy, so I'll try down." Rouge snapped her wings to their full length and took a running dive into the enormous elevator shaft.
She would glide to one end of the tunnel, then circle back, controlling her drop with practiced skill. She soon came to another ledge, blocked off by a similar armored garage door. This one was marked 80. She saw no signs of the hedgehog's path, and her echolocation revealed that the door would need explosives to open. She gave an uppity huff and jumped back down.
The elevator shaft serviced floors in intervals of ten. There were probably sub-systems to access individual floors. Either that, or Robotnik had super-sized ten floors to match his fat ego. She floated lower and lower, to floor 50, to 30, but an armored barrier barred off each ledge. Each time, she frowned but she didn't bother to panic – the only way to travel was down, after all. Why fuss?
A way out would present itself. She was Rouge the Bat after all – she had infiltrated Hidden Base and weaseled through a powered-down Space Colony ARK. And that was just getting inside. There was always a way out. She lived her life by those words.
Floor 1, the very bottom of the shaft finally came, and with it, an explanation for the state of the elevator. A heap of fallen platforms cluttered the ground level, some smashed. Rouge recognized them from the ARK and the Pyramid Base. They were levitating platforms, meant to service the various floors, and with power cut off, they could float no longer.
But traffic was not meant to descend this far. There were no armored doors or ledges here. This was the end of the line. The hedgehog must have found his way through a higher level. Rouge cursed him and waved her flashlight around, looking for the lingering hope.
Reflective lettering caught her eye: EMERGENCY EXIT. The door was plain metal and human-sized, nothing fancy or futuristic. There were no locks or security keypads, just a bar that you pushed to release the latch and swing the door on its hinges. It pushed open with a rusty moan.
Rouge smiled. Scientific Genius he may be, but there was something simple about that old fool. He might as well have installed a screen door with bug netting. There was always a way out.
She was expecting a straight exit into the gray lands at the base of the tower, but The Doctor was not totally senile. There was a concrete stairwell past the emergency door, and the only way to go was down.
Odd. The report she'd read before that whole "ARK Incident" never said anything about basement levels. This piqued her curiosity.
So down she went. The stairwell was so boring and economical, she wondered if she was still in the excessive Final Egg. Not one grinning logo was on the wall! Rouge grumbled down eleven flights of stairs, and with each one, she could hear the jungle outside, taunting her with its buzzing and humming wildlife.
Wait. Wait one second. Wasn't she moving underground? Wasn't the stairwell made of muffling concrete? Wasn't the wildlife around the tower dead?
She shut off her flashlight and took the next stairs more cautiously. That sound was not the hum of wildlife; not even the quiet ringing of the brain that arose in silence. It was coming from down below.
Rouge flinched and shut her eyes. Light! A strip of light stabbed her eyes!
This was the final staircase. At the bottom was a door. A thick, reinforced door of steel with great big locks and bolts – the kind that might defend a bomb shelter. In their hurry, someone had left it open by only the tiniest hair, and green light was seeping forth.
Now would have been the time to speak into her radio and report back to headquarters. She caught herself in the reflex of reaching for her old walkie-talkie. This door, these stairs, they had never been included in her mission briefings.
The light seemed to call her; draw her forth. This was the greatest secret ever to be hidden away, and it was hers to uncover! She slinked to the stinging light, curled her nails around the edge, and pulled it open for a peek. No one in sight. She slipped her body through the crack and entered.