The Doom Crystal: Part 2, Stuck Between a Rock and a Very Hard Place, Section 1

A Sonic the Hedgehog Fanfic by find-the-lion

Disclaimer: I do not own Sonic the Hedgehog, Dr. Robotnik, or Snively. They are copyrighted by SEGA, DiC Productions, and Archie Comics.

However, Ebony Moon and Maria the Cat are copyrighted July 7, 2005 to me as is this story which is also copyrighted July 7, 2005 to me.

Notes:

This story takes place four months before Endgame in the comic book.

Ebony

Oh, hello. I see you decided to come back. That's great! I'm thrilled; I really am. It's great to know that people think what you have to say is worth hearing. But enough about that. Let's see, where did we leave off? Oh yes, I had left Knothole to go to Willow Grove, another one of the local villages, on a personal errand. I think I'll skip ahead from there a bit. For a while after that, not much happened that could be considered unusual. Even though I have never actually joined the Freedom Fighters anywhere, I routinely do my part to help our side. I make Robotnik's life perfectly miserable as often as my traveling lifestyle permits, and apparently in the last three years, I have done so enough times to have the dubious honor of achieving his attention. This gained me some notoriety among the other villages I had visited, even though some of them had already as good as adopted me when I first wandered in, but after I bumped into Sonic and proved that Knothole and the Freedom Fighters did indeed exist, it made me nothing short of a hero.

I don't consider myself a hero. I have too many problems of my own to even consider a full time career in hero work. We'll explore that further a little later. First and foremost on the list at this point in time, had been the whereabouts of my family.

But enough about that, what was going on right now? Oh yes, about a week ago, I had checked in at a SWAT-bot station and accessed a file there that had told me they were being transferred to a mining operation on the giant super continent of Aisra. I would have left straightaway, but at that time, I received a call from a friend of mine who I had last seen about a month prior at his village on the edge of the Great Plains to the north. He wanted me to come back and help him find one of the nomadic tribes up there. That'll get explained better later in this narrative, but apparently, they had gone missing from their usual haunts. Unfortunately, from my current location, the quickest way back to where he was happened to be through Robotropolis, but when a friend is in need, what can you do?

I'll tell you what you do. You run like crazy! That's what you do, and that's what I was doing at the moment. I had almost made it about two thirds of the way through the city when it happened that I was spotted by one of those flying surveillance probes that Robotnik uses to spy on his empty hulk of a city. Of course, as you probably already figured out, this meant SWAT-bots. I had dispatched five already as I retreated through one of the old residential districts, but there were too many for me to take on alone.

I was currently running down one of the back streets behind a row of what had been apartment buildings, when I noticed a ladder coming up on my left. Thinking that perhaps if I climbed it quickly enough, I could get to the roof and find an alternative running path, I sprinted to it and started climbing. I was almost to the third floor when I felt a spotlight on me. There wasn't much I could do about that, so I contented myself with trying to scramble faster up the ladder. A blasted bolt singed my hair and hit the wall as I neared the top.

"Come on, is that the best you can do?" I yelled at them as I climbed onto the roof. "I'll bet you couldn't hit the broad side of a..." this last taunt was drowned out by a shower of plasma fire. 'Oh yeah, that was real smart.' I thought to myself as I ducked down below the wall that surrounded the roof and looked for a better hiding place. A trap door stood open in the center. I crawled to it and climbed down inside. So much for running.

"Now where do I go?" I asked myself. I found one of the suites that was on the opposite side of the building from where I had climbed up. There was a window in what had been the living room that was open enough for someone to get through. I went to the window and looked out, evaluating the street on this side, which was currently empty. Definitely an improvement on the street I'd left.

I reached into my shoulder bag and found a thin cord with a small device that resembled a grappling hook attached. Upon further study of the living area I was in, I fixed the hook around a pipe just inside what had been the kitchen. I tested my weight on it and it held, so I eased out the window, and slowly slid down the rope. I dropped the last few feet to firm ground and after tugging on the rope to retrieve my hook device, I continued to creep toward the edge of the city..

As I passed an unattended corner something about the whole picture suddenly seemed wrong somehow, as if it were too easy.

What was it?

Maybe just the quiet. I shook my head and kept going. It had to be my imagination.

I passed the next corner, which also was empty of SWAT-bots. 'Okay, maybe Sonic's around or something.' I thought to myself, as I continued walking. Then a siren sounded. I nearly jumped out of my skin and started running again.

As I ran, I suddenly noticed that there was something up ahead, approaching through the smog. I couldn't see who it was, but I quickly decided that it didn't look friendly, and so I turned around and started sprinting back in the other direction. Up ahead there was an open door on my right. Deciding that perhaps I might have better luck in not getting found on the next street, I went through this new door and quickly began searching for a back exit. When I finally found it, I tried to pull it open. I think my luck ran out about there, because it wouldn't open.

"Come on." I muttered. If I wasn't being chased, I'd have time to pick the lock, but there wasn't time. Finally, I realized that there was a window next to the door. If I could find a pipe or a stick or something, I might be able to break it and get out that way. As I cast about for a possible glass breaker, I noticed something standing in the doorway I had entered through. It looked like a cat.

"Oh, hello," I said. "Are you being chased too or do you live here?" The cat walked into the room without saying anything. The lights were dark in here so I couldn't see very well, but as the cat approached, I noticed that she was brandishing a pair of handcuffs.

"I'll take that to mean you live here." With that, I pulled back my right fist and attempted to punch her in the face as I prepared to quickly retreat around her, back the way I had come. This would have worked, except that something else appeared in the equation at that moment. Almost as fast as I punched, the cat blocked it with her right arm and then proceeded to counter by punching me in the stomach. Next thing I remember, she hauled me up by my wrists, proceeded to secure them behind me and then half carry me, half push me back the way we had come. It happened that fast.

I didn't get a good look at my captor until we were outside. We were moving toward a hover unit that had just landed, and I risked a peek at her. What I saw nearly made me gasp. She had a white lower face stomach, but the rest of her was black. I did notice however, that there was a seam as though someone or something had sewed her together going down her face, right between her eyes, and moving down the left side of her pink nose, and coming to a stop right at the bottom of her cheek.

"Move it." She said when she noticed that I was no longer doing so. She forced me to turn back around and then opened the door to the hover unit, which we had reached by now. It was a standard model. You know, with the pilot and copilot's seat in the front, a gun turret on the top and the cell taking up the rear. Anyway, she pushed me into the holding cell, making me fall on my face in the process, and locked the door. She then went up to the front and took the controls in front of the pilot seat. It didn't take me long to figure out that we were headed toward Robotnik's fortress.

I got myself up onto my knees. It was an awkward position with my hands behind my back, but I managed. I had a feeling that since the last time Robotnik saw me I was being rescued by Sonic, he wouldn't be too keen to let me sit in a cell for a while. I had no intention of getting anywhere near him at the moment. I reached into my left sock, and got out a small piece of wire.

After a minute of poking around, the handcuffs fell to the floor. I stood up, planting my feet to insure I didn't fall on my face again, and made my way to the door. From my place in the cell, I could now see out of the windshield. It was then I noticed that we weren't going to the prison blocks. The prison blocks were at the base of the fortress. We were going straight to Robotnik's personal landing pad. That was a bad sign. It meant he didn't even want me to see the cellblocks before he got started. That was something I could not afford to let happen.

I looked at the door of my prison. It was no different from any other cell door I'd worked with, so pulled out the wire again and set to work. If only I had more time. This lock was particularly complex, and I wasn't exactly in the best position to pick it. I suddenly felt the hover unit land and quickly hid my wire as I saw the cat stand up from the pilot's seat and turn to make her way back toward my cell.

Of course, the cat immediately noticed the handcuffs I had deposited on the floor, and deduced from this that if she were to open the door as she was, I would undoubtedly try to tear her throat out in an escape attempt. From this line of thinking, she reached for a plasma rifle that was sitting next to my bag and pointed it at me.

"You may be an escape artist, but if you do anything funny before I take you to Robotnik, there is no way you could possibly escape this little toy." I decided to wait to test her theory until a more opportune time. I put my hands up and waited for her to open the door to the cell. She opened it and motioned that I walk out. I did and again, waited while she collected my effects from a table just out of reach of the cell door. I then continued forward after she signaled me with a poke in the back with her rifle. I walked forward and out the door to see that we were indeed on Robotnik's personal landing pad, and that, he had come out to greet us.

"Hello again Miss Moon." He said in his usual venomous tone. I didn't answer him, I was too busy trying to analyze the situation for possible escape routes.

"Please, won't you come in, I'm sure we can find quite a lot to talk about in my laboratory."

"It seems you'll just drag me in there anyway, unless I want to die out here in the cold. But then again, considering the odds of what's in store for me, chances are the latter would be preferable."

Robotnik advanced on me and cupped my chin in his roboticized left hand. "If you were anyone else, I would be happy to oblige. But then I would miss out on all of your wonderful little stories about where your friends are." He let go of my chin and signaled to the cat. The feline in question guided me through the door at the other end of the landing pad, which, I soon discovered, led to one of Robotnik's bigger laboratories.

Snively, was waiting in front of a computer console and there were also two SWAT-bots waiting to take custody of me from the cat. This they did, with each one taking hold of one of my arms. Having finished her job, the cat walked back out through the door to the landing pad, I assume to park the hover unit in it's accustomed place, wherever that was. It was then that I noticed a rectangle of steel that seemed to be standing upright against the nearby wall. I also noticed that the SWAT-bots who were now restraining me were leading me towards it. When we were almost there, I saw four cylindrical objects slide out from the steel rectangle's flat surface. On closer inspection, meaning we were right on top of them, and the SWAT-bots were forcing my ankles and wrists into them, it became obvious that these were shackles.

Once he was certain I was secure, Robotnik sauntered over to where I was now effectively shackled to the wall and said, "Now, perhaps you could tell me the location of Knothole."

"Forget it tubby." I answered. "Your not speaking Mobian anymore."

"Miss Moon, I do not have time for this, perhaps I have not made myself clear, I might let you remain free another day."

"Yeah, maybe sometime in the next life. Forget it."

A SWAT-bot interrupted the interrogation. "Excuse me sir, but your bath water is ready and if you do not hurry it will be cold."

Robotnik turned back to me and said, "Well Miss Moon, I suppose we shall have to wait until tomorrow to finish our business. My new combat specialist did find you rather late in the evening, and perhaps your attitude will change after you've had some time to think it over." He and Snively then completely vacated the room, leaving me where I hung while the SWAT-bots took positions at the doors to the room to make sure no one entered, not even the worker bots.

'Wow. Saved by the bath.' I though to myself. 'Now that's a disturbing picture.' I allowed myself a moment to reflect on the situation. There had to be some way out of this. I just had to figure out what it was. Hmm. It was obvious that I couldn't do much hanging here. I would need assistance. My eyes landed on my squad of guards. They may only obey Robotnik, but that doesn't mean you can't manipulate them.

"Hey SWAT-bots!" I called.

They ignored me.

"Hey! Metalheads!" I tried again, louder this time.

They continued to ignore me.

I took a deep breath and bellowed one of my personal favorites, "YO! GARBAGE CANS!"

Nothing.

They didn't budge, but I suddenly had another idea. "You know, Sonic was right here, just now, and you missed him!"

Still nothing. I sighed. Perhaps that wasn't the way to go after all.

'I guess I'll just have to come up with some other means of getting down from here.' I thought to myself.

To Be Continued…