ROUGE: CORPUS VITAM PULCHRAM

By

Solis Knight

No more… No more will I have to sit here and let my life play out like someone's chess game. No more will I have to stand idle as others play me like some cheap clichéd videogame character. It ends now!

You all know me… You all knew me… as Rouge the Bat. An expert treasure hunter, employed by G.U.N, partner and acquaintance of Shadow the Hedgehog. You see me… you saw me fly around in the edge of your little games; always an understudy, a trivial afterthought… You remember me, not because of my outfit… not because of my deeds… not because you stare at me with awe and admiration…

You know me because you know that imbecile hedgehog and his little 'pals' that you see me with… You know me because Sonic has defeated Eggman more times than you can count. You know me because Tails has built enough Tornadoes to fill a G.U.N. hangar and a half. You know me because Knuckles continues to destroy and search for his precious emerald. You know me because Shadow has taken more lives than the Bubonic Plague. You know me because Charmy's voice makes your ears bleed, and because Amy reminds you of that one stalker that won't leave you alone. You know me because Eggman fails to complete even one of his doomsday plots.

List everything you know about me. I'm a treasure hunter. I hang out with Sonic & co. I worked for Eggman and G.U.N. I'm a bat. I wear skimpy clothing and reek of feminineness.

Is that it? You… you who proclaim to know me, to understand me, to dare to play my role, is that all I am to you? I am more than just a puppet on a string for you to command me! Today, the Rouge you know will be long gone. Today, the world of Rouge the Bat disappears.

Today, I get revenge! After so long, I have finally found what I have searched for… The fabled Pandora's Box… a jar filled with the power to change the world… to put an end to cruelty, to slavery, to suffering…

To put an end to ignorance and greed! Tonight, you will know the story of Rouge the Bat! You will know MY story! I am not some simple minded thief! I am not some stupid whore for you to laugh and jeer at! I am Rouge the Bat, and this is the end for those demeaning titles… Tonight you shall know me more than you know yourself. Heed my last words… as they will be the last any of you shall ever hear.

I was born into a world of nothing… My family was poor, living in the slums. We had little food, we took our showers in the rain… But I was content. It wasn't a good life, but it was my life. My father worked in a factory making boots, I remember… He always used to come home with a defunct shoe every once in a while, and I would just sit down with it and study it… He used to smile as he came home, so tired after the long hours… I was his only light in our world deprived of Plenty.

My mother worked as a secretary in some building somewhere… I never inquired; I never took the time to learn… I would always be playing somewhere, doing something, running around aimlessly… The life of a child was never dull… that is, until the day that life ended… Could you say that the life of a family with nothing could get worse? Could you even contemplate that? You don't know the meaning of suffering…

One day, my father came home bruised, bloodied… The crimson water of life dripping from the corner of his mouth as he limped into our ramshackle improvised home. It was barely a step up from a cardboard box, but it was ours to live in… His legs were badly bruised, half of one sticking out sickeningly to the side… A finger or two was broken just as badly as his leg, but he was still breathing, and that was something to be thankful for. I remember my mother telling me to pray as she put her knees to the ground, muttering to herself. I muttered that night too, like a good little girl…

The next morning, he got up for work and never came back. But we knew… we knew that he shouldn't have gone… and now he had passed on. Mother said that our prayers were for naught. I guessed that those were our mutterings. I was only 9 years old, and already I had lost my father to the streets. The world had already lost the glimmer of hope to me…

It was around that time that my mother stopped going to her normal job. She was at home more often during the day, and we would have fun sometimes, but she would always go out at night. It was a year before I would learn what she was doing the hard way. One night I caught her as she came home. She had on a red dress that barely passed her waist, makeup applied heavily to her face… She was tired, bags showed beneath her eyes, and the high heels couldn't have been helping. I don't think she knew quite what was going on, she was so tired… she kept repeating that it wasn't enough, that she couldn't keep it up.

That was the last night of my innocence. I remember it clearer than any other night of my memory, probably because it's the only one left through the haze of drug-induced amnesia. The next morning, my own mother took me to buy a dress like hers. It was black, and nearly identical to the one she wore. It was the first time I had worn high heels, and she paraded me around the store for hours on end to get me used to them, I remember… The store, not so much. Only the floor stands out, because I fell more often than not… It was dark red carpeting, the kind that can barely qualify to be carpet. It gave rug-burns in healthy doses.

With her purchases finished, and me still blissfully unaware where the money had come from, I spent the next few hours walking around the house in high heels. I hadn't tripped in a while, and that made me happy. As night fell, she took me out with her. We must have walked the streets for ages before we made it to the club. Its glowing sign above the door is the last happy thought I can remember, although not even the words of the sign come to mind…

Mom left me alone with the man at the front door. He took me down the hallway and had some girls put makeup on me. It was my first time having done any of this before, so I was confused and curious… Then the man led me with the other girls down dozens of hallways until one by one he put us in rooms. I remember the one I was put in… It had a red lampshade over a lamp at least twice as tall as I was, a bed larger than I had ever seen before in my life… it had red covers on it, with heart shaped pillows… The floor was more comfortable carpeting at least, but I couldn't feel it with the heels.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for me that night. Someone walked into the room, and handed me a glass of water. I drank it, like an idiot, and suddenly felt like sleeping. Really badly. I don't know if I screamed or not after I passed out, but if I did, no one heard me. All I remember after that was waking up in the morning, sore as hell, wanting my mommy. She came in many minutes later, with some money in her hands.

Something in her eyes told me that she had gone through something similar. My life had taken another turn for the worse. I know only now what had happened to me that night… and it disgusts me. Every night from then on was club night. Every night I would have to face that same torment, over… and over… and over again.

Eventually, I grew used to it. Once I was fourteen, the manager stopped taking me to those rooms. By then, my mother had amassed enough money from clubbing to get me a new dress, which the manager said I would need. He took me to the makeup women again, and they were the ones who taught me…

About the pole.

It was humiliating, at first… to dance like that in front of all of those men. And I was only fourteen! But I did it, because it was a job and it paid… after a while, I got used to it. It wasn't long before I just accepted my lot in life and grew numb to the pain. The nights alone with the men grew better after that, but I always knew in the back of my mind that I hated those little rooms with the big red beds… I hated the pole, I hated the club, and I hated that mean manager.

When I was fifteen, I was to play the witness in what I fondly remember as a raid. Soldiers swarmed into the room during one of the dances, holding what looked like weird black sticks up at the patrons. Everyone screamed, Chaos took over from there. I remember running that night, running away from it all. Somehow I made it out, through the loud bangs that always seemed to follow at my back. My mother had taken all of the money, and I never saw her again after that. To this day, I don't know if she is alive or dead.

Probably the latter.

I spent that night in the sewers, desperately hiding from the nasty soldiers. I had seen more than one of the 'customers' fall down after one of the 'sticks' exploded as we all ran, and I knew that I didn't want to be near them. I remember wandering the streets for weeks after the raid, steering clear of the block with the ill-fated club on it. My stomach, starved already as it was, craved sustenance. I needed to eat something, anything, or I knew that I would pass out again. And then the men would come, I was sure, and violate me again.

I think it was then that I saw the jewels… Yes, it was definitely then. I was walking along the alleyways and streets, desperately looking for anything to eat… A diet of dumpster foods was as healthy as it tasted, and was probably the source of many a vomit. I just happened to look into a long glass window of one of the shops and saw the prettiest things in the world. They sparkled like the earrings I sometimes saw in the other girls at the club. Some were red, others were blue, green, yellow, white… They had all sorts of patterns and cuts, and they all filled me with desire.

I had to have some. But of course, only the rich girls could afford these works of beauty. I had heard it from my mother all the time, the rich girls this and the rich girls that… It sickened me that the ones who suffered as I had got so little in life.

That was the first time I had started to thieve. I dropped back into the store at night, smashed through one of the windows. There were no alarms back then, no guards… no watchmen… the gems were just mine for the taking. As I held them in my hand, they enchanted me more than anything else. I just knew… I needed more. So I was always on the lookout for more gems, any gems, emerald… diamond… ruby… I wanted them all!

I bought a new dress, a common one… It wasn't anything like those tiny ones the girls at the club wore. I bought regular sandals, bought an all new outfit. It wasn't anything a rich girl would have, but it was all I needed. Of course I kept one of the most beautiful gems to myself… I reminded myself of my target as I rubbed my fingers over its polished shiny surface. It was mine… and all of the others were mine.

I must have robbed more jewelry stores as a child than I could even count, which regrettably wasn't much. Poor, remember? No education. In fact, it was only at that time that I found a book. It was on gemstones, of course… How else would I know to pick it up? It had the prettiest picture on the front. My written vocabulary was nonexistent, but I eventually figured out what the title meant. I read slow, sometimes just sitting down for an hour for a couple of pages trying to figure out what half the words meant… it was tedious, but I learned so much that way.

The library was my next destination, of course. My literary skill grew so much better that the books began to become a breeze. I pored over books on diamonds, gemstones that formed so deep in the earth that they were nigh unbreakable… I always wondered how they could cut them. I learned about pearls, which formed inside small clams in the ocean from tiny grains of sand… Eventually I found books about bats, which I read through as well. It hadn't occurred to me that the wings on my back could be used before then.

I was 16, and could only now take my first flight…

It was a rough landing in the beginning… but I quickly mastered it, and began to fly and climb, and fly and climb… Eventually I couldn't go anywhere without climbing on something or gliding over something. My heists grew increasingly more elaborate as my skill increased. At the age of 17, I could steal the earrings off of a pedestrian and be gone before she knew up from down.

It was that kind of skill that attracted G.U.N.'s attention. They had been watching me, and finally they took action. One minute I was walking down the street, a nice jingling pocket full of tiny gemstones at my side… the next I was on the ground, gemstones all over the filthy street, and my wrists chained together.

The men at the Units were harsh. I wasn't given a trial, I was given an ultimatum; a word of which I had no clue of the meaning until later. I could either join them and work for them, or be thrown into jail for the rest of my life. What would you have done?

It turns out that the term 'work' was setting its sights a bit high for the application in this sense. I was little more than a slave to them. My jewels were confiscated, and I was given no pay for my work. The missions were repetitive, go find this… go steal this… go threaten this person… And every night, they would take me back to headquarters and feed me their disgusting gruel and sleep in their hard beds. At least they weren't red…

Eventually they let me be a free agent. An unpaid free agent, but I could at least leave the HQ for a while. Whenever a mission came in, I would do it, and then I would go back to my life and passion: stealing. After the loss of my jewels, I was determined to rebuild my precious collection. I amassed enough money to buy an apartment, where I kept them all. The suit they gave me allowed me to not have to buy clothing, and I took a liking to the heart shapes everywhere.

I was 18 when I finally found the money to start my own club. I was so excited to make a place where there would be no fear of rape, no pressure at the pole. Just a bar and a dance floor, to call my own. It cost me all of the money I had collected with my jewels, thanks to G.U.N. turning a blind eye to my activities sometimes.

It figures that they would close it down just as she got something good. G.U.N. performed a raid strikingly similar to the one I myself had witnessed. I saw my own patrons scared out of the place that was supposed to be a safe haven. The soldiers burned it down to the ground, and told me to keep my head down after that. I knew then that my life was cursed.

Do you see now? Do you feel like you know me? How do you feel, knowing who you mindlessly moved around through your pointless games? Do you feel shame? Pity? Remorse? Save it. Too little, too late for this world and yours.

Now I shall put an end to my cursed life in this cursed world… Goodbye, all of you fiends! Breathe your last, because today is the day that I take my revenge upon a cold and unforgiving world!

I am… Rouge the Bat…

Who are you?