Chapter 18 – Rising to the Challenge
It didn't take long at all for Sonic to lose Robotnik and his hover-egg-cup-thing—Hover-Egg? Egg car? Walrus boat?—in the maze of tall, blocky structures that comprised his factory-fortress complex. After all, the mad doctor wasn't confined by gravity or the need of clear passages. He could simply fly over them, and avoid all the obstacles woven throughout the complex below.
Obstacles that, Sonic discovered the hard way, were more than just a little dangerous.
Like the trap door that opened under his feet as he ran across the open causeway that led from the looping highways of the Mobian city to the gritty, smoke-choked spires of the human one. Sonic barely jumped clear of the suddenly disappearing floor, glancing back briefly and shuddering at the sight of nothing but deep, deep blackness in the revealed pit. So far down, and no bottom in sight. Yikes. At least the trap door panels were obvious once he knew what to look for, and he was able to dodge around or leap over the several others that dotted the road.
The road itself cleared the open expanse that stood as division between city and fortress, and while both boasted a great deal of metal-and-concrete construction, the difference was still stark. True, the highway city had been built on the bones of the Mobian one, even to the point of Mobian homes being torn down to make way for more cold, inhospitable structures and processing facilities, but the highways had been fun to run on, and parts of the old city still remained, were still lived in. With time and work, the two could very likely be integrated into something better.
But this? The whole factory-fortress mess Sonic now faced? One giant deathtrap. There was nothing welcoming about it, and certainly nothing fun. Chimneys belched caustic brown smoke into the air, reeking of oil and something sour, and here and there spouts shot off bursts of flame that underlit the grimy cloud cover. Sonic thought it might be nearing dawn, but it was difficult to tell through the pollution in the air. It even made the tops of some of the structures hazy. Lights covered everything, but they did little to illuminate the deepest reaches of the alleys, instead flashing an ominous red like the fortress's heartbeat. Antennae and radio transceiver equipment sprouted from high roofs, and everything hummed with activity.
And somewhere in this whole mess, Doctor Robotnik hid and plotted, probably with diabolical mustache-twirling.
"If I was a bad egg," Sonic mused, "where would I nest?"
Nothing stood out as an obvious nerve center, unfortunately. It was all too crowded, built on top of itself like clusters of crystals but much more boring.
Oh well. Second-best way to find the heart of the fortress—since just looking wasn't working—was to run through it until he found something that looked important.
Which is what he planned to do, if he didn't fall into a bottomless pit first.
A trench of sorts appeared ahead, a black stripe against the metallic ground. Probably deep, like the other pits. Maybe spike-lined. Sonic leaped across it via a series of moving platforms connected by conveyor chains that wobbled as he tried to balance on them, and spun just as he jumped clear on the far side. Too close for comfort, like everything in the fortress.
Ledges led to higher ground, and Sonic took them. The further from the pits he could get, the better. And, of course, the platforms slid into the walls just as he touched them, leaving very little room for error as he jumped. Below, terminals sparked to life with electricity, crackling along conduits in the floor. Falling was not an option. He had no desire to spend the rest of his potentially short life as a crispy-fried hedgehog. With his luck, the human would probably eat him.
But he had only one minor slip-up in his climb, sending adrenaline racing through his body, heart hammering in his throat as he clung to the barest lip of metal in the wall until the ledge slid out again. He scrambled to the top, took a moment to catch his breath, and pushed on.
No time to waste.
Alleys tightened as he ran. Wound on themselves, twisted around. Doubled back. Bridges crossed over places he knew he'd been before. Tunnels wove underneath. Grate-paneled walls separated him from walkways he'd already traversed, and ones he'd probably be seeing soon enough. Once he was sure he'd taken a wrong turn and lost ground, because he recognized a cog that had spat him out into a vertical space with spinning platforms, only now the cog's direction had reversed. He took it anyway, and groaned when it sent him downward, into a narrow tunnel that led to extremely cramped quarters and moving blocks of steel and mesh that pumped with the heartbeat of the factory. He had to press himself to the walls, roll quickly to clear the narrowest of spaces before they crushed him, watch his toes and quills when they ground against each other in the tight hallways. Sweat streamed through his quills when he finally dropped through the bottom, and he took several welcome breaths. It was enough to make anyone, even a hedgehog, claustrophobic.
Still he kept moving. Past broken pipes that spurted fire when he drew near, heavy cylinders and gigantic pistons that thumped and pounded in a steady beat, machinery that threatened to crush and cut and electrocute and char-broil the little hedgehog with every step he took.
Too late to turn back. Too far in this to stop.
Static crackled over a speaker embedded in the ceiling, startling him out of his single-minded focus on pushing through. He looked up, immediately made a face when he saw the shiny black eye of a camera lens poking out of the wall.
"You should turn back while you can." Robotnik's voice, gruff, but curious, hissed and popped from the speaker.
"You'd think a mad scientist like you would make a better PA system," Sonic retorted, sticking out his tongue and running onward.
He had to be nearing something useful. More and more he found his way blocked by locked doors too strong for his quills to carve. Found floors dropping out from under him to try to send him downward. Sometimes into the dark abyss, but sometimes into lower passages he'd either already been in, or that he could see were full of hazards the higher routes lacked. More flames, more electric discharges, more crushing pistons. A few times he had to navigate narrow vents. Once he actually fell as several panels in the floor spun under his feet the moment he touched them—they didn't even look like the trap doors, to add insult to injury—leaving him free-falling toward a deep, deep pit and his only salvation, another chain of moving, unstable platforms. He managed to grab them, barely, and shook his fist up at the traitorous ceiling.
It had already closed up.
He had no time to curse it out. The conveyors didn't quite connect one to the next, so he'd have to jump before they wrapped around and truly dropped him into the darkness below. One to the next, hoping he didn't overbalance anything and start them spinning early. Where they led, he didn't know, couldn't quite see in the gloom—what he'd give right now for one of those fire jets just to provide a little extra light—but they went up, and that was enough for now.
The first chain ended. He jumped to the next, steadied himself on the platform, watched as his previous perch spun downward into the dark.
He shivered.
The conveyors clanked upward, indifferent.
End of the line again, another jump to the next. Flashing red warning lights picked out the edges of a ledge up ahead.
It didn't look like the ones that receded into walls, or spun around.
What it looked like was hope.
Okay, bit cheesy, that.
He jumped to the ledge.
Metal groaned. Buckled under his feet.
"I'm not that heavy!" he shouted, running forward as the panels separated and collapsed into the pit behind him. Despite the danger, despite the adrenaline rush to outrun gravity and make a safer landing on more solid ground, a small part of him still managed to note the tiniest, stupidest details. Namely the lack of bolts holding the ledge together.
And then he flung himself onto a sloped floor of metal grates and pipework, hissing steam in places, but blessedly actually bolted together.
He pushed to his feet and grumbled about shoddy workmanship as he pressed on.
Up the slope, then another, and another. Further away from the pit. Further away from yet another near-death scrape.
He didn't even spare a glance for the only robots he'd seen in the entire fortress—why have bots anyway if the place was already full of death traps?—simply dodged the ball-shaped bombs they bounced at him and jumped on their piggy heads to disable them. Hopefully their trapped occupants could find their way out of the facility. He couldn't really take the time to play escort at the moment.
Another speaker hissed with static somewhere above his head. "You don't belong here, rodent."
"Neither do you, egg-brain!" Sonic smashed the last pig-bot and jumped past a flame pipe to find a wider stretch of road ahead of him, and a massive door featuring Robotnik's face. It had to be the heart of the fortress. The nerve center or scrap brain or whatever. Vents to either side looked like they'd be his best bet at breaking in.
"You're just a child," Robotnik's voice crackled. "Turn back now, and I'll let you go with your life."
The ground shuddered. The sound of grinding and clanking echoed through the fortress, centering on a point behind Sonic, and he turned.
Walls moved. Massive rolling doors slid upward or aside. Hazards retreated into walls.
A wide thoroughfare revealed itself, a fairly straight shot out of the fortress and back to the highways over the Mobian city.
It was a lot closer than Sonic expected, for all the running he'd done.
Sonic eyed the nearest camera. "Why?" he asked warily.
"Because I tire of this game and want you out of my hair," came the growled response, and Sonic had to admit the human did sound honestly tired of it all.
At the same time, he couldn't help it. Robotnik had set the joke up too well. "What hair?"
A strange grinding noise squealed over the loudspeaker. Sonic realized it was the human's teeth. "Insolent rodent. Consider this your one chance."
Sonic shrugged and stretched. "Nah, don't think I can just walk away from this."
"Suit yourself."
With an equally loud rumble, the path out closed up again, walls and hazards sliding back into place. Sonic spared one last glance, wondering if he'd made the right choice, before running at the massive, ego-faced door and the vents to either side of it.
—
The interior of the fortress's heart wasn't much better than the exterior.
There was certainly a distinct lack of pits that opened up into bottomless blackness, and for that Sonic was grateful, but now the pits just dropped down onto electrified floors or spurting flame or exposed buzz saws.
Yes, buzz saws.
What they were meant to cut, Sonic wasn't sure. Some hung over conveyor belts that occasionally held chunks of scrap, but others sat out in the open like a massive safety violation, and he really had a bone to pick with the one hallway he had to sprint through because a rogue saw blade came rocketing at him down the middle of the floor. His quills were a bit shorter now on one side no thanks to it.
Where there weren't saws, there were crushing pistons, or swinging spike balls. All hung over conveyor belts that pulled him along like the worst factory. Primary export: destruction. Also injuries. And probably robots, because that at least made some sense. Robots and replacements for all the egg-cup-cars—Egg Floater? Egg-O-Matic? No, that sounded like a kitchen appliance—he'd busted. He could see components mid-assembly on the other side of the mesh walls, but couldn't figure out how to reach them. The whole structure was a maze, and Sonic felt very much like the lab mouse.
It might have been easier if it had just been hallways, but no. Transport tubes led throughout the facility, pulling him from one corridor to another, sometimes through what felt like miles of shafts, spitting him out and closing behind him. He'd make progress upward only to be shot downward again, climb rooms of more receding ledges just to have a transport drop him back near the bottom but on the other side of a metal grate. More than once he found doors that slid aside to let him pass, only to lock tight behind him, and in no time his sense of direction was completely scrambled and turned around. He didn't think he could find his way out now if he tried.
A little voice wondered if he should've taken Robotnik's offer after all.
He found it harder to tell that little voice to shut up.
Just a kid...
The facility felt like an exercise in two steps forward, a whole pitfall back.
And every so often, another speaker would spit out static and Robotnik's voice. Another camera lens would whir as it focused on him.
"Why do you persist?" the human asked as Sonic hopped across a series of platforms that retreated into the walls. The drop below was deep, but he could at least see the bottom...where electricity crackled in bright blue-white arcs. If the fall didn't kill him, the shock at the end would.
"Sightseeing," he retorted, and slipped a bit from distraction. A quick leap brought him to the end, tumbling onto the more solid floor and rolling briefly down-slope onto another conveyor. He pushed aside and out of the way before another buzz saw swooped down and sliced where he'd been moments before.
A few shaved quills floated down to the conveyor belt. Sonic frowned. At this rate he was going to end up as naked as a mole rat.
"You can still leave," Robotnik said, his tone the epitome of reasonable.
"I thought my one chance was earlier."
"I'm feeling magnanimous."
"Ooh, big words. But I think I prefer to overstay my welcome." Sonic ran past the conveyors and out into another open room full of ledges and spinning drums. He stuck to the first drum he bumped into, a force within it pulling on him like a weird, localized gravity. He used it to his advantage to fling himself further upward. "I'm just getting warmed up!"
"Do you really think the people of this island will thank you for it?" Robotnik's laugh broke with the static. "I've seen the footage. How they run away from you."
"They're scared," Sonic said, as much to himself as to the mad doctor.
Robotnik laughed again. "Of course they are. You're different. You don't belong here."
Sonic rolled under a particularly low gout of flame and took off down another corridor. "Maybe if you stopped stuffing everyone in robots, I'd leave."
"Are you really doing them any favors when you break my bots down?"
"It's gotta be better than being cooped up in a tin can!"
"Even in the lava below the ruins?" The response was pointed. "The flooded caves? The hazards of a factory?"
Sonic skidded to a stop as guilt stung. Had he put people in danger by freeing them?
No. Robotnik was trying to twist everything. Make him doubt.
The robots were slavery. Prisons. Not safety.
He growled and dashed forward again.
The floor sloped downward. More of the pig-bots with the bouncing bombs stood in his way. He smashed through them without a second thought and only a moment spared to shout for the Mobians who crawled out to find somewhere safe to hide, and raced down the ramps. The air grew warmer, the hum of the heart of the fortress louder.
Sonic had to be close.
He skidded out of the atrium into another wide hall. At the far end he could see what looked like an open span into a control room of some sort, with screens and flashing consoles and an egg-shaped human.
Sonic raced forward.
Spiked balls dropped on chains from the ceiling. He dodged around them without breaking a sweat.
Picked up speed across the paneled floor.
Robotnik turned to look at him. Raised one eyebrow. Didn't look scared.
Why didn't he look scared?
Something flickered between hedgehog and human. Instinct screamed at Sonic to stop, and without thinking, he dug in his heels, heard the soles of his sneakers squeal against the steel floor, smelled the ozone in the air.
He stopped a hair's breadth from the energy barrier that stood between him and his quarry. Heat radiated off of it, prickled on his skin.
Robotnik sneered at the close call.
"Welcome to my home, rodent."
Sonic glared. "Hedge. Hog."
Robotnik waved off the protest. "You can still leave."
"Not a chance."
One eyebrow quirked over the human's blue spectacles. "And just what is in this for you?"
Sonic tapped one foot impatiently. "Curiosity."
Robotnik snorted. "Curiosity killed the cat."
"Good thing I'm not a cat."
Robotnik regarded him for a long moment, almost enough to make him uncomfortable. Impatience grew. He wished the barrier wasn't there so he could shove a sneaker in the human's smug face.
When the human spoke again, his voice was low, but cut right to the heart of it. "You think you can be a hero."
Sonic bristled slightly, but tried not to let it show.
Robotnik saw it anyway. Chuckled. "This can only end in tears. Giving up yourself for others with nothing in return. You are going to die young and alone."
"Agree to disagree," Sonic retorted. "Take down this barrier and put it to the test?"
"No." Robotnik walked to a console and drummed his fingers along the top edge. "I will make this offer one last time." He tapped a few buttons, and Sonic heard the familiar grinding through the facility again. Passages opening. Hazards sliding out of sight. "You can leave in peace"—he tapped a few more keys—"or you can leave in pieces." He flipped up a panel, uncovering a red button, and waited, finger hovering over it.
"After coming all this way?" Sonic shrugged. "I think I'll take my chances with pieces."
Robotnik's mouth widened in a wicked smirk. "I thought you might say that."
Sonic felt his bravado bleed out of him. "What—"
Robotnik's finger stabbed down onto the button. The room shook as something rumbled beneath Sonic's feet, like demolition charges. He stumbled.
The floor began to collapse.
Sonic tried to scramble free, to find somewhere he could jump to and avoid the pitfall, but the trap ran flush with the walls and the energy barrier. There was nothing to grab onto. Nowhere to go.
Except down.
He hit rocks as he fell, bouncing off of faded crystal formations. The smell of water filled his nose. Robotnik's laughter echoed behind him.
He hit the floor and blacked out.
Oh look! A conversation!
Also, trying to translate Scrap Brain's level design into prose was...interesting.