dreamsforthefandom

[you]Blue Star: A loose Sonic 1, 2, 3S&K adaption[/you]

Disclaimer: Characters you see in the games are (c) SEGA/SonicTeam. All the other characters are mine.

Author’s note: This has aspects of the Fleetway STC comics, is loosely based on the Mega Drive/Genesis games, but is predominantly my views and perceptions. I’m trying to make it acceptable to everyone else, so I hope you like it.

I started this fic a while ago, so bear with any spelling mistakes or overdose of dialogue please ^_^;

I'll be updating this on my FanFiction.net account first, but this page shortly afterwards, so where you read it is up to you

[you]Part 1: Birth of a legend[/you]

A single, blue star shone in the sky, making the fact that the sky was pitch black more obvious. It wasn’t cloudy. It was just that the stars and the moon refused to show this night. Many Mobians saw this as a bad omen, and stayed inside. Superstition said that the blue star was a cause of very bad luck, and if you were caught in its light you’d be bad luck to yourself and everyone around you. Some dismissed it, but very few took the risk of going outside anyway.

Even children due to be born would wait a day for the blue star to go. It was like the superstition had been imprinted into the Mobian genes. But one child didn’t want to wait.

The blue star shone through the hospital window, illuminating the young child as he lay curled up in his mother’s arms. The hedgehog had been born with all his quills already formed, and this had undeniably caused difficulty. The quills were stiff and sharp, and had torn his mother up inside. While he lay in her arms, bathed in the light of the blue star, his mother died.

“I asked her if she was certain she wanted the blinds to let the light through. She wouldn’t back down on it.” a sharp male voice said.

“It’s her choice” a second voice. Slightly deeper, and another male.

“It was her choice. Her child’s bad luck!” the first voice spat

“Oh psshh. It’s just a dumb superstition.” a third voice. Soft in tone, and female.

“What do we do with the kid?” a fourth voice. Warbly and slightly older than the others. Another female.

“We get someone to look after it. Any volunteers?” the third voice asked.

A silence.

“Oh don’t all jump at once. I’ll do it.” the third voice gave an annoyed sigh

“Can we shut the blinds first?” the first voice spoke with a hint of apprehension.

“If you must, you chicken.” the third voice growled.

“Hey!” the second voice protested.

“Sorry George.” the third voice apologised.

The doctor and nurses stood near the door, not willing to go near the light from the star. The nurse who had decided to look after the child walked over to the window, and twisted the blinds to shut the light out. The florescent lights were able to light the room fully now. The blue star’s light had been too strong to be blotted out by the electric lights, and as such the staff didn’t want to go close to it. The doctor was a dobermann, he was the first to have spoken. There was the rooster, who had been named as George, he was one of the nurses. The other nurse standing away from the window and the dead hedgehog on the bed was a pigeon, and the one who had simply dismissed the superstition was a panther.

She reached down and lifted up the baby hedgehog, scooping him carefully into her arms. She glared at the others until the doctor ran over to help sort out the child. He glanced at the dead mother, who seemed completely peaceful, unaware of the pain she must have gone through. He looked at the panther, and frowned.

“Why would you take a cursed child on?”

“He won’t survive otherwise” she frowned “And there is no ‘curse’. It’s just folklore”

“Then how come his mother died already”

“Simple freak accident.”

“Yeah…. Right…”

“What kind of doctor are you? You’d just leave this child to die?”

“Karen…”

“NO. Look, I don’t care about any curse. He needs care and a home and you aren’t offering him ANYTHING.” She growled threateningly at him.

“Karen, I didn’t mean it like that.” The dobermann bent his ears back “I mean… What about Maverick? Would he accept that?”

Karen frowned. Her son was known for not easily accepting change. Well she’d made up her mind. He was going to accept it whether he liked it or not. She clutched the baby hedgehog closer to her and flattened her ears. Her yellow eyes focused on the Doberman’s brown ones.

“He’ll accept it. This is my child now.”

“He’s not even a cat species!”

“Doesn’t matter. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll take my leave.”

“Karen!”

“Oh I quit. I can’t work with a bunch of superstitious fools like you” she turned to go. The pigeon and the rooster stood aside. “Good bye.”

She stormed out the door, snatching up a blanket to wrap the tiny ball of spikes in. She held him closer to her chest as she walked out of the hospital, grabbing her coat. No one tried to stop her. No one wanted to risk having to go out in the light of the blue star. If the panther wanted to, that was her problem.

A cold wind was blowing sharply as she stepped out into the eerily lit night. She pulled her coat on and tucked her new wards inside it, clutching him like he was the most precious thing she could own. She ran down the road, heading into the rural area of the Green Hill Zone. She didn’t have any vehicle to travel in but she preferred to run anyway. A faint boom echoed, and the quivering ball of spikes in her arms twisted his head to listen to it. A small smile was visible, and Karen smiled back at him. She looked up to see a streamed cloud from a sonic jet. The pilot must’ve been as dismissive of the ‘curse’ as her. It was the only aircraft she’d seen that day. The little hedgehog’s interest in the sound it made gave her and idea for his name.

“I think you can be called Sonic.”

A small sigh from the child as he rolled up again, and she smiled softly. He may have made an ugly cub, but she couldn’t help but feel for him. Maybe they got their superstition backwards. She felt lucky to have him. He was lucky that she was in there. Anyone else would have left him to die, despite their ‘doctors’ oath’. Stupid superstitions. Some believed that the heavens were warring when the blue star showed. And maybe they were. But she didn’t care about that. What the heavens did was their concern, not hers.

She reached her house, and opened the door. It was a modest cottage on the very edge of the Zone, and had a small flower garden in front of it. She walked indoors and had to step aside again to avoid a tackle by her five year old cub. Maverick raised his arms, demanding a hug, and she sighed. An old owl hobbled out of the lounge and glanced at the bulge in Karen’s jacket.

“Well he’s been as good as he normally is..”

“What did he do this time?” Karen sighed, glancing at her cub, who flattened his ears and hid behind the babysitter.

“Smashed a vase, threw his train out the window, and complained about you always working nights…”

“Well the last isn’t a problem. I quit today” She held the bulge in her jacket protectively as it squeaked

“Oh?” the owl tilted her head “May I ask what you’ve brought home with you?”

“Sonic…” Karen slid her jacket back to pass her the bundle of blankets and spikes.

“This…. He’s newborn? Since when did baby hedgehogs have their quills already?” she tilted her head at the youngster, who fidgeted and unrolled a bit, allowing them a tiny view of his face.

“They usually don’t. But those quills of his killed his mother. He needed someone to look after him. His dad died a month or so ago. That’s what his mother said when she came in.” Karen sook her head “Only child born tonight. The others saw him as cursed and wouldn’t go near him.”

“I don’t blame them. I don’t trust the blue star myself” she ruffled her feathers.

“I know. You can stay here overnight anyway.” Karen took her new child from the babysitter.

“Mummy? Wha’s curst?” Maverick peered at her from behind the owl “Wha’s hetchock?”

“Don’t worry Mavvy, they’re nothing” Karen sighed, then smiled “This is your new little brother, Sonic”

“Yay brother!” Maverick bounced out from behind the babysitter, forgetting he was in trouble “Can I hol’ him?”

“Hahahahah, no sweety. He’s new and fragile”. ‘not to mention covered in some wicked points’ she thought. “Maybe when he’s older, okay?”

“Umm….. Okay!”

“How long are you going to look after him?” the owl hooted

“As long as he needs me”

“Okay”

The owl hobbled back into the lounge again, and pulled the sofa-bed out, sorting it out for her overnight stay. Karen may not have cared about the curse, but old Lucy certainly did. She really appreciated that Karen was letting her stay overnight. While she was busy with that the panther looked at Maverick. The cub was bouncing around excitedly, trying to get a better look at his new little brother.

“Oh Mavvy, aren’t you supposed to be in bed?”

“Noooooo…..”

“Maverick…”

The cub squeaked and ran up the stairs, giggling. Karen smiled. That had gone better than she could have hoped. She held Sonic close again as he curled up, sleeping, and walked up the stairs. She didn’t doubt that it was going to be hard looking after Sonic for a while, but she’d get used to it.

~TBC~

[you]Part 2: Childhood troubles[/you]

“NyaaNyaa! Can’t catch me!”

“Yeah I can!”

The little girl panther ran around the field, chasing her big brother. They laughed and she tackled his heels, bringing him down. He tumbled over onto his back, and got his quills stuck in the ground. His sister flopped over his stomach and laughed at him as he pouted.

“Hey! Not fair!”

“Yeah it is!”

“No it’s not!”

“Is!” his sister got off and helped pull him up to his feet.

“Ah you cheated Tabby!”

“Did not!”

“did too!” Sonic pouted “Pinning me down is cheating!”

“Is not! You shouldn’ be so spiky!”

“The groun’ shouldn’ wan’ to EAT ME!”

“Hey Sonic! Hey Tabitha!”

“Eeee! Tiffany!”

Tabitha ran over to the fawn and pounced, trying to get her to join in their game of tag. Tiffany squeaked and scrabbled away, to get pounced at by Sonic instead. Tabby pounced too, and the three youngsters tumbled around, laughing. Sonic jumped away, shaking his short, brown spikes out in all directions to get the dirt out of them. Tabby noticed he’d moved, and seeing that he was now grooming instead, she stalked through the long grass nearby on all fours. Her tail waved in the air, giving her position away, and Sonic’s brown eyes followed her through the grass. He tugged at his spikes, pretending to groom again, and waited for her to pounce.

She jumped from the side, so he ducked and she went straight over his head, tumbling head over heels and ruffling her short black fur. Her tail tangled round her legs and she looked rather puzzled when she eventually stopped. Her brother had been right in her sights and then he wasn’t. Sonic ran up to her, followed by Tiffany, and giggled.

“Now I’m the winner!”

“You cheat!”

“Didn’t!”

“Did!”

“Didn’t!”

“Did!”

“I have candy! Do you want some?”

“YAY!”

Immediately forgetting the argument, Sonic and Tabby scrambled to their feet and each grabbed a piece of the bar that Tiffany was holding out to them. The fawn smiled and munched on her own piece, sitting down on the grass. Sonic sat down too, but Tabitha darted around the nearby area, singing something to no particular tune about the chocolate.

Sonic was now five, and had no clue that he wasn’t a panther. Sure he as a different colour, he was spiky, he didn’t have claws or a long tail, but he could run, jump, pounce, swim and climb like a panther. He could make sounds like the panthers. He could do anything his family could do. So he had no reason to suspect that he was anything different. His big brother didn’t seem to like him much, but other than that, everything he’d been told was that he was a panther. The first two years of his life had been filled with illness, disease, broken bones… you name it he’d had it. But he’d recovered from everything, and was currently a perfectly healthy hedgehog.

Tabitha was a year younger than him, and saw him as her older brother, and definitely a panther. For that matter, she saw anyone with spikes as such, often mistaking porcupines and hedgehogs for members of her own species. Though Karen had tried to explain to her, the cub wouldn’t change her opinion. At least it meant that Tabby would always accept Sonic as her brother. Unlike Maverick.

Tiffany was the family’s next-door neighbour. A seven year old deer, Tiffany didn’t see anything wrong with Sonic being a panther, though she knew he was technically a hedgehog. In her opinion, everyone was the same. She was a very idealistic fawn, and very friendly. Plus she always had some tasty chocolate bars when she came to play.

Sonic finished his piece of chocolate and flopped onto his belly, pretending to be a rock. Well, a very spiky rock. But he didn’t know what a cactus was so he stuck with the rock description. Something glinted in the longer grass nearby, and he crawled over to it. Pouncing, he saw it was a gold ring. As his hands closed around it, it vanished in a glitter of sparks and he landed on his face. Sitting up, he brushed the dirt from his eyes and looked around for it. It wasn’t there. He pouted. Why did anything shiny vanish when he tried to catch it?

Tiffany laughed as she watched Sonic change his mind and take to hiding in the long grass instead. Her friend got bored so easily when something didn’t go according to his plan. She pulled a paddle ball out of her bag, then started playing. This attracted Tabby’s attention, and the panther sat down nearby, padding at the ball whenever it came near her.

“Tiffy? Where’s Sonic?”

“I dunno”

“I’m hiding from my cheaty sister!” Sonic called from somewhere in the grass.

“You not hiding if I can hear you!”

“I am if you can’ see me!”

“I can see you!”

“Liar!”

“Am not!”

“Am too!”

“Am not!”

“Am too!”

“Am NOT!”

“Am TOO!”

“AM NOT!” Tabby pounced into the grass in the hopes she’d catch Sonic, but found herself clutching air.

“Am tooooo!” Ya missed me!” Sonic was several feet away, having darted across on all fours while his sister was in mid jump.

“You was here!”

“No, I was over here” he dodged as she pounced at him again “Wrong over here!”

“Stop moving!”

“I’m not!”

This little game of hide and seek-come-tag continued for a while, temporarily stopping so that they could say goodbye to Tiffany when her dad came to get her, before resuming their game in full force. Sonic occasionally ran up to tag Tabby, before vanishing in the grass again.

“Ah stop hiding!”

“I’m n-” a rustle, squeak, and a crash.

“Sonic, where you go?” Tabby stood up, only just able to see over the grass.

Seeing a small pushbike and its rider a bit further along, out on the shorter grass, she squeaked and bounced over to it. In her occasional jump above the grass she saw more bikes and people around. But she was bouncing towards this one, because she knew him.

“Maaaaavvvvvvyyyy!”

“Hullo Tabs” Maverick grinned at his sister.

“MavvyMavvyMavvy! Tell Sonic to stop playing hidey games! He’s gone quiet and I can’t find him” she blinked as someone nearby yelled and swore.

“I’M NO’ HIDING!”

“Hello Sonic! Heeyyyyyy… Why’re you playing swingy?” Tabby pouted at Sonic’s new ‘friends’.

“I’m no’ playing swingy either!” Sonic kicked furiously at the air below him. “Pu’ me down!”

“Augh, the BRAT BIT ME!”

“Shall we put the baby down?”

“I’m NOT A BABY!” Sonic growled.

The two teenagers holding Sonic in the air by his wrists were a leopard and a monitor lizard. The leopard was sucking at the paw he’d tried covering Sonic’s mouth with, and his ears were bent right back. The lizards was larger and probably older, and had Sonic’s arm in a strong, single handed grip. He was restraining himself from laughing at his friend’s now very sore paw, and was being careful to keep their spiky prisoner at arm’s length. Tabitha started to run over to try and play too, but Maverick grabbed her tail.

“Heyyy! I wanna play too!”

“Not with those two you don’t”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll beat you up! They’re bullies Tabs”

“… Why’s Sonic playing with them then?”

“I don’t think he meant to” Maverick neglected to add the fact that he’d pointed out where Sonic was to them.

“Then he should be pu’ down!” the cub turned to the older creatures and yelled “Pu’ my big brother down!”

“Your big brother?” the leopard laughed “Hahahahah! The kid’s got a great sense of humour!”

“Hey kitty, this ain’t no panther”

“It too!”

“I am a panther!” Sonic gave a little meow-growl-roar mixture to prove it.

“Hahhahahahahahah! He’s good at that” the lizard prodded Sonic’s nose “but I’ve heard better”

“I jus’ gots a sore throat is all!”

“Yes. Of course. We believe you.” the leopard rolled his eyes, then pulled sharply on Sonic’s arm “Let’s get him back for biting me!”

“I wonder how far the kid can stretch…” the lizard licked his lips, and tightened his grip on his arm.

Sonic yelled at this, and the lizard held the wrist tighter. The leopard was repeatedly yanking on the hedgehog’s arm, in an effort to pull to off, and Tabitha was chewing on Maverick’s ankle, trying to get him to let go of her tail so she could help. Maverick simply said that she was too small to help, and, when asked why he didn’t help either, pointed out that the same was true for him. He was smaller than them. Besides, if he tried, they wouldn’t be his friends any more.

A loud wail from Sonic only made the teenagers try harder, and laugh at his feet scrabbling madly in the air to try and find something to either kick at or run away on. The lizard felt a crunch under his grip, and, startled, let go. The leopard was pulling at that moment, and so fell backwards, ending up with Sonic’s quills in his stomach. He gave a yowl of pain and threw the hedgehog off of him. Sonic instinctively curled up, and rolled into the lizard’s leg. It wasn’t deliberate; merely caused by the momentum he’d gained from the leopard’s throw; but it still earned him a hard kick in the stomach when he’d unrolled enough.

“How dare you attack us you little weirdo!”

“Yeah! You should show some respect!”

Sonic simply whimpered, which got him another kick.

“Leave him alone!”

“Shut it kid” the leopard glared over at Tabby, who’s fur was standing on end, before stamping on Sonic’s hand.

“Why are you being so mean!”

“It’s fun!”

“It’s stupid!” Tabby was pulling against her brother’s grip “Why don’t ya do something Mavvy?”

“They’re too big! I can’t fight them!”

“But they’re beatin’ up Sonic!”

“Yeah ‘Mavvy’, come do something about it!”

“Oh no, we better not angry him, an annoyed cub’s sooooo dangerous”

“Hey…! That’s not nice!” Maverick flattened his ears. His friends were being mean to him? That wasn’t fair.

“LEAVE THE CUBS ALONE”

“Uh oh…” the lizard stepped back, tapping the leopard’s arm as he continued to kick Sonic.

“Huh? Oh…” the leopard stopped kicking and started running, closely followed by the lizard.

The fleeing bullies decided it best not to look back, and rapidly left the field to take refuge in their houses nearby. A large panther walked up to Maverick and Tiffany, then frowned. He looked around for Sonic, then went to gather him up. The little hedgehog was shaking and had his eyes tightly shut, so he hadn’t seen who’d picked him up. All he was thinking was ‘please don’t hit me again’.

“Dad Dad Dad! Those mean big boys were beating Sonic up an’ Mavvy wouldn’ let me ‘elp him!”

“And why didn’t YOU try Maverick?”

“… Sorry”

“You better be. COME ON. We’re going home”

Tabitha ran up to her dad’s heels, bouncing along next to him, while Maverick loitered by his bike sulkily. After a stern command from his father he got on it and rode past, ignoring another shout as he headed home. His father sighed in irritation, and gently tapped Sonic’s ear.

“Sonic, are you alright?”

“Don’t hit me!”

“Sonic, it’s me.”

“Huh?” he half opened an eye “DAD!” he twisted around to hug him, and yelped, curling up again “Owieeee…”

“Did they hurt you?”

“Nononono, I’m okay!” he shook his head

“Sonic! You shouldn’t have played with them big boys”

“I wasn’ playin’!”

“Come on boy, tell me the truth. Those boys hurt you didn’t they?”

“… promise not to tell anyone?”

“Of course”

Sonic nodded, and his father sighed in annoyance. Why children picked on anything smaller than them was beyond him. Their parents obviously hadn’t taught them any manners. Well he’d speak to them later. Right now he was taking Sonic back home, to help him. He’d not been happy when Karen had brought the child home on the blue star night. And he had been even less happy when she told him that he was going to be raised as a panther. But as much as he didn’t want to raise a cursed child, he wouldn’t wish him any harm. But those children had ruined his promise and now he was mad.

“How badly did they hurt you Sonic?”

“They grabbed my arm an’ tried pull it off an’ my wris’ went crack an’ they drop me an’ then threw me an’ then kick me.” he frowned thoughtfully “Lots.”

His father frowned again. This kid was getting to be a real pain to take care of. And Karen was going to be so angry when she found out what had happened. ‘This kid’s really not having the best of luck is he?’ he thought to himself.

-----------------------------

Sonic healed rather quickly soon afterwards, and developed a love for running. This came accompanied with more injuries, obtained from tripping, crashing, skidding, falling off ledges and bridges… he seemed determined to get any speed related injury he could get. He ran pretty fast, but he wanted to go faster. Knowing he probably never could though, he made do with being the fastest in the Green Hill Zone. He liked to race Maverick on his bike, and though his brother didn’t much like plying with him, he was still determined to show the hedgehog some humility. Five year old hedgehogs didn’t know the meaning of the word. And Sonic was getting faster every day.

As he grew, his love for running did too. It was only just behind his love for swimming, so he combined the two from his tenth birthday onwards, learning to run and jump off the bridges, diving into the river that ran through the Zone, and see how far he could swim upstream. One day the family decided to go to the Emerald Coast for a day trip. They caught the boat from South Island to the smaller of the two main islands, and disembarked at the port in Station Square. Sonic ran over to the edge of the pier, looking longingly at the water. Tabitha copied him, laughing, and Maverick sulked. He hated the beach. And he said so. Loudly.

“You hate everything!” Tabby waved at a nearby dalmatian.

“Do not”

“You do!”

“Oh stuff you.” Maverick walked off to the beach.

“Oh Lucifer, can you go with him please? You know what sort of trouble he’ll get into.” Karen sighed at her husband.

“Eh. Okay.”

Lucifer walked after his son, his tail twitching irritably. Sonic ran in circles around Tabitha and Karen, eagerly asking in hurried sentences if they were gonna go to the beach too. Tabby demanded an ice cream first, so Sonic stopped asking long enough to want one too. Karen supplied them, and, after Sonic had wolfed his down and stood tapping his foot while they finished theirs, conceded to go to the beach too.

Sonic ran out onto the sand, and looked over to the series of islands, bridges and piers. But then ignored them and grinned at a large whale nearby. He dived in the water and swam over to it, then around it. Five sharks of various species swam up to him and laughed.

“Oh isn’t that cute, he wants to make friends” A black-fin shark

“Shall we introduce them?” A great white.

“Hi!” Sonic waved at them and grinned “Are you friends with the whale here?”

“Oh yes, we’re good friends with him.” A tiger shark.

“Wanna talk to him?” A hammerhead.

“Uh huh. But he won’t come all the way up to say hi”

“Well take a deep breath and go down to smile at him” A white-fin shark.

“You sure? What if he doesn’t like me?”

“Oh he likes everyone” the tiger shark grinned toothily.

“Okay”

Sonic dived down, followed by the sharks. Two of them loitered next to him, while the other three swam round behind the whale. One of the sharks next to Sonic nudged him with a finned arm, and Sonic waved at the whale, smiling sweetly. It gave a short whistle, and he grinned. ‘I think it likes me’. He started swimming back to the surface, because he was getting short of breath, and the sharks grabbed his ankles, keeping him under. They dragged him over the top of the whale backwards, meaning his quills scratched into its skin. The other three sharks simultaneously swam into the whale, kicking and punching at it, insulting it in clicks and screeches. The whale sang out and swam off, but the sharks kept a grip on Sonic. The hedgehog tried punching at them, but couldn’t get enough momentum behind it in the water. The sharks were younger than him, but were bigger. Hedgehogs weren’t very tall compared to nearly every other species on the planet. And Sonic was slightly short for his age. Which made for more target practice.

He clawed at the water, trying to pull himself upwards, to the surface that wasn’t that far away, but he couldn’t. The other sharks joined in with keeping him under the water, and, unlike the leopard and the lizard he suddenly remembered from earlier in his life, these guys were trying to kill him. He tried shoving them away, but starting to panic, bubbles of precious air escaping him as he tried to escape. They pulled him down further, then swam off in a rush, leaving him to try get to the surface again. He was breathing water now, and he was growing weaker…

Tabby looked over the surface of the ocean, trying to see where Sonic had gone. She had been very careful to keep an eye on her brother since the bullying incident, and seeing the whale swim over the surface but no Sonic swimming back to shore, she got to her feet and tugged at Karen’s arm.

“Mummy, I can’t see Sonic…”

“I’m sure he’s alright dear”

“But he only went out to see the whale and he hasn’t come back. I can’t see him on the surface.”

“Hmm…” Karen sat up. She knew that although Sonic liked swimming, he didn’t say underwater for long. “Wait here Tabby, I’ll go look for him.”

“Okay…. He was over that way” Tabitha pointed out past the wooden bridges

“Be back in a moment dear.”

Karen ran off, and Tabitha sat on the sun chair her mum had just vacated. She sighed, trying to keep an eye on her mum and one on the beach at the same time. She noticed another ‘panther’ and waved at her. The red eyed hedgehog she’d waved at blinked in confusion. She didn’t know this cat. She wasn’t going to talk to her. Instead she ignored her and resumed attacking an abandoned sandcastle with a small wooden sword. Tabitha pounced at a seashell next to the girl and grinned.

“Hi!”

“Dunno you. Go away”

“Why? I just wanna ask if you’ve seen my brother”

The girl pointed at Maverick, who was sulking as far away from the water as he could.

“No, not Mavvy. I mean Sonic. He looks like you” she smiled

“Your brother’s a hedgehog?” the eight year old raised an eyebrow

“No, he’s a panther. He just looks like you”

“I’m not a panther. And if he looks like me neither is he.”

“Oh… well have you seen him anyway?”

“No. I saw a hedgehog go out to the whale but I haven’t seen him since” she had a mature way of talking.

“Ohh….”

“Can you leave me alone now?”

“Umm… Okay.”

She looked around, and saw her mum on a floating platform, with Sonic pressed tightly in her arms. Tabitha swam over to her, climbing on the platform. She tapped Sonic on the shoulder, and he cried.

“I don’t wanna go back in there!”

“Don’t worry honey, we’ll go back over the bridges”

“You never said it could hurt me!” he was soaking wet and shivering

“I did, but you loved it too much to listen”

“I wanna go home!”

“Are you sure honey?”

“I wanna go hooooooooommmmmeeee!” he wailed.

“Okay dear.”

They walked back along the bridges, heading back to the port. Sonic wailed, whining at the boat and demanding reassurance that it wouldn’t sink. Maverick grumbled and walked onboard, followed by Lucifer and Tabitha. Sonic held Karen’s hand tightly as they went back on board. The little girl hedgehog was on the boat too, with her parents nearby. She was watching them carefully, and it was freaking Sonic out more. He spent the boat ride with his eyes shut, not wanting to look at the water or the strange girl. When they were back on South Island, he ran straight for home, waiting for his mum at the door. He seemed much more cheerful with land under his feet, and was now acting like nothing had happened.

But he never went into the rivers again.

~TBC~

[you]Part 3: True Blue[/you]

“Can I have your watch dad?”

Sonic looked up at Lucifer from the other side of the coffee table, pulling the sweetest expression he could manage. Lucifer raised an eyebrow at him, and lowered his newspaper. It was a couple of mother after the incident at Emerald Coast.

“Why would you want my watch?”

“Because…”

“You wouldn’t want to pull it apart by any chance, would you?” Lucifer asked, knowingly.

“Nooooo….” Sonic shuffled from foot to foot.

“You can have the old one. This one’s mine”

“Eee, thanks! Uh… the old one’s the ticking type, right?”

“Yes…”

“Yay!”

Lucifer put the newspaper down and dug in a chest of drawers next to the armchair. Sonic caught the watch as the panther threw it to him, and grinned, before darting off and up the stairs to his room with it. Lucifer sighed as he picked his paper up again. Sonic had taken a liking to the way things worked, so he had a habit of dismantling mechanical objects whenever he got his hands on them. Hence Lucifer’s decision not to let him have his new watch. Maverick ran into the room, his tail waving.

“Dad, where’s mum?”

“Shopping.” Lucifer shrugged. It was the weekend. Karen always went shopping. “And before you ask, yes, Tabby’s with her.”

“Ohhh… Can you help me with my homework then?”

“Oh fine…” Lucifer folded up the newspaper “Not like I’m allowed to read… So, what’s the problem?”

-+-+-+-+-

A few hours later, dull, heavy thuds were heard coming down the stairs, and both panthers raised their heads. Clanking and clicking noises were audible, as well as the hum of a motor, and a large metallic insect rolled into the room, stopping in the doorway and startling them. They looked it over as they backed away, and noticed that it seemed to be a ladybird shape, with large fore claws, a huge black tyre in place of legs, and a dull metal shell and head. Solid black lenses for eyes watching them caused them to yell, and Sonic ran into the room, leaping up to sit on top of it.

“Sonic! What the heck is that thing?!”

“This? I call it Motobug. It isn’t finished yet, it got out of my room before I could paint it and add a few bits.” The hedgehog grinned, holding up some antennae. “I can’t get it back up the stairs.”

“Where… did it come… from?!” Lucifer got to his feet and Maverick hid behind him.

“Uhh… I built it?” Sonic pulled a screwdriver from behind his ear and proceeded to attach the antennae.

“You built that?!” Lucifer’s jaw dropped “When?!”

“I started it secretly just before we went to the beach, and I’ve nearly finished it.” Sonic shrugged as he worked “I borrowed the toaster.”

“Is it remote controlled?” Maverick peered around Lucifer, and gaped when Sonic shook his head “It’s got an AI?”

“Yup.”

“When did you learn to build robots?!” Lucifer was watching the Motobug’s fore claws.

“Don’t know. Just figured it out a while back. Was tweaking a friend’s watch and figured it out then.” He tapped his head “Things just went whoosh in my mind… I can think so fast…” he trailed off, shrugging again.

“Can you help me with my homework then?”

“Maverick…” Lucifer frowned at him.

“I know I know. I should be trying to do it myself.” Maverick laughed “I was kidding… So you’re not totally useless Sonic”

Sonic cast an annoyed glance at Maverick, and the Motobug turned using its claws to face the cub directly. Sonic tapped its head and it lowered the claws.

“No, no attacking Mavvy. He was just making a statement.” Sonic leaned down over its side to reach a panel, and it beeped in response.

“Voice recognising too?” Lucifer blinked,

“Uh huh. And face. It’s not a stupid bug.”

“Where on Mobius did you get all the materials to make this?!”

“Here and there. I said I borrowed the toaster. And your watch. Mainly I tweaked around with other stuff to get the sensors and stuff. As for the shell, I went to a friend who knows someone who owns a scrap yard. They gave me all I needed. And the tools they gave me too.” He opened to panel and tugged and rearranged some of the wires in the mass of cables and circuit boards. “And I got it all up to my room through the window.”

“Wow…”

“Think you can help me paint it later dad?”

“… Sure… I’ve got to help Maverick with his homework first.”

“That’s alright. Hey, can I borrow the shed to store Motobug in? Since it won’t get back to my room?”

“Um… okay. But don’t’ leave it on in there, I don’t want it to break things by trying to get out.”

“Uh huh. I’ll turn it off when I get there. It’s hard to push when its wheel’s locked up.”

Sonic shut the panel and tugged the antennae, turning the robot around, before jumping off and heading out to the back door to open it. The Motobug followed him like a pet terra dog, and Lucifer and Maverick blinked as they left. They’d had no idea what Sonic could do, but this had been completely outside of their expectations. Lucifer shook himself back to his senses, and turned to face Maverick,

“Let’s get on with that homework, shall we?”

-+-+-+-+-

The next week, Sonic had jumped on top of the Motobug after an argument with Maverick. His brother had wanted to take the Motobug as his own, as a toy, but Sonic had refused to give it to him and called him as many nasty names as he could think of. Before anyone could say anything, he’d steered the robot out of the house and into the storm, faced north, and had sped off to the old stone bridge at the border of the zone.

He slid off the back of the bright red and blue robot, and stood on the bridge, looking up at the dark clouds above. The rain fell around him, and splashed on his face, running into his eyes. He flattened his ears, realising he’d been really annoyed if he’d run out into the rain. He still hated water. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes, then walked back to the Motobug. The rain was heavy, and puddles were forming in the worn brickwork of the bridge. The shoelaces of his muddy purple trainers dragged in the puddles, and his gloves kept sliding down his hands, revealing the dark brown swirls around his wrists, the dark brown crescent moon shapes on the sides of his hands, and the bright blue stars on the backs and palms. He tugged the gloves back up again, and ran a hand over the shell of the robot.

“Why do I get so angry…?”

He gave a startled yelp as a puddle was splashed up his side, and turned to see who had soaked him even more. An orangey yellow blur vanished across the bridge and into the rain, with faint spirals visible in the falling water and the sound of a soft helicopter rotor. He bristled, his spikes sticking up on end, and he jumped back onto the Motobug.

“I bet that was one of Mavvy’s friends! I’ll get them for splashing me!”

The Motobug beeped and revved, then sped after the blur. Sonic leant down so that he was lying against the back of the robot to minimise wind resistance, but he had the feeling that whoever it was was already long gone. He remembered someone mentioning something about the Emerald Hill Zone being in this direction, so he shrugged and headed towards it. He briefly debated about going back home, but a glint of gold ahead caught his attention again. He stood up on the back of the robot, almost slipping and falling off, and reached up to the gold ring that floated above his head height. He glimpsed the rest of a short line of them as his fingers closed around the first one, and suddenly a rush of energy burst through him, resulting in him finding himself running ahead of the Motobug, and gaining distance. He gradually lost speed again, but noticed another ring trail. Wanting to taste that energy again, wanting to feel that burst of pure speed, he altered his position slightly and grabbed the first in the row, shooting through the remainder in a split second, and increasing his distance from his robot even more.

This pattern continued for a while, until the rings ran out and a large village appeared in the thick rain. But Sonic was going too fast. He stopped moving his feet, but because of his momentum and the slippery road surface he skidded straight into the village. He crashed into someone with a yelp and a thud, and they tumbled over until they hit one of the cylindrical, tree-like houses. Sonic looked down at who he’d squashed, and yelped and jumped to his feet at seeing flickering and burning red eyes glaring at him. The young girl hedgehog stood up and brushed herself down. Her high collared jumper and skirt combo was a bit odd to see in the rain, especially with the fact that she was wearing sandals and seemed to have been out in it for a while, with her spikes slicked down. She frowned and picked up a large sword from the ground nearby, holding it so that it dragged on the ground behind her.

“Oh arg! Sorry! I didn’t mean to crash into you, I couldn’t stop.”

“Hmph.”

“Are you okay?”

“No worse than I ever am.” She glanced him over “Hey, have I seen you before?”

“I think you were at Emerald Coast.”

“Oh yeah. You were that kid who drowned. The hedgehog who thinks he’s a panther.” She rolled her eyes.

“But I am a panther…” Sonic flicked an ear and shrugged. “You a panther too?”

“No. I’m a hedgehog. Hedgehogs are spiky. You look like me, right?” she raised an eyebrow as Sonic nodded “Yeah, well that’s because you’re a hedgehog too.”

“But mum’s a panther. And dad’s a panther. And my brother and sister are panthers. So that makes me a panther.” He folded his arms indignantly.

“Ever considered that you were adopted?”

“Uhh… no?”

“Well that was probably the case. Ask your panther mum about it if you don’t believe me. She’ll tell you.” She turned to walk off.

“Hey, wait! Uh, my name’s Sonic. What’s yours?” he grabbed her shoulder, and she turned around, shrugging his hand off.

“My name is Pewter Slipstream.”

“How old are you? I’m ten. Hey, wanna be friends?”

“What? But you only just met me!” she blinked at him “And I don’t have any friends. I don’t need them.”

“Think you don’t need them and that’s more reason to have them. So there, we’re friends now.” He grinned, and she gave a small smile.

“… Okay, thank you Sonic.”

“So this is a nice village. What you doing out in the rain? Where’s everyone else?” Sonic looked around.

“Everyone else is indoors. I was feeling the rain.” She shrugged “This is the Emerald Hill Village.”

“So I made it to Emerald Hill already? … Hey, have you seen an orange blur thing? It splashed me and I was chasing it.” Sonic turned his attention back to her, and she frowned thoughtfully.

“Orange blur? No, sorry. Hey, where you from?”

“I’m from Green Hill.” Sonic grinned, then looked around. “Oops, left Motobug behind.”

“Motobug?” Pewter tilted her head.

“Ah, it’s a robot I built.”

“You mean from a kit?”

“No, I built it.” Sonic flicked an ear, hearing the chugging of the motor “And it’s coming. Hey, Mo-to-bug!”

Pewter yelped and hid behind Sonic as the robot trundled up to them, making barely audible clicks and beeps. Sonic petted it, and jumped up onto its back. He grinned at the younger and smaller hedgehog, who blinked.

“Wow, nice robot…”

“Heheh, yeah. I’, working on another one too. One that fliiiiiiiieeeessssss!” he laughed.

“Cool! Heh, hey, come back to visit again when it’s sunny, okay? Emerald Hill’s really pretty in the sun.”

“Okay, I will. I should get home now anyway.”

“Uh huh. Bye Sonic! … Thanks for talking to me… No one else does.”

“No problem. Not many people talk to me either” he grinned “See ya!”

He turned the Motobug around and waved, speeding off back to Green Hill. He felt a lot better now, he figured that he should apologise to Maverick when he got back in. And ask his mother about this hedgehog thing his new friend had mentioned.

-+-+-+-+-

“You’re a hedgehog, yeah.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I have been meaning to, but I never found the time”

Sonic sat on top of the coffee table, in front of Karen as she sat in her armchair. He’d dried out from the outing in the rain, and was now fidgeting. Karen sighed, and shook her head.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you by not telling you. You just made such a good panther, I didn’t see the harm in leaving you to believe that you were for a little longer.”

“Oh…” Sonic pulled his gloves off, glancing over the markings on his hands before looking at his nails, which were sharpened to points to mimic claws “I guess it’s okay. I know I’m a hedgehog now, but it doesn’t mean I have to be like one right? I can still be a panther when I want okay?”

“Hahaha, of course.”

“I can stay being a panther here, and you can still be my mum, right?” he pulled his gloves back on and looked at her, and she nodded, smiling.

“Of course you can, you’re my little Sonic cub and that won’t change.”

Sonic laughed and pounced at her, hugging her happily. She hugged him back, carefully putting her arms around his spikes. Tabitha skipped past the room, then peered in. Sonic turned his head to grin at her.

“Hi Tabby!”

“You back now Sonic? Have fun out in the rain?”

“Yeah, I went to a whole other Zone, and found out something I can use those rings for, and made a friend. Hey, where’d Mavvy go?” Sonic tilted his head, only just realising that he hadn’t seen Maverick since returning.

“Uh, he went to his friend’s. Said somethin’ about you bein’ selfish an’ not lettin’ him play with you robot” Tabitha shrugged.

“Oh…” Sonic flattened his ears.

Karen put a hand on top of his head and ruffled his spikes “Why don’ you tell us about your trip Sonic?”

“Ooo yay! Tell us! Where’d ya go? Was it raining there too? Did you have fun?” Tabby darted into the room and jumped onto the sofa, waiting for Sonic to tell the story.

“Okay, I’ll tell ya.”

Sonic climbed off Karen’s lap and sat next to his sister, grinning, then started recalling the trip, recapping everything he’d done and seen. When his story was finished, Tabby clapped and looked at Karen.

“Can you take us to Emerald Hill sometime? I wanna see!”

“If you’re both good at school we’ll visit it now and again, deal?”

“Um… okay!” the children cheered in unison.

“Go off and play in your rooms. No more storm games or you’ll catch cold.”

“Okay mum. Hey Tabs, wanna come see my new project?” Sonic started out of the lounge and up to his bedroom.

“Okay Sonic the Hedgehog!” Tabitha giggled and followed him as he smiled.

“’Sonic the Hedgehog’… Nice sound to that.”

-+-+-+-+-

Over the next nearly two years they visited different Zones on the island, but the Emerald Hill was a regular destination. Sonic introduced them to Pewter, who didn’t seem too bothered by the large cats, and in turn introduced them to her own family. Sonic took a particular liking to her brother, who looked a lot like himself, right down to the brown eyes. They grew to know the village almost as well as their own Zone, and the villagers became good friends with the family. Sometimes Sonic had to be stopped from wandering off after something that only he could hear, but otherwise the years were uneventful, apart from the occasional bully incident. And one case where the hedgehog had fallen into a river and panicked.

Until one weekend, just after Sonic’s twelfth birthday. The events that would happen this day, would change his life forever.

-+-+-+-+-

Sonic had ridden Motobug to the Emerald Hill again after his birthday, and this time there was a smaller robot, wasp-like in shape, sitting on top of his head. He watched the scenery for rings, having heard that sometimes they reappeared. But it seemed that this time they weren’t there. He’d told Karen where he was going, just so she knew, but he’d wanted to go there on his own this time. To explore and play and anything else he felt like.

He heard something again. A quiet, ringing sound, like a distant instrument. He halted Motobug, to get a fix on where it was coming from, then directed his robot to head towards it. It was near the base of a giant stone loop. These were prominent features around the planet, always coloured like the grass and stone of the zones. He liked to see how far he could climb up them, but never really succeeded. But the sound wasn’t coming from above the loop; it was coming from beneath it. He slid off the Motobug at the base of the loop, and started wandering around, looking for the source of the sound.

“Hey, whatcha looking for Sonic?”

“Huh?” He looked up to the top of the loop, to see Pewter waving down at him. “Oh, hi! I’m looking for the thing that’s making the noise I can hear…” he turned his attention back to the ground, to see if there was a way underneath the loop.

“Hmm… You tried over there?” Pewter’s voice was right behind him instead of above, and he jumped.

“How did you… but you were all they way up there… huh?!” he blinked, and she grinned, tapping the side of her nose.

“It’s a secret. Look, over here there’s a metal trapdoor in the ground. It covers a tunnel. Maybe what you’re looking for is in there?” she walked over to a large bush and stamped her foot hard near it, causing an echoing sound.

“Oh, hey, that’s cool! Thanks Pewter!” Sonic crouched down and pulled at the flap until it slid aside.

“Heh, just show me what you find down there. I have to go back home for now, but you can come visit me there to show me, okay? Be careful, I don’t know what’s down there.” She waved and turned to run back towards the village.

“Okay! See ya later!”

Sonic peered into the tunnel. It was a steady, gentle slope, leading down into the ground beneath the Zone. He told Motobug to wait for him near the loop, and the robot beeped in response. The smaller insect on Sonic’s head hovered above him, and he tapped it.

“You stay with Motobug, Buzzy. I’ll be back soon.”

A whirr of the wings propelled the robot over to its companion, and it perched on one of the larger one’s antennae. Sonic grinned at them, and slid down into the tunnel. The smell of machinery attacked his senses, and he shook his head, and then started walking down the large tunnel. He felt that it was going down further, but there wasn’t much light to see by. After a while of walking, a small light showed up in the darkness, like the light through a crack in a door. He jogged the rest of the distance to it, and pushed against the wall next to it, to find that it was, indeed, a door. A large door. It swung into the room beyond, and Sonic cautiously walked inside. There were many bleeping monitors and whirring machines, but he could hear that ringing again. It was more of a song now, with words he couldn’t quite understand. He glanced around the room again.

It was a very large room, with narrow windows in the ceiling. This meant that it extended up to the surface level from where he was standing. The machinery and computers were mainly arranged around the walls, but a large object towered in the centre of the room. The song was coming from inside it, and Sonic could see frosted glass panes were holding something that shone within it. He cautiously walked through the room, looking around for whoever ran the place. He saw some interesting red and white sneakers, so he picked them up and tried them on playfully. Not seeing anyone, he walked up to the large machine, and pressed his face against the glass. The way it was made meant that it was hard to see what was inside it, but he could make out six objects floating within it. It was these things that were singing to him. He perked his ears up, mesmerized by the song. They were asking him to do something for them.

The human who worked the machines walked back into the room just as Sonic, in a trance like state, reached for the rings that were acting as a power source for the machine. He ran over.

“No, stop!”

Sonic’s consciousness snapped back as he took the rings away. He looked at the tall, slim human with the orange moustache that had woken him back up.

He was about to apologise, but a bright light emanated from the machine.

And it exploded.

-+-+-+-+-+-

The world was silent.

A voice. It was speaking to him.

It was calling him. But it wasn’t saying his name.

“Wake up! Wake up, are you alright?!”

He knew the voice.

He urged his eyes to open, and waited for his vision to return. The blur leaning over him was Karen.

“Mmm…. Mum?”

“Are you alright?”

“… Oww… It… kersploded… Was it something I did…?”

“Hey, hey, don’t you go back to sleep yet!” Karen shook him as he tried to close his eyes again “Have you seen my Sonic?!”

“… What are you talking about? … Mum… I’m Sonic…”

“What?”

“I’m Sonic…” he repeated.

Karen could only stare in pure disbelief at the bright blue creature sitting in front of her. Eight bladed spikes, torn gloves and strange shoes. Bright green eyes.

This couldn’t be Sonic.

… Could it?

~TBC~

[you]Part 4: It begins[/you]

The bright blue hedgehog sat with his hands on his head, shaking his head to try and get the ringing in his ears to go away. Karen kept her hands on his shoulders as if to prevent him from going anywhere, even though the child wasn’t intending to leave while his head still hurt.

“Please, where’s Sonic?”

“I already told you… I’m Sonic…”

“But… you can’t be… you don’t even look like a normal hedgehog, let alone my little cub.” Karen was determined to learn whether or not this kid was for certain Sonic.

“Mrs Spiritpaw!” The little call was barely audible over the sounds of murmurs of the crowd that had gathered. The young red-eyed hedgehog girl pushed through between the legs of the villagers, dragging her sword behind her. “Mrs Spiritpaw! What happened?” On hearing Pewter’s question, the rest of the crowd also decided they wanted to know.

“I don’t know! I was following after Sonic to cal him home, but then I saw the explosion and ran as fast as I could to get here. All I’ve found was this cub; he says he’s Sonic but…” Karen shook her head.

Pewter ran the short distance between the crowd and Karen, and looked over the blue hedgehog. “… Sonic?”

“Pewter! I thought everyone had gone blind or something!”

“… Not really, you do look… A lot different.”

“I do?” Sonic shook his head again and looked over himself, eyes widening in surprise and confusion “Whoa… What happened to me? This is me, right?” Sonic looked up and around the faces, then settled his gaze on Karen and Pewter “Why… am I… blue?”

“What did you find down there?” Pewter tilted her head, and Karen just sat in silence, still holding Sonic’s shoulders.

“Um… A laboratory of some type. There were floating glowy things in a glass machine, and they asked me to let them out. And there was some human there and he said ‘No don’t do that’ and I didn’t even know what I’d done. And the machine with the glowy things kerploded.” Sonic nodded, acknowledging to himself that that was indeed what had happened. “But why am I blue? I’m not supposed to be blue…”

“It’s really Sonic?” Karen seemed stuck for words. “But… What…”

“Mum… I wanna go home” Sonic pouted and shook the last echoes of the explosion away from his ears.

“Mrs Spiritpaw, this is Sonic, I can tell” Pewter tapped the panther’s shoulder, and Karen started “Take him home.”

“Karen Spiritpaw! Explain just what is going on!” An annoyed looking squirrel almost barked the words, as if he blamed the panther for everything. “There’s a massive crater in our Zone, debris scattered throughout the village, and we come here and find you talking with this bizarre creature that’s probably the cause of it! Explain!”

Karen growled in her throat at being spoken to like that, and leapt to her feet. “I would explain if I knew what was going on! You cannot command me around like you seem to think you can. So I wouldn’t try it.” There was a soft click as she unsheathed her claws, and the squirrel took a step backwards.

“I wanna go home…” Sonic whined quietly, carefully standing up “Mum, can we please go home?”

“I…”

“Please? I’m gonna need to reprogram Motobug and Buzzy coz I look so different now and I can’t do that right now!” Sonic looked around for the robots “Where are they anyway? I told them to wait next to that loop! They’re in trouble when I find them” he frowned.

“I passed them on the way here. They were just wandering around in circles.” Karen raised an eyebrow at Sonic.

“They were? Well I’m gonna go find them.”

“Wait, you… You’re definitely Sonic, aren’t you?”

“Well duh.” Sonic rolled his eyes and rubbed his shoulder “I’ve been saying that all along!”

“Um… Okay… I’ll see you on the way home. If you wait by the robots we can talk better okay?”

“Yeah, okay mum.” Sonic fidgeted foot to foot “Can I go now?”

“Yes you can. I’ll finish talking to these guys first.” Karen gestured over her shoulder, and Sonic nodded.

The hedgehog started walking back towards Green Hill, but soon found himself surrounded again by half of the crowd. They were jostling to see him better, and some of those close enough dared to tug on his spikes. Questions were thrown at him, and he tried to walk backwards away from them. Karen looked over from her argument with the squirrel, and growled at the crowd, demanding that they leave him alone. Pewter darted over and pushed through the mass of bodies, tugging Sonic’s arm.

“You lot should know better than this!” She yelled at the crowd, and Sonic whined at them “Leave him alone!”

Her little outburst silenced them for a second, but then the group started prodding and pulling at Sonic again, ignoring her. Sonic yelled out for Karen, and caught sight of a small gap in the group, and ran through it and away.

The Emerald Hill Zone residents got up from where they had been knocked down, and stared at the spot where Sonic had been a second before; but now where a few small clouds of dust were vanishing into the air. Pewter stood up too, and ran back over to Karen, explaining what had happened. Karen stared for a second, and then growled again.

“You lot had no right to upset him!”

“He ran… so fast…” Someone she couldn’t see said.

“However fast he runs is none of your business!”

“I demand-” the squirrel started again, but Karen’s glare silenced him.

“I can’t see why you’re being so mean to him! I’m going home and we’re not coming back here again!”

“Mrs. Spiritpaw…” Pewter tugged her arm “I can come visit you though, right? Because like… Sonic’s my friend.”

Karen nodded at the little girl, and then glared around the rest of the people “You should all be ashamed of yourselves.”

-+-+-+-

After sprinting away from the village and back towards the Green Hill Zone, Karen found Sonic sitting at the base of a large stone loop, rubbing his head and cursing the object. The robots were still circling for no apparent reason nearby, but Sonic didn’t seem to have noticed them. She called him, and he turned his head, frowning with those unnatural green eyes.

“The stupid loop jumped out in front of me”

“Are you sure you didn’t just run into it?”

“Why would I run into a giant thing made of stone?!” Sonic snapped, then got to his feet and jumped up into the loop, stamping on it “Stupid thing!”

“Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”

“No, I was just running away from all their questions and tugging and I don’t like being pulled around.” He sat down, swinging his legs over the edge of the loop.

“Well, it was a lot faster than you normally g-”

“Ooo a ring!”

Sonic was looking up at the top of the loop, and could see one of the rings floating just below the curved surface. He got to his feet and looked at the wall. Karen bit her lip, and told him to get down, but he’d already taken a couple of steps backwards to gauge the size of the loop. Before she could say it again, he sped forwards and up the side of the loop, rushing around it in a second and missing the ring in his surprise at getting around the full length of the loop. He made another loop, caught it, and tried stopping. He skidded another circuit of the loop, then fell backwards, and rolled off of the structure. He stared at his feet.

“Whoa.”

“Are you okay Sonic?”

“Yeah I’m okay. Wow… How’d I do that?”

“I don’t know… But… More than just your looks have changed then…” Karen crouched down and held his shoulders “You want to sort out these robots of yours right?”

Sonic nodded. “Yeah. They’ve been messed up by something from the look of it.” He walked over to them carefully, and whistled. The robots stopped. “Well, their stop command works at least.” He flicked open a panel on the side of the Motobug, and started fiddling around with it. “Agghh, something’s fried the circuits… Might’ve been that kerplosion.” He sighed and picked up Buzzy, then placed it on the Motobug’s back. Giving a different whistle, he commanded only the Motobug to start up again, and it whirred and headed back to the Green Hill Zone village.

“What if it messes up again Sonic?”

“I’ll just do the same thing. Now… What do I do about this?” He ran in circles, creating a small tornado of dust and grass, then skidded again “How am I gonna go to school like this? They’ll all take the mickey out of me!”

“No they won’t, they’ll probably think it’s cool” Karen smiled at Sonic “Plus your speed’ll mean you can show them not to take the mick by beating them in races”

“That’s… true…” He frowned thoughtfully “What’ll Mavvy and Tabby and Dad think though? What if they think I’m weird.”

“Sonic, we’re your family, we could never call you weird.”

“Mavvy could.”

“Ignore him. He’s just at an awkward age.” Karen nodded. “Come on, let’s go home. And you can work on your stopping while we go there, okay?”

“I stop fine.” Sonic pouted “But maybe a little bit of practice will help…” He darted a short way down the path, and Karen sighed, following him.

-+-+-+-

Two years later Sonic was lounging near a river within the Green Hill Zone, watching a few Terra rabbits hopping around. He sat with his back against a palm tree and his arms folded between his spikes behind his head, humming a random tune. The Motobug was beeping nearby, and Sonic flicked an ear around to see what it was after. Seeing that it was just watching him, he shrugged. There was no humming around any more, as he had given Buzzy to his friend a few weeks back when she had to leave South Island, and he hadn’t been bothered to build another one. His new speed skills had kept him occupied.

A blue Alta bird, known as a Flicky, flew past him, and he smiled. The Zone was nice and quiet, though in recent months a lot of the wild animals had vanished for no apparent reason. It had bugged Sonic at first, but since no body else seemed bothered, so he had gradually paid less attention to it. A metallic whine interrupted his thoughts, and he got to his feet, looking semi-accusingly at Motobug. The robot simply beeped at him, and he frowned, turning around to see what was making the noise. He looked up, and fell backwards in surprise. A small swarm of about twenty giant wasp robots, a lot like his Buzzy in design, were flying overhead. He blinked, and Motobug gave an alarmed beep. Turning his head, he cried out in shock. A large group of Motobugs were rushing towards him. Sonic jumped up to the top of the palm tree as the robots trundled past, and his own Motobug was lost in the horde. Sonic turned his head to look towards the village, and his jaw dropped. The Buzzy-like robots had got there already, and the village was in flames. He cried out as the strange Motobugs sped after the wasp robots, and slid down the trunk of the tree. His own Motobug was in pieces on the ground, but as much as he had loved that robot, his village, his family, were in trouble. He growled, and bolted towards the village. The air around him grew hazy, then misty. He skidded to a halt, and looked around. Blue mist… Sonic’s mind rushed through what he’d picked up about religion and superstition, and yelped.

“Genocide City!” Sonic looked around as the mist thickened, and saw vague shapes flying around within it.

A powerful stench of rot and blood bombarded his senses without warning, the sound of cracking rock and tearing metal, interlaced with screams of terror joined in, and he couldn’t see past the end of his nose. He ran forwards blindly, with his ears flattened against his head, trying to ignore the screams and sounds, and the feel of the Zone collapsing around him. Several cries for him caught his attention, and he shook his head, hoping the calls would go away. Some were asking for his help, some were blaming him, and he felt himself crying. Wiping his eyes on the back of his glove, he caught the sound of metallic wings beating. Metallic wings. Those fake Buzzys!

He bared his unusually sharp teeth, focused on the sound of the wings, and ran towards them. Bursting out of the mist, he landed on top of the nearest wasp robot, and swung his fists down into it, pulling it apart in a pure rage. Leaping to the next one, he repeated the procedure, and threw the majority of the robot at the nearest Motobug, to the satisfaction of a twin explosion. Sonic caught sight of Genocide vanishing out of the corner of his eye, but he was too annoyed to care. He swung a kick at another Motobug as it charged at him, and indented its head with the force of the blow, knocking it backwards into another robot. He saw a strange machine fly overhead, and its pilot looked over the edge with a large, mustached face, frowned at him, and sped off. Sonic was knocked off his feet by a chameleon-like robot appearing out of nowhere and crashing into his back. He growled deeply as he got to his feet again, before jumping to grab the robot and throw it into a totem pole that had appeared where Genocide had been. As the robot exploded, the rest of the attacking army of machines split up and scattered through the rest of the Zone, which now looked completely different. Sonic stared around the Zone, taking in the new details.

“What… Is going… On?” Sonic bit his lip, looking for any sign of the rest of Green Hill’s residents. “Where is everyone?!”

~TBC~

[you]Part 5: The Green Hill Zone[/you]

Sonic dashed around the burning remains of the Green Hill Zone’s village, picking up the Terra rabbits and the Flickies that had fallen from the few machines he had destroyed and persuading them to get on their way, and looking for any sign of the residents, but finding none. He sped over to the totem pole that the chameleon robot had exploded against, and frowned at it. It definitely had not been there before Genocide City had appeared. Jumping up to stand on the top of it, the cerulean hedgehog looked around. The Zone had changed almost completely. The stone loops were still intact, but where the old stone bridge should have been, and a good few hundred feet on the Green Hill side, there was a large, fast flowing river. Totem poles had appeared around the Zone in seemingly random locations, the palm trees had developed small spikes along their trunks, and the few methods of crossing the waterfalls had either vanished completely or been replaced by narrow bars. Sonic could also see the robots attacking other parts of the Zone, tormenting the Terra and Alta animals. But he could not see any of the Zone’s former residents. Reflecting on what he had heard within Genocide, he shook his head and covered his eyes.

“I’m… alone…” Sonic sat down on top of the totem pole, sniffling. “I can’t believe it… How could anyone do this…? How?” He looked up, rubbing his eyes. “I bet that floating human guy had something to do with this!” Growling, he jumped off of the totem pole, and glared in the direction the human had gone. “I’m gonna get him and make him talk!”

Sonic started running, speeding up in seconds and blasting past a higher bit of ground. One of the wasp robots appeared over the top of the verge, and paused in mid air, firing a bolt of plasma at him. The grass ignited where he had just been, and he skidded, jumping up to the robot. He curled into a ball in mid air, and his short, razor sharp spikes tore through the metal, causing the robot to explode. A Terra rabbit fell out of the shattered machine, and shook itself, before hopping away. Sonic snorted at the robot’s wreckage. ‘So they fire bolts at me? Like… Like bombs. Buzzy… Buzz Bombers.’ Turning to resume running, he jumped over a crystalline fern, and landed on top of a Motobug. He stamped hard on it, and the metal carapace crunched underfoot. The robot sparked, so Sonic leapt off and ran further through the Zone, smashing any and every robot he could find. He stood near a crab-like one for a while, watching to see what it would do. After it fired twin plasma bolts from its pincers, Sonic ran at it, curling into a ball to roll along the ground and rip through the robot. All these metal monstrosities were plaguing around his damaged home Zone, and he was going to get rid of them. Uncurling back into a run, he sprinted past a small grove of trees, and slid down an unexpected slope. A deep pit was at the bottom of the bank, filled with tall, wickedly pointed columns of stone. Sonic yelped and leapt into the air, his powerful legs sending him sailing across the pit to the cliff-like ledge on the other side. The blue hedgehog landed on the edge of the precipice, slid, and ended up clinging to the top by his fingertips. Looking down, he assured himself that he did not like the idea of falling into that pit, and kicked a foothold into the orange and brown chequered wall. Using his makeshift footing as a base, he jumped to get a better grip on the grass. Another crystalline fern was near enough to the edge for him to grab hold of, and he used it to pull himself all the way up to the solid ground.

“That cliff… was not there… the other day…” Sonic lay flat on his stomach, muttering the words into the grass with tones of annoyance and breathlessness.

After a moment of recuperation, Sonic got to his feet and looked around, trying to think of what could have happened to his Zone. A chameleon robot appeared out of thin air again, hovering in front of his face for a moment, before curling its tail up against its body to make itself more like a missile. Sonic blinked at it, then yelped and ducked as the robot shot overhead. It looped around behind him and came back, so Sonic leapt into the air in a flip and landed on its back, riding it through the air. It tried to shake him off by performing hairpin turns, but in response Sonic shifted his weight to remain on the machine.

“Awesome! Sky board!” Sonic held his arms out and mimicked the pose of a surfer, before realising that he was heading straight for a wall. “Uh oh… Uh, gotta go ‘meleon!”

With that, he back flipped off of the robot, and the force from his kick-off sent the machine careering out of control and directly into the wall before it could right itself and change course. The small explosion and the rabbit hopping away in a hurry were music to the hedgehog’s ears. Sonic grinned, and then resumed his pursuit of the human. He sped down another nearby hill, and found himself at a sunken river. Cursing, he looked around for a way to cross it. Another chameleon robot uncloaked against a chequered cliff, and Sonic frowned at it. This one was green, unlike the other two which had attacked him; they were blue. He wondered what this one was going to do, and soon found out when he had to leap aside from an electrical bolt which crackled when it hit the damp grass of the river side. Growling, he sprang at it, and it vanished again. His fist passed right through where it should have been, and he cracked his fist against the wall. Giving a yelp of pain he backed off, shaking his hand.

“Fine, I’ll leave you alone for now” Sonic growled at the invisible robot, and turned around, catching sight of a rotating beam crossing the expanse of the river. He darted towards it, and whined pathetically. “Great... Spiky log.”

The beam was covered in wicked spikes, serrated on the sides so that they could tear your legs if they caught them. A narrow pathway was visible, twisting in a spiral along the full length of the beam between the spikes. Sonic frowned, watching it for a couple of rotations, trying to figure out the speed of the log’s spin. He glanced at the fast flowing river below, and took a breath, before stepping out onto the clear bit of the log. The beam was about a foot wide, and the narrowness of the path meant that you had to put one foot in front of the other, making it harder to keep your balance as the wooden pole span. It wasn’t spinning fast, but the constant sound of the nearby thundering waterfall and the piranha robots snapping in the water below him were distracting. Sonic walked carefully through the spikes, judging each step as accurately as he could. The log twisted suddenly, and Sonic froze. There was a creak, followed by a snapping noise, and the log stopped turning. The blue hedgehog flicked his ears, and gave a startled yelp as the beam snapped. He sprang into the air, but started falling short of the edge. A piranha robot jumped out of the water at him, and he instinctively curled up, bouncing off of it as it exploded and the Flicky flew out. He crashed into a palm tree on the other side of the river, and cringed from the impact on the spiky trunk. After he slid to the floor he rubbed his chest and brushed his fur back into order.

“Ouch…”

Sonic stood up again, and looked around. A Buzz Bomber swooped down out of the sky and fired at him, forcing him to jump aside. He growled deeply, and picked up a stone, before hurling it at the robot. The projectile shot through the machine’s head and it fell to the ground. Sonic frowned.

“I’m getting annoyed with your type of attacks you rip off. Sneaking up on me is not a good thing!” Sonic kicked another stone at the wasp, and it exploded, allowing the Terra rabbit inside to hop to safety. “Well… At least I know where the animals went.”

Sonic shook his head and turned to continue his run through the Zone. He sprang up to the top of a tall totem pole nearby to get a glance around the Zone, searching out the moustached human. He could spy the floating machine in a field a short distance away, partially hidden amongst several hovering platforms. Glaring, he sped towards it, crossing a bridge over the top of a waterfall. It creaked underfoot, and a plank fell out. Sonic watched the wooden slat float down the river and over the falls, and whined, hurrying over the rest of the bridge. He rushed along the path, and skidded into the field.

The hovering machine was positioned between a pair of the floating platforms, and at sight of the hedgehog running into the field, the human laughed. Sonic stared up at the machine, then at the large, glowing wrecking ball beneath it, then back up towards the human’s face. He pointed and growled.

“Who are you?!”

“I am the scientist Doctor Robotnik. And you, dear boy, have been ruining my robots?”

“You stole my designs!”

“I did not. I used my own designs. And you’re hardly capable of creating such masterpieces as my machines.” The scientist raised an eyebrow at Sonic, who growled.

“My Motobug and Buzzy didn’t use animals as… As… Whatever you were using them for, I admit! But you still stole their external designs!”

“The animals were the power source. You’d be surprised how effective a rabbit can be to power a robotic soldier. And animal designs are unsettling for creatures such as you little…” Robotnik laughed “Oh yes, you’re a hedgehog.”

“Yeah, and?”

“You have some interesting skills I see. But you’re so young, there is no way you can beat me my boy.”

“Shut up! What are you doing to my Zone?! What’s with all these robots anyway?!” Sonic flattened his ears. “Fix my Zone!”

“This is how the Zone used to be, if you must know. And I did not do anything to it.”

“You burned down my village!”

“It was in my way.” Robotnik shrugged. “And now you are in my way too.”

“You wrecked my Zone!”

“I’ve already told you my boy, it was not my fault the Zone reverted from the way you knew it to the way it used to be. But you’re too young to understand I guess. And it’s a shame that I’m going to have to destroy it to get what I want back.”

“You ain’t smashing up my Zone, no matter what you want.” Sonic jumped up onto the top of a platform. “I’m gonna stop you!”

“Then my dear boy, I shall have to get rid of you too. It’s a shame. A sonic speed hedgehog would be an interesting research specimen.” Robotnik laughed as Sonic bristled.

“I am no research specimen!” Sonic jumped at the floating machine, and span into a ball. He bounced off of the metal shell and landed back on the platform.

“You’ll regret attacking me my boy!”

Robotnik pressed a button on his dashboard and the giant wrecking ball swung backwards, before swinging towards the platform that Sonic was standing on. The hedgehog yelped as the orb crashed into the bottom of the platform, unsettling his balance and throwing him off. He rolled along the floor in a ball, narrowly missing another swing of the ball, before uncurling and springing up onto a platform again. He cast a glance over the machine, and settled his gaze on the open cockpit in which the scientist was seated. A small grin crossed his face, and he jumped on top of the ball as it swung up through the platform he had been standing on. When the orb reached the highest point of its swing, Sonic waved at Robotnik, then leaped into the air and curled into a ball. Robotnik hurriedly banked the machine sideways to avoid having the razor sharp spikes hit him. Sonic tore through the chain holding the wrecking ball, and the sphere crashed to the ground. Robotnik twisted the hovercraft around so that he could glare through his glasses at the cerulean hedgehog on the ground below.

“Stop dodging!” Sonic snarled at the human.

“I would much rather not have those quills of yours stuck in my head thank you.” Robotnik frowned. “Farewell my boy.”

“I am not your boy!”

Sonic ran after the machine as it turned and started flying away. A large, cylindrical machine was sitting on the ground in front of him, so instead of adjusting his course to run around it, he jumped, but had misjudged the height so his trailing foot caught on the edge of the circular button on the top, tripping him over. He landed flat on his stomach on the button, and it pressed down. Sonic blinked and sat up as the machine shook, then sprang off of it as it exploded, releasing Terra rabbits and Alta bluebirds, which promptly ran away into the Zone. Sonic sighed and sat down in the grass, looking around the Green Hill Zone again.

“That Robotnik guy’s up to something. And I’m gonna stop him.” He got back to his feet, and turned to face the direction the scientist had gone. “Marble Zone huh?”

Sonic clenched his fists and ran towards the volcanic mountain in the center of South Island. Marble Zone was around the lower edge; whilst at the top within the crater was the Hill Top Zone. Sonic couldn’t see the hovercraft moving up the side of the volcano, so he bolted along the fields, weaving between totem poles, until the first ruins appeared.

~TBC~

[you]Part 6: The Marble Zone[/you]

As Sonic sped through the lush fields of the altered Green Hill Zone, aiming for the ruins he saw ahead, he tripped over and tumbled in a roll, crashing into a totem pole. Grumbling, he stood up and walked back a short way to find what he’d fallen over. A familiar ringing noise that he hadn’t heard since he’d got his speed sounded in the grass, and he jogged over to it. Looking down, Sonic saw a beautiful gemstone lying mostly buried the ground. It was a pale grey in colour, and glowing with an internal light. He reached down and dug it up, looking into the translucent surface and tilting his head to see the crackles of energy within it. Its chiming song gradually quietened as Sonic grew used to listening to it, and he flicked an ear.

“I don’t think I should leave you lying around…” Sonic said to the jewel. “There’s something… odd about you…” He frowned and looked around for something to carry it in, before settling on one of the last few palm trees in the Zone. He jumped up and pulled a large leaf off, before sitting down and fashioning a bag out of it and some stiff pieces of grass. He slid the stone into the satchel, and slung it over his shoulder. “That’s better. I may not know what the deal is with you, but I don’t think anyone else should see you either.”

He stood up again and stretched, yawning. Then Sonic caught sight of a Buzz Bomber flying through the nearest ruins, and remembered what he was heading that way for. He growled lightly, before resuming his previous sprint for the ruins of Marble Zone. His mind raced through things that he’d heard about the Zone, like it had once been half of a giant City, and that they’d mastered geothermal energy using the volcano. Minor things that Sonic liked to pay attention to.

The broken pillars of partly eroded white marble gradually came up around him as he ran across the line between the two Zones. If the marble wasn’t there, the only thing that would have enabled Sonic to tell that he’d crossed between the Zones was the different shade and texture of the grass. Whereas Green Hill Zone’s was soft, supple grass, a rich, shimmering green in colour, Marble Zone’s was more brown and dull, like it had dried out, and coarser. Sonic had a feeling it was the proximity to the volcano that caused it. He continued to run forwards, and jumped when the Buzz Bomber he had spotted earlier zoomed into sight. The hedgehog spun through the metal, leaving the robot to explode, and paused for long enough to raise an eyebrow at the small seal that fell from it. The seal shuffled off into the ruins, and vanished. Sonic shook his head and turned around again, in time to spy a pink caterpillar robot crawling across the grass towards him.

It wasn’t moving fast. It wasn’t even moving threateningly. All it was doing was slowly crawling towards him, using the ripple-like motion common to real caterpillars, and opening and closing its mouth. Sonic scoffed. Sure, he hadn’t been at this robot smashing thing for a day yet, but he could tell that this thing was a pretty poor excuse for a robot. In his eyes, it couldn’t hurt him at all unless he deliberately put his foot in its mouth or something. He took a step backwards from it as said mouth tried to chew on said foot, and swung a powerful kick at it. The force of the blow knocked the robot’s head flying over the ruins, and the remaining three spherical segments of its body fell to the ground uselessly, allowing the squirrel inside to run out and off towards the pine trees that lined the side of the volcano. Sonic rolled his eyes.

“Well that was threatening. Lessee… He can’t have got too far away…” Sonic looked up at a purple-grey stone cliff ahead. “He probably floated over that in that stupid machine. So…” the hedgehog looked down the wall that was blocking his path, and smiled at a passage partly hidden behind some rising and falling columns of stone. “So I’ll cut through it”

Sonic darted over towards the passageway, but skidded to a halt just before he reached the moving columns. Mainly because he found himself faced with a river of lava right at his feet. He took a step backwards again, and sighed.

“Man that was close! gee, I didn’t know just how close to the surface the magma is here. No wonder it’s so warm.” Sonic frowned at the wide flow in front of him, then up at the shifting platforms. “Maybe…”

He tensed up, and jumped into the air as the platform nearest him lowered towards the lava. When the next platform lowered the one he was on rose, so he jumped down to it, then onto the solid land on the other side. Sonic sighed miserably, knowing full well that this was the safest part of the Zone. Not many people ventured through Marble because of the earthquakes and the lava. But he knew he didn’t really have anything else that he could do if he wanted to find out why this Doctor Robotnik had attacked his Zone. He ran for the passage and cut through to the other side, hastily ducking the bat shaped robots that had decided to ambush him inside. They swooped back over his head and up, returning to once more hang upside down from the ceiling. Sonic sighed. He would go back to smash them later.

Sonic got up and walked over to another river, where platforms of stone and grass were floating on the surface. Frowning at them and the way they were shifting with the flow of the hot liquid beneath them, he wondered if they would hold his weight without pulling him down into fiery death. ‘Well, only one way to find out.’ He thought to himself, and leaped over onto the first floating foothold. It seemed fine for a moment, then tilted. The heat from the lava caused the dried grass to catch fire, and Sonic yelped, running up the platform and jumping across the remaining three as fast as he could to get to the other side. Where he was promptly attacked by another pair of Buzz Bombers. Dodging the blasts they fired at him, he jumped up and kicked one into the other. Both exploded, their remains falling into the lava, along with the two seals. Sonic gave a dismayed cry, before noticing that the seals were happily playing in the hot liquid without seeming to mind the temperature.

“What the hell?” Sonic frowned, and sighed. “I guess they must be adapted to living in this Zone or something. Strange little things…” he shook his head and walked onwards, seeing a much taller cliff than the last one ahead of him.

This cliff had a much larger entrance, and from the rubble in front of the gaping passage Sonic gathered that it had once been a magnificent marble doorway. Sonic shrugged and made sure that he still had the bag containing the gemstone, before climbing over the collapsed wall and into the cavernous interior. He took to walking, looking around. It wasn’t as dark as he had expected it to be in here, as there were torches burning on the walls and windows to allow light to filter in from outside. Mosaics adorned the purple-grey marble walls, and it was warmer than it was outside. Sonic frowned, realising that that meant there was yet more lava down here. Though it made perfect sense, he wasn’t happy about it.

Sonic walked down the steps, marvelling at the sheer size of the underground building. It was a good thirty feet from floor to roof when he reached the bottom of the stairs, though he could see that it only lasted for a short way further before the room shrunk to a nine foot high hallway. Looking around, he decided that the best way to go was through this passage, so he set off at a slow jog. There were no windows in the corridor, which made sense as they’d only have ended up looking out into rock anyway, but there was a warm glow from above him. Sonic looked up, and almost turned tail and ran at the sight of the molten rock above him, until he realised that there was no way he’d have been able to get into the corridor if the lava had been able to get through the remarkably strong, glass shield that was the roof. The hedgehog had to stop and admire the work. Whoever had built this place had certainly known what they were doing. Shrugging, he continued through into the next big room.

Hearing a clinking sound, Sonic looked around for the source of it, down at the floor; noticing small, neatly pierced holes; then up, before his eyes widened and he jumped to the side, narrowly avoiding a large, circular, black steel disk, around three foot thick, with another two foot of steel spikes protruding from the bottom. It started to rise back up into the roof, with the same clinking he had heard before, before crashing down again. Sonic gave a relieved sigh, and got to his feet again.

“That was too close.”

Sonic walked away from the dropping trap, and frowned ahead. There appeared to be no way forwards. A chain extended from the roof to a circle of black steel on the floor, and the hedgehog tapped his foot.

“So I’m gonna need to move that eh? Lessee…” Sonic walked up to the disk, and walked around it, before tripping over a gap in the floor nearby. Looking back down into it, he noticed a large green panel. “Oh? Wonder what this does…”

Leaning into the hole, he pressed his hands down on the panel, and heard a chinking noise. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw the trap rising, but as soon as he removed his hands from the panel it dropped to fill the gap again. He tried again, with the same result. Sitting up, he grumbled. ‘This isn’t gonna work… I need to find something to hold this down with.’ Looking around, he saw a piece of masonry hanging loose from the wall, still quivering from the last crash of the disk. He shrugged. ‘Well, worth a shot.’ Sonic got to his feet, and walked over to the wall, putting his hands in the gap between the loose block and the rest of the bricks. He tugged at the brick, which, though loose, was stubborn. When it wouldn’t come out of the wall, he resorted to lifting a foot up and planting it on the wall to give him better support. With the extra leverage, the brick eventually came out of the wall, and fell onto the foot below it. Sonic cursed loudly as he pulled his foot free, and scowled at the offending piece of wall. He sighed, and got behind it, pushing it along the floor towards the gap in which the pressure switch was settled. Once the block fell into place, Sonic sat down and rubbed his foot, waiting for the trap to reach the ceiling.

“Stupid bloody thing… Ow.” Sonic grumbled at the trap. “I guess as long as that switch is pressed that trap’ll stay up. Eh, no worries. I ain’t lifting that thing back out of that hole.”

Sonic looked around the level he was on again first, before dropping down the gap underneath the suspended trap. He walked to another set of stairs, and frowned, pausing as rows of spikes shot out of holes in the sides of the steps below him. Leaning forward slightly to get a better view, he saw that they were only on every other step, so he waited for the first lot to retract, and then rushed past that step and onto the safe one below it. He repeated this process until he got to the bottom, tripping off of the last step and down a gap, to land on the back of a caterpillar robot, which promptly self-destructed, sending the four segments of its body in different directions, along with Sonic’s leaf bag.

When the hedgehog had recovered from the unexpected explosion, he looked down the narrow corridor, which was barely six feet high. Seeing another wall of lava behind a glass shield, he relaxed, until he saw the caterpillar’s head hit an already cracked part of the glass, where lava had seeped through and pooled on the floor beneath it. The impact sent large cracks spreading across the already weakened glass, and Sonic backed away, picking up his bag from where it had landed as he did so.

“This. Isn’t. Good.”

The glass burst, and Sonic turned tail and ran the opposite direction down the corridor, vaulting up over rubble and ducking under buckling sections of the roof, narrowly avoiding being impaled on a set of steel spikes that shot up out of the floor underneath one of the low roof sections. He spied something shining in front of a grated wall ahead, and scooped it up as he leapt for dear life onto a higher platform in a larger room. He waited a moment as the rushing lava smashed into the wall, pausing only to see if he’d need to keep running. The hedgehog was relieved when it stopped rising just at the level of the platform he was currently standing on. ‘It must be flowing out of those grates I guess. Lucky.’ He thought to himself, before continuing his trek through the underground ruins. He lifted the glowing object that he had found up as he walked, and flicked an ear at it. It was another stone like the white-grey one he had found in the Green Hill Zone, only this time it was yellow in colour. Sonic put the jewel into the leaf bag with the other one, smiling at the ringing noise they made.

“Okay,” he said, once he’d got used to the renewed singing and it quietened again. “Let’s go find that Robotnik!”

Sonic rushed through to another large room, one much like the one he had entered in. This one had lava filling the lower floors, and a few broken stone staircases up to higher ground. As he was about to jump onto the nearest one, a column of fire rained down from a vent in the ceiling, and startled him into tripping backwards. When it stopped, he paused and looked up at the source of it. The vent glowed, then opened again, allowing more liquid rock to rain down, some of it splashing onto the edges of Sonic’s fur. He yelped in pain and shook it off, backing away to a safer distance. He couldn’t retreat though, because of the corridor that had been filled when the glass shielding had broken, which only left him the option of going up to the higher levels. Sonic waited, watching the vent and checking its timing.

“One… Two… Three… Four…” Sonic noted the vent spew forth more fire, then resumed the count. “One… Two… Three… Four… Right, so I have a four second gap? No problem!”

Sonic rubbed the singed fur of his shoulder, waited for the vent to close again, and took a running jump. His powerful kick sent him sailing across the gap to the nearest broken staircase, allowing him to land, check his balance, and jump up to a platform away from the vent before it opened again. He took his time in judging the jump up to the platform above, as if he fell there would be nothing to grab onto.

After making it successfully to the relatively safe room above the lava pit, he smashed open a couple of bat robots to release the squirrels inside, and looked around. There were green metal pistons encased in the same lava-proof glass he’d been admiring earlier. They were moving with the flow of the lava he could see through the glass. Unfortunately this also meant that they filled the room with a source of painful death by crushing. Which wasn’t something that Sonic enjoyed the thought of. He looked up, and hurriedly stepped forwards as the one above him started lowering again. Then the next one decided to lower, so he moved forwards again. This continued until he’d made it out of the room, and complained to himself about the civilisation that had built it being a bunch of idiots who hadn’t had the common sense to leave a path around the side of the moving power sources.

He looked up, and saw a gap in the wall above him. Before he could leap up towards it, he heard the noise of the chain pulling the traps. Darting a few steps back, he managed to avoid getting impaled on the underside of the steel spikes as it fell down. He jumped on top of the trap, using it as a lift to get up to the open part of the wall, and leapt outside, relieved to be free of the confines of the buried building. Stretching, he grinned at the open air and sunset, and made sure his bag was secure.

“Hmm… I’d better find something better to carry you in. Maybe there’ll be somewhere I can get a proper bag soon.” Sonic addressed the gemstones, before walking onwards. “Now… What was this way again?” He paused at the edge of a lake of fire, noticing another of those metal prison things on the other side. “Well, I guess I should get the animals out of that thing like I did in Green Hill, now I know they’re in them.”

Sonic jumped onto the first of the two bare stone platforms that were in the middle of the lake, and had started timing his jump to the next one when he heard the sound of an engine, of sorts, approaching. Pausing, he looked up, only to give a disappointed sigh when he saw Doctor Robotnik approaching in his hovercraft again. This time it appeared to have some sort of cannon attached to the underside of it. The scientist peered over the side at the blue hedgehog, and frowned.

“You again? I’m surprised you made it through the city.” Robotnik sounded genuinely impressed. “My boy, why do you persist?”

“I’m not your boy.” Sonic was obviously fed up. “Look, I’ve been running all day and I demand to know what you did to my Zone!”

“You were just following me to ask about that when I already told you the answer?”

“Ain’t that what I just said?” Sonic tapped his foot.

“Maybe I’ll tell you later.” Robotnik made a show of inspecting his gloves.

“Okay then, what are you up to?” Sonic was getting impatient. “First you wreck my Zone, and now you’re here in Marble Zone. I bet you’ve put those stupid robots of yours in the other Zones too!”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Answer me!”

“You should be more polite to your elders my boy.”

Robotnik pressed something inside the hovercraft, and piloted it over and above Sonic. The hedgehog looked up, wondering what he was doing, then yelped and jumped for the other platform as fire shot from the cannon and burst out over the foothold where he had just been standing. Sonic growled. ‘Flame-thrower? That means there’s a fuel source inside that machine somewhere. If I can damage it…’ Sonic’s frown turned to a smirk again, and he jumped back to the first platform as the hovercraft manoeuvred over him and dropped more fire. Looking at his opponent carefully, Sonic waited until the machine was coming back, then jumped for the underside of it, his sharp spikes tearing into the metal before he bounced off again. He uncurled to land on his feet, and jumped off of the platform as it burst into flames again. Robotnik had felt the damage to his machine, and started to pull up higher as he came back to try drop the fire on the hedgehog again.

Sonic waited, timing his jump, then leaped up, curling into a blue buzz-saw and ripping into the metal. The smell of petrol almost caused him to uncurl, but he managed to hold his spin until his spikes caught something that ricochet him back to the platform. Sonic hurriedly jumped out of the foothold floating in the lava, and darted across the dry grass to the other side, to take shelter from the fire racing up the dripping fuel and to the machine. Robotnik rabidly pressed a series of buttons, causing the fuel tank to drop into the lava before the fire reached him, and it exploded, forcing the hovercraft up into the air, and Sonic to cover his sensitive ears from the noise. As he uncovered them, he heard an annoyed yell.

“I’ll get you for that hedgehog!”

“You mean I’ll get you, Robotnik!”

Sonic watched the scientist regain control of the hovercraft and pilot it off to a partially constructed amusement park Zone a short way away. He growled and pulled himself up to his feet, looking back at the prison machine he was leaning against, before climbing up to the top of it and standing on the plunger-like top to release the Terras from their captivity within. He glanced towards the park-like Zone, then at the sky as it started to get dark.

“Sheesh... I spent so long wandering around inside…” He yawned as he slid off and checked that the precious contents of the leaf bag were intact. “Man I haven’t run so much in one day… I still need to follow that Robotnik dude…” He yawned once more, and took the bag off his shoulder, putting it down near the remnants of the prison, before sitting down beside it. “No point doing it… Without rest… Not if he’s gonna-” another yawn “-keep attacking me…”

Sonic watched as the first stars appeared over the sky, and stretched, before laying down next to the bag containing the singing stones. The heat from the lava lake nearby kept him warm, and he soon drifted off to sleep. He hadn’t realised just how tired he was.

~TBC~

[you]Part 7: The Marble Village.[/you]

Writhing blue darkness around him. Dark purely because it does not allow the light to penetrate it.

There! A sound!

He cannot move, for he cannot tell where the sound is coming from.

Something grabs him, it is crushing him.

And all the while there are voices screaming at him, accusatory and frightened.

He cannot move, he tries, but he cannot. The blue is fading away, fading dark.

“Arrrghhhh!”

Sonic sat up as he screamed, panting hoarsely. He was drenched in a cold sweat, despite having rolled so close to the lava pit in his sleep. It took a few moments for his location to register in his mind, and when it finally did he shuffled back away from the burning lake. He looked around for his bag, and found it camouflaged in a small tuft of grass nearby.

The hedgehog picked up the bag and listened, because the jewels’ calm, ringing song had changed to a more frantic one. He frowned, looking around, before slinging the bag back over his shoulder. The gemstones calmed down, and resumed their quiet song.

“Were you worried about me?” Sonic muttered to the jewels, and rubbed his head. “Sheesh, what a nightmare… I…” He sighed and shook his head. “I need to move on I guess…”

Sonic got up to his feet, and shook his head to try wake himself up. The soft sunrise washed over the landscape, blending in with the glow from the lava behind him. It bounced off of sharp corners on the Spring Yard Zone ahead, shining brightly and making the metal constructs gleam. The hedgehog had to rub his eyes as he started walking.

“I’m hungry.”

-+-+-

Sonic walked into the village that rested at the end of the dried grass of the Marble Zone, and looked around. He wondered about calling out to find out if anyone was there, but decided that if they were, they probably wouldn’t appreciate being woken up by a complete stranger who smelt of petrol and carried a bag made out of leaves. Not to mention the fact that he was bright blue and no-one outside of the Green Hill Zone and the Emerald Hill Zone had ever seen him. He didn’t doubt that it would cause some gawking, to say the least.

A giggle from behind a couple of the small, marble huts, followed by a scream and more laughing, indicated children playing. Sonic knew from experience how cruel children could be if they saw something odd, so he walked a bit faster. ‘Strange.’ He thought. ‘I always heard that no-one lived in Marble Zone. Maybe no-one’s gone through those ruins before. Makes sense.’

“Hey, whassat?!”

‘Oh great. I’ve been spotted.’ Sonic grumbled lightly to himself, continuing to walk towards the Spring Yard Zone, and trying to ignore the children who were behind him and yelling questions.

“Oi! Who’re you and what are you doing in our village eh?”

“That guy’s blue. Why’s he blue? Why are you blue mister?”

“He smells funny.”

“Hey what’s in this bag here?”

Sonic stopped suddenly and whipped a hand round to grab the squirrel’s wrist as he tried taking the bag. “I advise you leave other people’s belongings where they are.”

“Okay okay, I’ll leave it!” The squirrel grumbled, rubbing his wrist when Sonic had let go. “What’s your problem?”

“I had a very bad day yesterday. And I’m gonna have another bad day today.” The hedgehog replied bluntly.

“You’re no older than me, what’s up with you? Shouldn’t you be back home, playing?”

“No. I have… stuff to do. So leave me alone.”

Sonic carried on walking, his ears flicking as he heard the children walking behind him. He turned to face the squirrels.

“C’mon guys, I just wanna walk in peace.”

“I heard your stomach rumble. Are you hungry?” One of the girl squirrels asked chirpily.

“… Uh…” Sonic shook his head frantically “No…”

“Liar. C’mon, you can eat breakfast with us!” She grabbed his arm, and started tugging him along behind her. “C’mon!”

“But-“

“Don’t ‘but’ my sis mate.” The boy who had reached for the bag walked up beside them, whilst the other two squirrels followed them. “You may as well while you’re here. And get a bath too, you smell funny.”

“Uh, that’s very nice of you, but I really have to go.”

“Go later. Food and bath now.” The girl who was leading him nodded.

-+-+-

“So that’s what’s up?”

They were all sitting at a table, with the young squirrels positioned as close to Sonic as they could get. Sonic hadn’t been too happy about having to have a bath, and especially not in a complete strangers’ house, but the petrol soaked into his fur might’ve ended up as a problem. Sonic had just finished explaining why he’d been passing through the Zone, and it had taken a while, with the squirrels questioning him almost every other sentence. It turned out that they were all related, and their parents were quite happy to let him join them for breakfast. It was the girl squirrel that had pulled him along that had spoken. Her name was Suzie. The male squirrel was Rusty, and the two youngest were twins by the names of Kerri and Lucy.

“Why do you need to go to Spring Yard? They’re not even anywhere near finished it yet.” Suzie stated.

“I heard from Becky that it’s practically a death trap at the moment.” Rusty nodded in acknowledgement. “All moving parts and spiky things. Becky said it’s not a good idea to go anywhere near it.”

“Maybe, but I told ya, I gotta follow this guy who went that way.” Sonic sighed and poked at a mug he’d been given. “And I really don’t have time to sit around talking.”

“You worry too much. From the looks of it he’s only going to the least significant zones.” Rusty shrugged.

“I don’t think that that’s what he’ll be doing for long.”

“Sonic, d’ya know what that big blue fog is?” Kerri finally decided to pipe up, and Sonic blinked at her.

“No… Well, I know what it is, it’s Genocide City. But I don’t know what it is.”

“Uh huh, well it’s the ghost of the Marble Hill City!” Lucy joined in. “Apparently, like, Green Hill Zone and Marble Zone used to be one really big city! Uh. Yeah, and then there was all the Blue Star happening and it completely destroyed it, leaving Genocide City behind!”

Sonic frowned, taking in what the squirrel had blurted out in rapid succession. “Oh?”

“Uh huh. Blue Star causes all sortsa trouble!” Kerri nodded. “I heard it ripped up most of the original city, leaving just the ruins in Marble Zone, and turning Green Hill from the forest it once was to the big fields and palm-trees that it is.”

“Yeah, and it turned Marble Zone into the lava type place it is now.” Lucy chattered again. “That was years and years and years ago though.”

“A millennium or so.” Rusty shrugged.

“Oh. Well… Sounds about right.” Sonic sighed, all this talk about the Blue Star and the Genocide City getting him down. “I… I really have to get going now.”

“Awww…. But we wanted to talk to you longer.” Suzie whined.

“Yeah, not every day you see a blue hedgehog.” Rusty agreed.

“You’ll come back to visit, right?” Lucy and Kerri asked loudly, grinning and giggling when Sonic nodded.

“Yeah… Next time I pass this way, I’ll say hi.” Sonic called out “Thanks for the breakfast!”

“Oh, you’re going already?” The mother squirrel walked up to Sonic and handed him a bag “Here, I packed you something to eat later on. Be careful little hedgehog.”

“Thank you very much.” Sonic bowed politely as he took the parcel, and slipped it into the leaf bag, which he checked still contained both of the singing gemstones. Satisfied that it did, he nodded. “I’ll see you all again later!”

“Bye Sonic!” the young squirrels replied in chorus.

Sonic stepped outside, and the family followed him out to wave. The hedgehog grinned at them, and was gone within seconds, leaving them to stare at the dust cloud behind him.

He jumped high into the air occasionally as he ran, and watched the rapidly approaching mass of metal that was Spring Yard Zone. A small smirk played across his face, and he kicked up his speed. ‘You think you’re getting away from me? Think again, Doctor Robotnik.’

~TBC~

-----------------

That's it for now ;) comments etc, either on this one or on the version I have posted on ff.net, are always welcome :3

[you]Blue Star[/you]

[you]Part 8: The Spring Yard Zone[/you]

Landing with a clang on the metal walkway, Sonic the Hedgehog peered over the edge of the building he was standing atop. The roof had looked so high up from below, Sonic couldn't resist the urge to see if he could run up the side of the scaffolding to get to it. The surface was made of a reddish metal, and towered over the wide field he had just left.

Sonic gave a sigh as he looked back towards the distant mountains that blocked the Green Hill Zone from view, and reluctantly turned away from the sight, knowing that if he kept looking he'd end up running straight back to make sure that what had happened hadn't been a dream. Instead, the hedgehog concentrated on the sound each foot made as it hit the walkway, purposefully taking him onwards with his journey.

He blinked at the view that was now in front of him. A lengthy expanse of towers and slopes, with the occasional colourful light decorating the area. Sonic frowned, and rolled his eyes, stifling a small laugh despite himself. This wasn't an amusement park, like he'd believed it was all the time, it was a city. Albeit no less under construction. Cranes adorned the landscape and there were steep ledges and large drops everywhere. Sonic blinked as he came up to a field of floating spheres; emblazoned with large yellow stars in red and blue circles; and looked over the nearest one in puzzlement.

“How is it doing that?”

By 'that', the hedgehog meant the way it floated in thin air. There was no sounds of engines or motors, nothing that he could figure made it hover. He waved a hand underneath it, and frowned, repeating his question in a manner that implied that the sphere should answer him. When the metal object merely floated there in response, he pouted and walked around it a few times, before folding his arms and scowling at the mocking yellow star.

“Okay ball-thing, you asked for it.”

Sonic backed away from the orb, fully intending to get a run up to jump at it. But he'd lost track of his position when he had circled it, and so ended up reversing into another of the floating spheres. He was bounced forwards suddenly with a yelp, and crashed into the sphere that he had originally been aiming to jump at. These one in turn ricocheted him backwards again, so Sonic jumped to prevent himself crashing into the one behind him once more. Jumping backwards wasn't one of his strong points, however, and he found himself flung vertically into the air as he landed atop the buffer he had been trying to avoid.

He finally managed to curl into a ball to attempt to protect himself, but being thrown between bizarre hovering objects that belonged on a pinball table was not his cup of tea. Pinging noises followed him around this seemingly endless field of bouncers, before he suddenly hit something very hard and very metal. And very not bouncy. Uncurling, he put his hands to his head in an effort to stop it spinning, and muttered curses at the buffers under his breath.

“Ow. Ow ow ow.” Sonic growled and struggled to his feet, rubbing his head irritably “I guess it is an amusement park after all. Though anyone who could be amused by that has a very weird mind.” Giving one last glare back at the star buffers, he carried onwards. “Well I guess they did get me forwards eventua- arrrrrgh!”

Sonic swore loudly and vividly as he plummeted from the top of the building, falling rapidly down towards the floor below. Which reminded him vaguely of the type of building blocks that children lock together in appearance. He instinctively curled up again, even though he knew that it would not stop him losing the use of a few limbs if he hit that floor. The added spin from the motion only served to speed up his descent, and he grunted as he hit something that gave way beneath him, cushioning his landing.

As he started uncurling, winded from the impact, there was the sudden, snapping sound of a spring, and he found himself airborne again, the wind rushing past his ears at an alarming speed. He twisted around to face the floor again, and it dawned on him. Those rapidly shrinking dots on the floor weren't building blocks, they were large, metal springs. And they were coming closer again. Sonic scrabbled in the air, in some form of an attempt to pull himself towards the next ledge, but only succeeded in throwing himself a few feet further forward. He hit the next spring and was instantly flying upwards again. So he repeated the scrabbling, and as he started to fall, he reached out a hand and caught hold of the wire mesh in the wall.

He yelled out as the rest of his body finished its much shortened descent, his weight pulling at the muscles in his shoulder before he could bring his other hand up to spread the strain out a bit. Not before an alarming pain shot through his wrist though. Sonic swore again, forcing his hand to keep gripping the wire as he kicked the tips of his sneakers into the wide gaps in the mesh. He slowly climbed up the wall this way, and eventually pulled himself over the top of the ledge.

Before he could rest, he had to roll to one side, almost slipping off the walkway again, when a large, pink, spiky robot trundled at him. Sonic stared at it as it stopped at the edge of the building, turned around, and started rolling the other way.

“Oh I've had enough of this.”

The hedgehog walked up to the crab-like crawling robot, picked up a loose pipe from a nearby pile on the floor, and swung it at the machine angrilly. The robot's head caved in and Sonic followed the swing through, propelling it over the edge and into the spring field below. He watched as the machine rapidly fell apart, disintegrating more each time it came into view above the edge, until all that was left was the rather perplexed animal that had been inside it. The small pink pig landed with a thud on the ledge, squealed at the large blue hedgehog, and bolted.

Sonic twisted his ears to listen to the sounds of its trotters as it ran away in the direction that he had been going, and shrugged. There had to be a way down if the pig knew where it was going. So he shouldered the pipe and checked to see if his bag was still there, frowning at a small tear in the leaf. He sighed, mentally judging how long it would take for the makeshift bag to get damaged beyond repair.

“Stupid springs. Making me tear my bag. I better see if I can find a proper one as soon as I find more people.”

The hedgehog frowned again, having realised that he'd hit on a point. This was a construction site, and so far he had seen neither hide nor hair nor scale nor feather of the workers. He walked to the edge of the rooftop he was standing on, and looked around below, holding onto a neon light fixture to keep his balance. When he didn't spy a single worker, he snorted.

“Maybe it's a holiday...” Sonic muttered quietly to himself, but there was a little, nagging voice in his head. 'Or maybe it's something more sinister'. He shook that thought away quickly and nodded “Definitely a day off. Or maybe that Robotnik bloke scared them off.”

Sonic noted the Buzz Bombers flying in a v-formation below him, and hissed at them, before turning and walking the way the Terra pig had gone. His left wrist was throbbing, and Sonic shifted the pipe over to his other hand to ease off the use of that hand. The hedgehog walked quickly, but cautiously, his ears twisting back and forth as he listened for any sign of danger.

He came to the entrance of a pathway that headed downwards at an angle into the building below, and paused. The red metal floor was smooth and sloping, and Sonic stepped carefully forwards, looking around the corridor curiously. The walls were the same metal as the floor, and there were circular indentations in them. What for, he could not guess.

“Huh?” His emerald eyes caught sight of a small, hand held computer laying in a corner, so he walked over and picked it up, flipping it over in his hand repeatedly to get a better look. “Wonder who's this is... Well I better leave it-”

Before Sonic could finish his sentence, the floor started shaking and a very low rumble was audible. The sound got louder and the floor shook faster, and Sonic turned around, to see a very large blue metal ball tumbling towards him. He yelped and turned, scrabbling for purchase on the slippery floor, before managing to run in the opposite direction.

His feet blurred as the orb rolled at him faster, and the slope got steeper, until Sonic lost his footing and ended up in a similar, albeit much smaller, ball, bouncing down the corridor slightly ahead of the sphere. He crashed into a low wall at the end, and hurriedly uncurled to jump over it. As soon as he did so, the rumbling stopped. Sonic paused for a moment, then decided to risk looking over the wall to see what had chased him like that boulder from that movie he'd seen a while back.

A large, armadillo-like robot stared back at him. Its body was like two half-spheres now it was open, and it even had little gun-metal grey arms and legs. Sonic glared at it for a moment, and stood up, fully intending to wallop the machine with the pipe that had rolled down the hill beside him; once he could reach it that was; when the rolling robot jumped and curled up again, rushing past his head to continue down the corridor.

The hedgehog blinked after it, then sat on the wall for a moment. “Where the bloody hell did that come from?!” he wondered aloud, before looking down at his hand, noticing that he'd kept hold of the computer. Shrugging, he shifted his position and left the pipe where it currently lay, turning his attention to the grey, pocket sized device.

Pulling it open, Sonic looked over the keyboard and screen with interest. Small letters were marked in the cover, a tiny, neat little P and an L. Sonic shrugged, they must be the initials of the person who owned the machine. He frowned at it thoughtfully, then flicked the on switch and watched the screen glow to life. He rapidly found himself disappointed at being faced with a password screen, and grumbled at it, knowing that he had little to no chance of guessing the right code. But, being Sonic, he was determined to see what was in the computer now.

His fingers darted over the keyboard in a random fashion, in some vague attempt to access the handheld's contents. The computer beeped angrily each time he typed a wrong code, to which he responded with a light growl before continuing his efforts. Sonic looked up the slope that he'd come down whilst he typed, and pouted at noticing a step staircase on each side next to the wall. 'Typical' he thought to himself, and turned his head back to the computer as it made a different beep to the one before.

“Finally!” He exclaimed as the screen showed up a list of files “Now what's in here...”

Sonic scrolled through the contents happily, muttering as he looked over blueprints that he found, including ones for the bumpers and a map of the Zone. He smiled when he looked over the latter one, and made the decision to keep the device, if only to stop himself from getting lost within the maze of buildings that Spring Yard looked to be. He poked at the screen, and grinned at noting it was touch sensitive, before scrolling around the map to get a better look.

“That must be the fastest route through to the other side of the Zone... I'll go that way I think.” Sonic frowned at the screen, and checked around to see what else was on the computer, before closing it and slipping it into the bag with the gemstones, which rang quietly again “Okay, let's go.”

Getting to his feet, Sonic looked at his wrist where he'd injured it before, and sighed. The joint was slightly stiff to move, but he kept shifting it around anyway, to stop it from locking up. He looked back at the pipe, and reached down to pick it up again, before using it as a makeshift cane to push himself to a standing position, since he really did not want to move. His stomach growled, and he looked hungrily at the lunch the squirrels had given him, before deciding to wait a little longer.

Stretching, he lifted the pipe up to his shoulder and started walking along the route he'd read in the map. Sonic watched around the corridor carefully, listening for any more of those 'Rollers', and kept his grip on the pipe tense and ready to swing if needed. He stepped out of the corridor and into another open area, with some more buffers floating overhead. Sonic shook his head at them, deciding instead to walk around them. As he did he noticed the edge of the floor nearby.

“Oh flipping hell, what now?” The hedgehog was already annoyed with the Zone, and wanted out as fast as possible. He knew Starlight Zone was just past the Spring Yard, and beyond that was a large power-plant that had been built around a year previously. And he had a suspicion who built it.

Before he could curse again, a large, turquoise block lowered in front of him, drawing level with the edge he was on. Looking up, Sonic saw more of the blocks moving in a line, ascending and descending in a vertical tunnel. Squinting to see more, he caught sight of another ledge high above the one he was on. The platform rose before he could step on it, so he watched it with interest. When it came back down, he walked onto it, ad waited for it to rise again. It stopped about halfway up the tunnel, so he stepped on the next one as it lowered. The third stopped just above stepping height for him, so he jumped onto it instead, then ran out onto the higher ledge.

He leaned on the pipe as he looked back to the column below, and snorted. The designs for those lifts had been inside the pocket computer, so he'd been expecting to see them somewhere, just not so soon. Sonic mentally insulted the lack of regular footpaths, and continued on his way. He walked into another covered area, this time it was a flat tunnel, so he wasn't so worried about the prospect of fleeing from another Roller. The roof lowered abruptly, coming to a mere three foot above his head, so he held the pipe horizontally to prevent catching it on the ceiling. His progress went well, until a red crab robot, like the ones he'd seen in the Green Hill Zone, blocked his route and fired its plasma balls at him.

Sonic took a step backwards and watched the attack fizzle out on the floor, before throwing the pipe javelin-style into the machine's head. It sparked, then exploded, leaving a small rabbit sitting in a daze on the floor. Sonic walked past the hapless animal and picked up the pipe again, then continued down the corridor.

Which started to slope again.

Sonic shuffled over to the steps on the side before he slipped, then cautiously walked downwards some more. As the incline steepened, he pressed against the wall to let another Roller pass him by, not in the mood to run again. What he hadn't been prepared for was the robot sharply turning on the spot and powering up the hill towards him. A startled yelp preceded his speeding back the way he came, followed by the robot in hot pursuit. As soon as he was out in the open again, he leapt frantically for a bloating buffer above him, dropping the pipe in the process, and let it spring him up to cling onto a ledge in the wall.

The Roller uncoiled and Sonic stared at the luminous green gemstone it held between its stubby limbs. The hedgehog licked his lips, and dropped down towards it, aiming a kick for its head. The Roller rapidly rolled out of the way and Sonic ended up using some very colourful language as he ended up tripping over by landing at an awkward angle. He scrabbled to his feet just as the robot barrelled towards him again, and managed to leap aside before he was flattened. He noticed his pipe laying on the floor nearby, and dashed towards it, willing his legs to get him out of the path of yet another charge.

As the Roller hit the nearby wall with a heavy-sounding crash, Sonic gathered up the pipe and sprung up to his 'safe' perch on the wall. The spherical robot span in circles below him, unable to launch itself high enough to reach him, before it uncurled again. At seeing the jewel again, Sonic propelled himself off the wall once more, twisted in mid air, and threw the pipe down into the weakly protected inside of the machine. The pipe crumpled with the force of the blow, and Sonic watched the robot explode in an impressive fireball, and raised a hand in front of his face, catching the glowing jewel as it flew through the air at him.

Sonic looked at the stone's pulsing light, and put it into the bag with the others. The leaf probably wasn't going to last much longer, but he'd replace it when he could. He nudged the pig with his foot, urging it to be on its way, before heading back into the corridor at a run.

He sped down the angled corridor, before jumping over a spiked flail as it swung out of cuts in the floor. Skidding to a stop just past it, he watched it circle a few times, and wondered what bizarre mind would put those blatantly dangerous things in such a small corridor. Sonic shook his head, deciding once and for all that the person in charge of development was a nutcase. He sat down on a raised section of floor, and took out his lunch.

Sonic chewed thoughtfully on the peanut butter sandwich, realising he didn't have any idea what he was going to do once he made Robotnik explain what happened properly. There was no way he could repair the Green Hill to the home he remembered it as, and there was no way...

No way to bring his family back.

Sonic finished the mouthful of bread and lowered his hand into his lap, suddenly feeling very not hungry at all as the true scale of what had happened dawned on him. He looked past the rotating spikes with a silent stare, in the direction he had come from. He'd always heard that Genocide wouldn't venture into pre-existing Zones. So why had it come into Green Hill? Sonic felt it was something to do with Robotnik, but couldn't figure out the connection.

What was he going to do once he caught him? The guy was up to something, that much was certain. And he'd attacked an innocent village for no reason. Sonic growled lightly. What he was going to do didn't matter. He was going to make him pay for such a crime.

With that, Sonic stuffed the rest of the sandwich into his mouth, turned one hundred and eighty degrees, and started running down the corridor, dodging side to side to avoid large spiked balls, and jumping to use the Zone's naming springs to get to higher areas. He charged forwards, bouncing from buffers and shredding through robots, until he came to the edge of the Zone. Ahead he could see the towering green structures that made up the Starlight Zone, but more importantly, directly in front of him, Robotnik was hovering. The scientist noticed the determined glare of the hedgehog as he stood on the bridge between the Zones, and laughed.

“Hell bent on destroying me still, my boy?”

“You bet, Robotnik.” Sonic flexed his wrists before pulling his fists up in front of his face. “C'mon, gimme your best shot!”

“Now why would I want to do that, when-” he laughed again as Sonic was knocked aside by a Roller “-my Badniks will do it for me?”

Sonic muttered something under his breath, and jumped as the Roller came back. He caught his toe on the speeding robot, and fell forwards, hitting his jaw on the brick bridge, whilst his bag snapped off his shoulder and skidded along the floor. The gemstones and computer fell from it, and spread across the bridge. Sonic scrabbled to his feet, rubbing his chin, and rushed for the bag. Robotnik on the other hand, had different ideas.

“You have Chaos Emeralds?!” he yelled at Sonic, his gentlemanly voice dissipating in an instant. “Give them to me!”

“Like hell I will!” Sonic scooped the Emeralds into the leaf, grabbed the computer, and turned to face the oncoming Roller “Oh no, you ain't getting me again!”

As the Badnik rolled towards him once more, Sonic leapt to one side and swung his foot hard at it, knocking it off its intended course, and off the edge of the bridge. Whilst Sonic clasped the bag close to him, he glared up at Robotnik, who hammered at buttons in his machine. A large, steel spike slid out from the bottom, and he piloted the craft over to Sonic.

“I want those Emeralds, and you are going to give them to me!”

“No way! Whoa!”

Sonic backflipped away as the hovercraft crashed down to where he had stood a moment before, then raised up, pulling a segment of the bridge with it. The hedgehog gaped at the large hole now in the pathway, and looked back up at the scientist, before being forced to scrabble backwards once more as Robotnik pulled up more of the bridge, shattering it as the spike withdrew.

“Stop moving you annoying little rodent!”

“Not while you got that thing!”

Sonic jumped over the gap this time as Robotnik smashed yet more of the bridge, and nearly lost his footing. He managed to fall forwards onto the solid stone, but when Robotnik plunged into the brick in front of him, he found himself forced to jump. He leaped over the hovercraft, and onto the safer side of the bridge, as the brick he'd been standing on dropped down into the chasm below.

What Sonic hadn't seen, however, was the large fan that was on the other side of the bridge. As the brick beneath the hovercraft shattered, Robotnik pointed a remote control at it, and the blades whirled into life.

Sonic yelled and ran in an effort to not be pushed over the cliff...

Robotnik pressed another button on the remote...

The fan increased its speed...

And Sonic was sent flying through the broken bridge, clinging stubbornly the the Emeralds and falling into the depths below with a scream.

Robotnik laughed and clapped his large hands together. “Now that little pest is out the way, I can finish what I started.”

~TBC~

I'm sorry, but copying and pasting somehow made the fanfiction unreadable in the forum, so to read the next chapter, click the link below.

Blue Star: Part 9- The Labyrinth Zone