Through the Looking Glass: Chapter 5-C
Rouge: Chapter 5
When the bat woke up that morning, she noticed the wrinkled bedsheets where Tooty had laid down the previous night. Realizing that she was not there when the morning came, Rouge was happier than she had been in her entire life. Finally, something had gone completely right for her in the previous few days, and it took something as simple as a batch of Chaos Emeralds to make things right to somebody.
Of course, this left her with a lie she would have to tell to keep Eggman from noticing anything. She was planning on telling the truth to Sonic and his friends in written form and asking them to keep very, very quiet about it, but Eggman should never have to know.
Thinking about this, she jumped out of her bed and moved towards the desk. She scribbled down her story on a piece of paper for Sonic and friends to read silently while thinking of a lie that she could use to fool Eggman. She figured it would work for barely a day, seeing as how the doctor was a genius and could figure things out, but she knew something would have to do until he found out.
As she finished writing the note, she looked it over before folding it up and placing it in her cleavage. She went straight towards the prisoners' room with the intent of giving the paper to Sonic to read, a wide smile on her face. She was so happy she could sing out to the heavens about her happiness.
However, when she entered the room, the scene she walked in on shocked Rouge out of her blissful state. She found Cream kneeling in her cell with Shadow being asleep in her lap. The black hedgehog had a few singe marks in his skin, and what was even more disturbing was that some of the fur had been burned right off. The bat was quite disturbed at seeing this.
"What happened?" asked rouge as she rushed over to Cream's cage, Amy and Sonic both looking at her as the pink hedgehog held the azure hedgehog with loving arms. "Why'd he hit the cages?"
"I don't know!" replied Sonic as he looked at the black hedgehog. "He woke us up in the middle of the night with so much noise I'm surprised you slept through all that! Eggman didn't sleep, and he's farther away from us than you are!"
Rouge was baffled by this. "What do you mean?" asked the bat.
"It was the wierdest thing, Ms. Rouge!" replied Cream. "We were sleeping, and then he jumped up screaming!"
"And then the next thing we knew, he was going apeshit while screaming about stuff like how there was so much Chaos energy that it was hurting him!" replied Amy excitedly. "And when he was yelling, he kept on hitting the cage. And right when Eggman got here, he passed out for some reason! It was so wierd, Rouge!"
Upon hearing this explanation, the bat froze absolutely still. Shadow needed to have a great deal of Chaos energy go by him for him to feel any form of pain from it. However, she also knew that there was no possible source for such immense power...
...But then she remembered that Tooty had been sent back home the previous night. And if Shadow had experienced pain from Chaos energy...
"Oh, no..." said Rouge, putting a hand over her breast. "I..."
Instantly, Sonic's emerald eyes narrowed. He glared at Rouge before crossing his arms in front of him.
"You know something about what's going on, don't you?" asked Sonic crossly.
"Uh, no!" replied Rouge quickly in a half-shout. Sonic was about to fume at the bat when he noticed that she was looking around to the audio surveillance spots while taking a slip of paper out of her cleavage. She then slipped the note into the cage, and then the blue hedgehog got a hold of it and brought it up to his face.
"Whatever you do, don't read that aloud!" she said in a whisper. "I'll be back in a bit!"
And with this, the bat left the prisoner's room, leaving Cream, Amy, and Sonic to look at the note. Slowly, the male hedgehog opened the note, and the three of them read it at their own pace, without actually speaking.
She then barged into the control room, where Eggman was preparing some sick experiments for Tails to try out, no doubt. When she entered, she found the doctor wasn't saying anything, nor was he playing any music like she half expected him to at this point. Instead, he was hunched over a radar system, studying it carefully and punching something into the nearby keyboard.
The bat moved to Eggman's side before the doctor finally noticed her presence. Coughing, he looked at her with a crooked smile on his face.
"Hello, Rouge," replied the doctor with a strange kind of perverse joy in his tone.
"I heard about what happened to Shadow," replied Rouge, slightly unnerved by the tone of his voice but deciding to ignore it. "What happened?"
The doctor then turned to the computer and pointed at its screen. The world map was displayed on a large screen, with two large electric dots over two areas just above one of the tropics. Instantly, Rouge's fur stood on end, and she feared the worst.
"You see those two dots?" asked the doctor as he indicated them with a finger.
"Yeah?" asked Rouge, struggling to maintain her composure.
"Those two dots happen to be what caused Shadow to wake up in pain last night," replied Eggman. "Now the only thing that would make him do that would be a whole ton of Chaos energy that would be expelled..."
Rouge nodded, sweat beginning to travel down her face as she looked. She was only thankful she had forgotten to apply eyeshadow that morning. "So, those caused him pain? Then why are they on the other side of the world?"
"Well, the energy started from here," replied the doctor as he sat with his legs folded over each other. "But then it did something wierd; as I was watching this radar, these two dots here rapidly progressed first to this point--" Eggman pointed at the higher of the two dots. "--and the straight on over here." Here he indicated the lower of the two dots. "Almost like a Chaos Control, but not quite."
The former G.U.N. agent had a feeling she already knew what had happened, but she chose not to say anything to the doctor. "So... what's the difference?"
"First, have you ever heard of a Chaos Mooring?" asked the doctor. When the bat shook her head a little too fervently for comfort, he looked back to the radar system. "I wouldn't be surprised; not a whole lot of people know about it."
"Chaos Mooring?" asked Rouge in anticipation. "What's that?"
"Well, it works something like this. Let's say we're here with some emeralds--" here he indicated the small cluster of dots that were the five emeralds that Eggman had in his base that were just south of the lower of the two dots, "--and let's say there are another set of chaos emeralds and a shamanic item to add to that. Also suppose that the Master Emerald is in the proximity of one of you."
"Okay?" asked Rouge.
"Now, you've set up a pair of mooring posts," replied Eggman. "Now, suppose somebody is here, and somebody is over there. Now, they both go to bed and fall asleep. What happens then is that an arc of Chaos energy goes between the two mooring posts where the Chaos Emeralds and the one side with the shamanic object are. And what happens there is that the person nearest to at least one emerald of their respective set of Chaos Emeralds starts to see the person who's closest to both an emerald and the shamanic object in their dreams. And this actually goes on in an alternate dimension where neither party are really asleep."
The bat scratched her head. Her and Banjo's hypothesis had been correct all along. But this only added to the confusion that the bat was feeling; it explained why she could remember every detail of her dreams vividly, but it did not explain how she had been able to move the portrait and Tooty around.
"But why are you mentioning this now?" asked the bat. "I mean..."
The doctor chuckled darkly as he pointed a finger in the air. "Ah, this is where it gets good!" replied Eggman jovially. "Once both parties have at least five emeralds in their proximity along with the shamanic object and the Master Emerald, people can start bringing things into their dreams to trade with others. Of course, this is a small feat, as it produces an energy signal too small to actually be read by this technology after a certain distance, and it can't trade large mass. However..."
He turned to the bat, a small, malicious grin on his face. The instant she saw this, Rouge knew she was screwed. The fear she was experiencing as this realization dawned upo her kept her paralyzed in place, however, and now that she saw the grin all attempts at keeping face in front of the doctor crumbled to dust almost instantly.
"If either party has some combination that results in both of them having all seven emeralds on both sides, they can transport organic mass to another point," he said. "And then, there's a spike of energy at the place where the organic mass was transported, which is where the remaining emeralds would be." Here, he stood up, and suddenly Rouge found herself backing into the wall. "Now, I gave you one Chaos Emerald at the start of this scheme to take over the world, and then you assumed guardianship of that bear. So that gives me reason to believe two things. One, that the remaining two emeralds are at either one of the points indicated by the radar. Two, that you transported that bear to one of those points."
The doctor kept that malicious grin as Rouge bumped into a wall, the sweat pouring down her face from fright and shock. She looked up at the doctor, very uncertain topaz looking into soulless goggles that flashed with the most evil overtones Rouge had ever seen.
"I'll give you one hour, and one hour only," he said, on the verge of cracking up. "If I don't find that bear within that time, then that emerald is mine, and you will become my prisoner! And then, you'll get to watch as I take over the world, with the corpse of that little bear to stare at you the whole time! And there's nothing you can do, as I'll be sending my troops to a certain set of coordinates tomorrow, and I'll be going there myself after two days to collect my treasure!"
Rouge gulped loudly and nodded ridiculously fast. "Y-yes... uh... sir..." she replied. "I'll find her..."
"Good," replied the doctor with a grin as Rouge moved towards the door. "If you don't find her, I'd like to thank you in advance for helping me out, skank!"
As the doctor laughed maniacally, Rouge exited the control room.
She dashed towards her room first to grab the Chaos Emerald from there to hide it somewhere. She knew that technically she could run to the storeroom on the other end of the control room, but she also knew that he kept his most vital technologies stored in a vault that even she could barely crack, and unfortunately this included the technology to turn invisible. Thus, she only had one hour to find a computer away from the control room, hack into the system, change the coordinates that Eggman had set for his supposed attack, cover her tracks from that so they wouldn't realize they were in the wrong place until the absolute last minute possible, and hide the Chaos Emerald somewhere close to the prisoner's room so she could keep on talking to Banjo.
With this in mind, she dashed into her room, literally threw the mattress up, grabbed the emerald from where she had placed it under the mattress, and dashed right out. She barely even gave her room a final glance as she ran out; she was so pressed for time she decided to forgo that clichéd idea of seeing one's living space for the last time.
The bat barged into the prisoners' room with such speed that it surprised Sonic.
"Whoah, Rouge, what's the rush?" asked Sonic.
Rouge did not reply, noticing a computer console in one of the corners. She ran straight for it, jumping right under one of the cells straight towards the monitor. Once there, she began typing away, hoping to hack into Eggman's databases with enough time to cover her tracks. She had taken fifteen minutes to hide the emerald, however, so she was pretty confident that she could hack into the system in forty-five minutes.
"Come on, come on, come on, come on, come on..." whispered Rouge repeatedly as she typed away.
Sonic would have said something, but Amy put an arm on his shoulder. They looked at each other, and this effectively kept Sonic's mouth shut. When Rouge did manage to hack into Eggman's database, she raised her fist in the air triumphantly, knowing that she was done with half of the battle.
Cream, who was still cradling Shadow in her lap, looked at the bat with bewilderment running greatly through them. Sonic was fighting back the urge to speak as Rouge typed away, hoping to find something about where the coordinates for Eggman's attack were.
Finally, she came across a screen of coding that Rouge suddenly paused on. To the normal eye, this coding would have been insignificant, but Rouge knew that this controlled how the computer read Chaos energy. Quickly, she looked over each equation, finally finding an equation that looked that it could control where the energy was pinpointed.
"How the hell does he expect this kind of coding to work?" asked Rouge softly, wondering what was going through Eggman's head as he had written a surprisingly simple equation to figure out. "I'd think a guy with 300 IQ would do a better job of hiding his tracks than this..."
"Huh?" asked Sonic, finally speaking up in his sheer confusion.
Rouge did not reply, instead wondering how much she could affect where the dot appeared. As far as she knew, the doctor had not given the coordinates to his robots, so she was left to wonder how much she should change the equation without him noticing. For once, she was thankful that his world maps did not display coordinate numbers; she would have been screwed otherwise.
With this in mind, the bat then changed the equation ever so slightly; however, she knew that it would be enough to greatly derail Eggman's search. When she got out of this screen of coding and moved through the rest of Eggman's database, she found the world map screen again, and her keen eyes noticed that both dots had shifted ever so slightly to the side; even though she could see the difference, she was sure he would never notice with his eyesight the way it was. She read that area of the map quickly, reading 'Isle 'o Hags' and realizing that Banjo had to go to the eastern part of the island.
The bat sighed in relief. Now all that was left for her to do was to cover her tracks as best she could, but since she had changed the fundamental coding of the system she figured it would be hard to catch. So she simply did a more elaborate equivalent of hitting the back button, and suddenly the computer was monitoring the electricity that ran through the bars.
"Okay," she said, sighing in relief. "I'll be back in a few seconds."
The bat promptly dashed out of the room, leaving the two hedgehogs and the rabbit to be very confused. The entire process had taken ten minutes, and even as Rouge ran back into the control room where Eggman sat hunched over his console she knew that she had one small victory over the doctor even in defeat.
"All right, I confess," she said as Eggman turned to see her. "The bear isn't here... I think she's at the lower of the two points..."
The doctor grinned evilly as his thumb went over to a button. "He he he..." he chuckled. "I knew you'd bend under pressure."
Eggman pressed the button, and then Rouge looked silently at him.
"What did that do?" asked the bat.
"It sent all of my robots the coordinates to where the energy was detected," he said. "I wouldn't have wanted a false alarm, after all..."
At this, the doctor laughed as two robots came in and roughly grabbed Rouge by the arms. To keep up appearances, she struggled with them briefly, her eyes very afraid as the robots carried her out of the control room. When the robots dragged her into the prison room, she was roughly tossed into the small cage all the way at the end of the row that was far from Cream. Upon hitting the bars, she let out a scream as she was shocked briefly before hitting the ground of her elevaged cage. Once the cage door was closed on her, the robots filed out, leaving Sonic, Amy, and Cream to stare at the bat with a bewildered expression on their faces.
And immediately, Sonic pounced on her with questions.
"What the hell just happened?" asked the blue hedgehog. "Why--?"
"Eggman found me out!" replied the bat. "He found me out! Please tell me you read what I gave you!"
Amy gave her a quizzical expression. "You're being awfully loud about it now!" she exclaimed. "Yes, we read the note, but shouldn't you be quiet about it?"
Rouge shook her head. "There's no point in keeping it down now," she replied. "He caught me based on energy readings from what happened with that..."
Sonic glared at Rouge before pointing a finger at her in accusation. "Aha!" he replied. "I knew you had something to do with how--"
"And don't you think for one second that I had my own interests in mind!" shouted Rouge. "That's how that bear I saved managed to get out of here, otherwise Shadow wouldn't be out cold and I wouldn't be sitting here!"
All three of the other occupants of the prisoners' room looked at Rouge with a strange expression on their faces. "So... you tried to do something good...?" asked Cream.
"And this is what happens," replied Rouge, glaring at the direction of the control room as she sat down. "I get caught, and I'm sent here." Sonic shook his head angrily, but before he could say anything the bat continued. "But you know what? It was totally worth it. I... you read the entire note, right?"
"Up to the point where you talked about that other bear you saw in your dreams?" asked Sonic softly. "Yeah."
"Well, that bear... she was special to him," said the former G.U.N. agent as she looked up. "And... even if I knew this would happen, I wouldn't have wanted to see him cry. He's so... gentle... Guys like him just don't look good with tears on their faces. I didn't want him to suffer from not knowing my charge's anymore. Call it pity if you want, but as soon as I found out about their relation I said to myself; 'I'd go to any length to see him smile'. And, so, I gave him his sister back. He was so happy... Even if this is what would have happened, I wouldn't have it any other way..."
As Rouge looked dreamily at the grey walls, Amy and Cream were genuinely touched by this small explanation. Sonic was dead silent for around three seconds. Then, he shifted, a playful smirk having taken a hold of his face as his eyes glinted in mischief.
"Really?" asked the blue hedgehog. "I think someone's in love here..."
Rouge was immediately caught off guard, and despite herself a great blush showed through her white fur. "W-what?" she asked. "Why d-do you say that?"
Amy punched the air with her arms, her hand barely grazing the cage as she let out a short whoop. "Aha!" shouted the rose-tinted hedgehog gleefully. "You are in love!"
Rouge's blush only intensified, but then it faded rather quickly as she thought about what Eggman was planning to do the next day. Surprised, the three other prisoners looked to the bat.
"Wait, Banjo..." she said. "Eggman's going to head straight for him tomorrow!"
"What?" asked Cream. "How are you going to warn him?"
Rouge winked at them. "Well, when a girl's got a way, a girl's got a way," she whispered. "I've got something together, don't worry."
"Yeah, but what is it?" asked Cream, whispering to the bat as she was the closest one to her.
The bat's soft blue eyes glanced at the places where the microphones were before whispering. "I'll tell you in two days when Eggman isn't here."
The rabbit gave a confused glance before whispering this information to Sonic and Amy. All the while, Rouge looked skyward, hoping that the place where she had hid the emerald was close enough to her so she could talk to Banjo that night in her dream.