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Let There Be Rock
Topic Started: Feb 9 2012, 11:13 PM (11 Views)
Sonic
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Played by Fallyn
Posted by: Vector Aug 8 2011, 11:33 PM
Oh, was he in a bad mood.

The dark haze of pollution that choked the once clear skies of the Green Hills was nothing compared to the storming clouds of anger hanging inside the crocodile’s head.

Rusty colored mud squashed from the path under the bite of the tires as he took a rather wild turn, matting the already battered flanks of the old vehicle. Without even looking, Vector stretched an arm to the backseat, making sure the quarter pole he’d brought by just ‘cause you never knew’ wasn’t bumped out as the jeep entered an area with more dips on the ground than scales on his back, the machine starting giving cranky sounds in protest for the roughness of the bumps.

-Come on baby almost over- he encouraged the car with a low growl, darting careful looks around and tightening his grip on the wheel. The sand-colored thing had been a jeep back in the days, and a pretty decent one too according to how comfortable the seats still were, but now after all the tinkering and repairs it had gone through looked more like some sort of overgrown quad, pieces of the shell missing here and there, the cover faded and shredded, the stuffing coming out from holes big like the fat jeko-rats that had probably carved them in.

But as long as it didn’t fall apart around his ass, and whatever stuff kept the engine going didn’t fail him too, Vector didn’t care. All he wanted now was putting as much more miles between himself and Knothole. He needed to see new faces, to bury the one that was now making thunder strike in his mind.

First being all flirty then acting like if it had been nothing, and then be all flirty again…with the next guy. Sure, he probably had misunderstood some signals from the pretty golden squirrel whose sweet name sounded so sour on his tongue now, but the girl needed to tone down the level of appreciations she loved to spend about ‘such brave guys’.

Girls.

With all the shit happening around, he should have been thinking about more serious stuff, really. Serious business! Like…seeing if some of his whistleblowers down in Starlight got news of his friends.

Since he’d met Tails and known of the return of his blue buddy too he hadn’t been able to bat away the feeling that something was finally going to move on that front too. Had been a really long time. Heck, if Sonic and the others had returned from who-knew-where after three years, then why couldn’t Charmy or Mighty finally be back too?

Another rude turn, as he swept away the nasty little thought suggesting that they might be dead.

Whatever. Even if he’d got nothing new, at least the District was a good place to find distractions. New faces, yes. Possibly, pretty ones.

His amber eyes refocused on the landscape: there was something…wrong. How strange, he’d followed this track an hundred times, and it was almost like something was…missing. Just what… a smirk crossed his long muzzle as he finally got the wrong note in the whole thing: lack of notes! His wireless headphones had slipped down at some point due to the bumps, and he hadn’t even noticed. Letting go of the quarter pole, he repositioned them: no background was complete without music buzzing in his ears.

Some minutes passed, the desolate hills rolling by at the rhythm of drums and guitar, but when at some point he casually turned to make sure the heavy pole of metal hadn’t rolled away in the meanwhile,a movement at the corner of his eye got his attention: there was something in the sky, and it wasn’t the dust of his trail. It moved in a way dust didn’t, getting closer instead that blowing away and…

Whoa. Oh, this was bad. This was bad, bad, bad!

Amber eyes getting wide, Vector ripped out the headphones from his head, the
sound that should have warned him only now finally getting through: the eerie hum of a herd of Gunners! There was no mistaking it, plus the things were already close enough for even his not too brilliant sight be able to understand that he was in big trouble.

Great. As if the day hadn’t been bright enough till now.

-Get off my tail!- he shouted pushing down on the throttle like if his life depended on it (which it did, by the way) but the effect wasn’t the one he hoped, the flying machines obviously faster than the old jeep. The crocodile growled as the first darts started whipping the air over his head. Okay so no way to run away. But if he got to go down it wouldn’t have been with a dart in his back.

Heck, no!

The jeep took a last wide turn before stopping with a loud screech. Now face to face with the robots, the crocodile jumped on the backseat, tail swinging behind him, the pole firmly in his hand cutting not less dangerously in the air. Ah! If they tried to get close he’d known how to welcome them! But despite the determination on his face, and the aggressive light in his eyes, inside Vector felt his stomach have a loop as the damned things slowly surrounded him, seeming to obscure the already weak light of the sun.

Sweet Source. Just…how many there were?

He’d better get out of the car, yup, better…at least that way one of them would have survived this.

Posted by: Sonic Aug 10 2011, 03:50 PM
Sonic had seen the scar before. Flashes of it as the nurses cleaned the wound, or checked his stitches or changed his dressing. They’d all smiled and said how it wasn’t so bad, how it had healed so well, how it could have been so much worse. And he’d smiled back at them and nodded, and agreed with everything they said, figuring it would heal up soon, get smaller, be gone. But some how, reflected in his own mirror, standing next to his own bed in the dappled light streaming through the window of his tree house, it looked way worse that it ever had in the hospital.

The puckered, raised mark was an angry, raw pink, bright as a brand against the peach of his skin and the royal blue of his fur. It stood out like an exclamation point, a physical reminder of how badly he had messed up, and Sonic found himself placing a white gloved hand carefully over it, hiding it from view. But he couldn’t hide it forever, couldn’t just keep wearing bandages he no longer needed.

Wist had said the scar needed to breathe, which of course meant it needed to be in the fresh air. Despite knowing this Sonic couldn’t help but be freaked out by the thought of the thing ‘breathing’, as though it was something alien that had attached itself to him, not part of his body. But that was stupid. It was a part of his body now, though he could still hope it might heal over time. But for now he’d just have to suck it up and get used to it. A lot of other folks had gone through more serious stuff than this, he was lucky.

He just didn’t feel super lucky right now. He sighed, then smiled at the pouty hedgie in the mirror. “Hey it’s cool, man,” he reassured it. “You’re still hedgehog perfection.” He winked, and turned away from his reflection, feeling a little better.

The golden afternoon sunlight twinkled through the leaves, calling him outside, and Sonic pursued it. It really was a most glorious day, and he set off at a run, expertly dodging the people scattered around and leaving Knothole far behind. His feet found a familiar path, and he followed it without conscious thought, the wind whipping through his quills.

The weight of worry was left his dust, and he zipped happily through the trees, swinging from low hanging branches and launching himself from toppled trunks. But as he reached the edge of the forest, a totally bogus and unfamiliar smell made him stop abruptly. Reaching out to steady himself on a nearby oak branch, Sonic gazed wide eyed at the landscape before him that should have been Greenhill Zone. “Oh no,” he whispered.

The once emerald hills and valleys had been scorched to dirty brown, the sky overhead a dark angry red like dried blood as smoke spewed into it from the factories below, each one like a scar on the land. The crystal clear rivers and little waterfalls were black as oil, and a noxious smog that smelt of sulphur and burning rubber hung over everything. Sonic starred in horrified entrancement until a sudden loud crack brought him back to his senses. He had squeezed the slender branch so tightly, it had snapped in his hands, and he blinked down at the piece of broken wood.

He felt like he’d just been woken from some terrible nightmare, but when he looked back up, Greenhill was still destroyed. He could have turned back towards Knothole, run somewhere else, but instead Sonic found himself walking down the gentle slope into the destroyed zone. Today wasn’t a day for running away, it was a day for facing up to things. And he somehow felt that he needed to see this, needed to really understand. But that didn’t make it easy, though the gut wrenching shock was fading now, and all he felt was a numbing sense of loss as he trudged along. Even the ground underfoot felt wrong, oozy and weird, rather than springy as it once had been.

Something brightly coloured caught his eye, an orange and silver shape, crumbled in the shadow of the blackened remains of a palm tree. Sonic turned the little body over with to toe of one sneaker and looked down at the twisted remains of a Coconuts, the badnik’s single remaining eye staring sightless at the sky. He’d smashed so many of them in the past, but for some reason seeing it now made him feel sadder than ever.

Then his ears, which had been flat against his skull, suddenly pricked up at the sound of gunfire, and before the sound had even really reached Sonic’s brain he was in motion. Someone could be in trouble, but even if there wasn’t anyone to save, it would feel pretty good to smash some Horde bots right about now. He needed something to blame for all this destruction, some way to work out the hurt that was twisting inside him. But as he drew closer he realised there was someone, a familiar scaly someone, surrounded by the weird blade like bots known as Gunners.

“Vector!” Sonic put on an extra burst of speed, glittering chaos energy surrounding him and trailing out behind like the tail of a comet. When he was close enough, he leapt, curling into a spiky demolition ball. There was a series of crashes and showers of sparks as he ricocheted like a glowing blue bullet, and then Sonic dropped casually into the driver’s seat of the crocodiles battered jeep, feet propped up on the steering wheel. “Yo,” he said, waving a hand in greeting.

Posted by: Vector Aug 22 2011, 07:23 PM
Bang! Bang! Bang!

The loud hits of metal against metal as the crocodile rejected the assaults of the strange mechanic blade-bees had been almost rhythmic at first, the robot surrounding him shooting and leaping down according to some sort of ordinate scheme. Vector had always been good with rhythm so that after the very first attacks he’d took the right tempo…but here was the difference with the old ‘bots: even the dumbest Horde minion could adapt fast. And so just when the crocodile had started thinking maybe he could have a chance in this, the rhythm had changed, until the attacks had become totally random, unpredictable…and a whole darn lot faster.

BANG!
…and that had been close!
The crocodile winced as the hit reverberated along the metal, eyes still closed as he’d lifted the pole just in time to deflect the blow. Something cold brushed against his cheek, making his eyes shot open again, the crocodile blinking in disappointment at the wide Gunner-shaped bend now decorating his precious weapon.

-Whoa…-

He was still staring at it, wide-eyed, the gravity of the damage just dawning on his brain, that a blue whirlwind circled around him, so fast that he was glad he didn’t have a fur to tangle, some well known spiky ball scattering and smashing the Gunners: it would have been a cool show, if it had lasted something more than the time for him to even realize what was happening. Even if had passed so much time from the last time he’d seen him in action, that crazy flipper could mean only one thing: Sonic. Sonic was happening!

A last boom and the hedgehog uncurled, dropping right down on the driver seat of the jeep, flashing him a dazzling smile and a
-Yo!-

For yet another couple of seconds, the crocodile remained immobile, clutching at the pole, eyes darting to the buzzing broken shells on the ground around him and then back to the hedgehog, as if still not convinced that I was over, and that it was over because of Sonic, Sonic of all people! To think that once such a thing could have been considered routine, and now he found it hard to believe: the idea that he was back hadn’t really sticked to the crocodile’s mind...till now. His puzzlement didn’t last long: as if he hadn’t been fighting for his life until a second ago, Vector straightened up, brushed some dust away from his chest and put on a wide grin.

-Yo Blue! Nice saving man, but I was totally in control…- he spoke, waving the pole, the smile dropping and turning in a grimace as he looked at the large bend and the several dents on it, before roughly tossing it on the backseat.

-Sure you were man!- the hedgie replied with a wink. –I just figured I'd help speed things along a little, y'know?-

Vector couldn’t help but laugh at the reply, and wink back -…I know I know…you just couldn’t wait to talk with me…-

Of course he knew the other had totally saved his ass, and Sonic knew that he knew so everything was fine and both kept smiling. And just like that, the oddness of meeting a friend three years and an apocalypse later was swept under the metaphorical carpet.

-So, what were you doing here?...- Vector started asking, opening the door of the car and sweeping the hedgehog away from the driver seat with a swift move of his tail, the stuffing squeaking under the much more considerable weight as he took his place. -…out for a walk?- he ended the phrase, adjusting himself better before finally turning to look at his passenger, that was as well trying to sit more comfortably at his new place, his movements strangely…careful, and stiff.

Vector found himself frowning: had he got hurt?

-You could say that, kinda bogus scenery though... – Sonic replied almost in a sigh, his emerald eyes running on the landscape, his little triangular ears drooping.
But Vector didn’t follow the other’s gaze: his eyes were elsewhere, staring at the bright mark on the other’s belly-side. He’d heard of the wound of course, but hadn’t really imagined…that. He’d never seen him with more than a scratch. That was just…wrong. And a bit gross.

His not really much polite contemplation was interrupted as the boy suddenly winced of pain, a tattered white gloved hand creeping to the scar, hiding it. Vector resisted the impulse to ask if he was all right. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the kid was as much in a bad shape as his sneakers, and knowing him, he didn’t like it, so no need to point it out: he seemed down enough for what had happened to Green Hill already…Vector didn’t mind anymore, but sure it had to be quite a shock for the other…if he recalled the first time he’d-thinking better, he didn’t want to recall that day, no.

-Yeah not a place good for pic-nics anymore…- he muttered, bending to look for the keys of the jeep. He got half an idea to drive the fatigued hedgie back to Knothole II, without telling of course.

_Truer words never spoken…_ the hedgehog in question replied, before finally stopping dwelling on the scarred hills and lifting his bright green eyes on him with a smile _…but hey, I found you, this day can’t be all bad. Long time no see, how you’ve been?_ he asked trying to lean on the seat.

The smirk that flashed on the crocodile’s long muzzle at that faded slowly in a more soft expression as he replied, inserting the keys.

- Oh you know...got my share of end of the world like everyone, can't say I got it too bad though , 'm alive right? Been doing little things here and there, nothing has changed much for me really, if the guys would see me now they'd say I'm the same old bossy croc...- he trailed off, ready to turn the engine on but hesitating, waiting for the inevitable next question.

_...you mean the Chaotix aren't with you?_ chaos green irises went wider for a second.

-Nope. We got split before…this- he made a nod at his surroundings without even looking, clutching his hand around the wheel and finally starting the car, the coughing roar of the engine masking what would have been an uncomfortable pause of silence, the time that he needed to force the sides of his muzzle back up.

-…but hey, they're cool, 'm sure they're fine...they're just waiting for me to find them you know?...-

He’d repeated that to himself so many times, that it came out just natural. He’d find them. They couldn’t be dead: Ray was smart, Mighty was strong, Charmy was wiser than any kid his age when he wanted, Liza didn’t even know how determinate she could be, and Espio well…Vec expected him to just appear out of thin air one day and mock at him for worrying so much.

_...right sure! course they are. Nothing bad coulda ever happened to those guys, they can take care of themselves…_

Those had been exactly the words Vec had been expecting from him, but something in the tone was wrong, so wrong to make him suddenly turn at his blue passenger, rising an eyebrow.

Whoa. And he’d thought his smile was forced.

Probably reading the crocodile’s face, Sonic’s confident smile crumpled, and he reclined his head looking away, passing an hand on his face several times as if to try to rub away tiredness…but it was a too deep one to be washed away just by that apparently, and when he let his hand fall back to his side, his eyes were if possible even more sad and troubled than before.

_I’m sorry dude…_

Vector couldn’t help but look away at first, a bit embarrassed. There, the oddness had totally sneaked away from under the carpet: but he was determinate to put it back into his place! He had never seen the kid so literally blue, and now that he did, he found it just unbearable. He sort of understood why he felt this need to apologize, but what could he reply? That it hadn’t been his doing but the Horde’s one? That was so obvious it almost enraged him having to say that aloud, he’d hit him on the head while doing so! Then he should he say that probably things would have went the same way even if he’d been there to fight at the time of the first attack? No, no he couldn’t say that: it would have meant that there was no hope now either. And he didn’t believe that. Plus, he wanted to bright up the hedgie’s mood, not sink it.

Gwha, that was just too much thinking for his head! His hand ran to the headphones still hanging on his neck, following the instinct to just drawn everything in music as always…and there he stopped, the solution just obvious. He never ever let anyone to listen to his music, but he didn’t hesitate a second to remove the headphones from his neck and stuff them on the hedgehog’s head, the kid a bit surprised, catching the slightly oversized things before could slip off.

-Here, something better to fill your head with, Blue…- the crocodile pat-patted him briefly before turning the wheel and pushing down on the throttle.
-…’sides, you’re doing it all wrong, you know? My old man said, ‘if you fail a work, you first fix, then apologize…- he couldn’t help but smirk at the memory.

_Big thing to fix…_ was the not exactly too enthusiastic reply.

Vector turned the eyes from the road, darting a quick look at Sonic, the boy now leaning against the window and looking outside at the devastation again, tinkering with the headphones and the volume to adjust them to his ears.
Hurmf. Amber eyes narrowed, and the crocodile gave a wide turn, changing direction.
There was a last thing he could do, even if it meant say goodbye to his idea to get back to Knothole.
Pff, who wanted to go back to Knothole anyway?

*********
It took almost half an hour at the slow pace of the old jeep but they were finally there: he’d had to firmly decline the hedgehog’s offer to drive several times (only way he was going to let him was if that had been a Ferrari and they’d been at Monza’s circuit) , until finally he’d gave up and just focused on the music, eyes closed, his face distending, and even a little smile appearing on his muzzle, one of those little smiles people aren’t even aware of.

Vector’s tail poked at him, the crocodile looking at the now completely transformed landscape: no more black smoke, but white clouds and azure sky, no more rusty dust and polluted waters, but green patches of stubborn stubborn grass and even some palm tree, holding on despite some yellow leaves.

And at the horizon, the best sight, at least for him: the lights of Starlight!
The little time to open his eyes again and blink twice, and the hedgie sat up straight like a spring, looking in all directions:

_hey it's not all ruined!_
Vector gave a little chuckle at the almost childish way the hero hanged his head out the window.

Yeah, it wasn’t all ruined. He’d showed him that.
‘Now you show me it can be fixed’ he thought, keeping driving in silence towards the city, his mind starting already to roll back along his old plan.
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