Rouge the Bat and "Fingers" Prower find a convenient way to get off West Side Island: A red biplane, one previous careless owner.
Fandom: Sonic the Hedgehog
Taking off into the night may have been a fun way to leave town but it was not a terribly effective way of travelling between islands. Though both Rouge and her newly-found little buddy Miles "Fingers" Prower could see comfortably in the dark, travelling any great distance over water at night was just asking for trouble. Rouge suggested they find somewhere to hunker down until morning, and then see what they could find. If nothing else, most other people tended to be awake during the day, and that included people who owned boats, ships and shipping companies.
They alighted in a copse of trees and hung their bags from the branches before getting ready for a good night’s sleep. Fingers dug out his folding campbed and a pillow, while Rouge found her travelling latches and tried to decide which tree to hook them onto. After he was set up, the kid looked at her and asked, “So, what are you doing?”.
“Picking a tree to hang from.”
“Hang from?”
She held up her latches, “Bats sleep upside down. Here, I’ll show you.” She picked a palm tree that looked suitable and fluttered up to it before hooking her sleeping latches onto a sturdy branch, and then her feet into the latches. This done, she let herself hang down and wrapped her wings around herself. She closed her eyes and sighed happily as a warm breeze washed over her and ran through her fur.
“Is that comfortable?” asked the kid from below her.
“Very!” she replied without opening her eyes, “If I had a spare pair, I’d invite you to join me.”
He chuckled softly and said “I’ll pass, thanks!”
“Suit yourself. Sleep well, sweetie.”
“You too, Rouge.”
The two of them woke the next morning to a beautiful clear day. After washing off yesterday’s makeup in a nearby stream, and longing for a shower (maybe the next island will have a decent hotel, she hoped) she pondered the day’s mascara colour. She eventually settled on purple, though to her embarrassment she found that she had taken enough time choosing for Fingers to get his gear packed and stowed, ready to set out.
The kid didn’t say anything about it, which she appreciated. Most children his age probably would have been climbing the walls, had there been any walls around to climb. She shot him an apologetic smile, and the two took off once more.
They hit the coast around midday, before Rouge veered to the left so they could follow the coastline north. They were making good time towards a large town where she was pretty sure they’d be able to take passage on a ship when Fingers asked "Is that a plane?"
Her instinct was to look up, but he was pointing towards the ground. When she looked, there was indeed a small aircraft on the beach, shining bright red in the sun. "Looks like it. Wanna go check it out?"
"We have time?"
"Plenty. Besides, even if it's abandoned there might be something we can salvage."
They landed a little way up the beach from the plane and took a closer look. The bright red biplane was parked under a tree far up enough the beach to avoid high tide, but other than that had been left in the open. Rouge could only consider it lucky that there hadn’t been any rain recently, but then realised she had no way of knowing how long it had been sitting there.
"Do you think it's been abandoned?" she asked as Fingers circled the plane on foot and peered up at it. He hadn’t started clambering up and down it for a closer look, but she could tell that he wouldn’t be able to contain his curiosity for long.
"I'm not sure”, he replied “It looks pretty banged up, at any rate. But then, why would someone fly a plane to this island and just leave it here?"
Rouge shrugged. "There's been a lot of strange things happening around here lately."
"Have there?"
Normally Rouge might have asked if he'd been living under a rock, but as it happened that was exactly what he had been doing. Instead, she replied, "Some bigshot human showed up on this island oh, say, a little less than a month ago? More or less. Apparently he's built an entire city from scratch, over on the south coast, and he’s set up a bunch of mining outposts too.”
Fingers turned away from the plane, which he had indeed started to physically climb, and asked "But there's already a city here. Are there really enough people to need a whole new one?"
"That's the strangest thing. That new city seems to be populated entirely by robots. Nobody goes in, nobody comes out."
He shuddered. "Creepy."
"You got that right."
He shook his head, as if he were physically shaking off the dark cloud that had briefly settled over the conversation, "Anyway, back to the plane! It seems usable, but if we're gonna make a long journey, I want to give it an overhaul when we get there."
"Who's 'we', Fingers? It only has one seat."
"Oh, well, I figured we'd swap. One of us flies and the other...uh...flies."
Rouge giggled.
"Oh, you know what I mean!" pouted Fingers, "One of us can fly this, and the other can fly themselves, and when the one flying themselves gets tired we can switch places."
“I can drive a car more or less OK”, countered Rouge, “But surely a plane is a different story.”
“Take-off and landing are the really tricky parts”, replied Fingers, “Other than that you just kinda keep it pointed in the right direction.”
“Huh! Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.” Maybe I’ve only heard about flying planes from people who can’t already fly, she mused, I guess moving in the air would take a lot of getting used to if you don’t have natural wings.
“Or, at least that’s what every manual I’ve read says.”
“You, uh… haven’t actually flown a plane before, have you?”
“When would I have time?”
She nodded to concede the point, and Fingers continued his examination.
“It says Sonic on the side. What do you figure that means?”
Rouge pondered the word for a moment. “Maybe it’s the company that built it? A plane’s a big-ticket item, if you make one you’re gonna want people to know it was you who did it.”
He opened a hatch on the side, towards the front, and took a look at the engine. “They must have done well. Whoever owned this thing before was rough with it but it’s still holding up OK.”
It did not escape Rouge’s notice that Fingers seemed to have latched onto the idea that the plane had been abandoned. While she could admit it was possible it still had an owner, and that they would be back for their property at some point, she wasn’t going to argue against him – besides, it was also possible he was right. Maybe it really had been here for months on end, she couldn’t prove it one way or another. Aloud, she asked “Will it get us to Sunset City in one piece?”
“Yeah, but it’s going to need a major overhaul after that. Whoever the last pilot was, it seems like they just jammed it on full power and never stopped.” He closed the hatch and wiped a black stain from his forehead before taking a look at the pilot’s seat. Rouge idly wondered if it was still called a cockpit if it was just a chair and a control panel, instead of the little control room airliner pilots sat in.
“What’s under the seat?” she asked as he poked and prodded around the maybe-cockpit.
“Let me check – a comic book, some red shoe polish, and an empty can of something called Flicky Energy.”
“This is definitely a guy’s plane.” Rouge pondered the mystery pilot, whoever they were. She was getting a pretty clear mental image of a boy racer – by taking it off his hands, they were probably doing the world a favour. Less chance of crashing trying to pull a stunt, at any rate.
“I’m keeping the polish.”
Rouge shrugged. “Be my guest. You can have the comic too, if you like.”
“Haha, score!”
There was a surprisingly roomy luggage compartment behind the pilot’s seat, with more than enough room for their various bags. Rouge overheard Fingers murmuring to himself about the amount of empty space and the possibility of adding a second seat, which she chose to take as a good omen. Of course she had no idea where they would store the darn thing, but assuming she could get that figured out she’d want both of them to fit in the plane at the same time instead of having to take turns.
It did not occur to her to wonder why she assumed she would keep the plane and, for that matter, the kid she had thought she was just going to get set up with a job in Sunset City. Somehow, he had already become her buddy.
After checking the controls, Fingers poked his head up over the side of the cockpit and shot her a thumbs-up. “OK, I think we’re ready!” he called.
A thought occurred to her, “Does that mean I get to do the thing where you physically spin the propeller to start it?”
“Yeah, I guess so!”
“Nice, I always wanted to do that.” She stepped up to the propeller and got a good grip on it.
“Are we leaving now?” he asked.
“The sooner we go, the sooner we can get somewhere. The sooner we get somewhere, the sooner we can get lunch.”
Fingers’ stomach growled loudly and he blushed. “When you put it like that, I guess there’s no time like the present.”
“That’s the spirit, kid!”
Rouge knew she had a huge grin splitting her face as she hand-started the biplane’s propeller, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. Some things were just cool, and there was no getting away from it. She flew alongside the plane, and found that she had to exert herself a little to keep up – but then, if she got tired all she had to do was ask to swap.
As she turned to take one last look back at West Side Island, an explosion ripped through one of the new industrial facilities. Another followed, and another until it seemed the whole place was going up in flames. Enormous pillars of black smoke rose to block out the sun, and the colours of the flames made a sickly rainbow. If they had looked closely enough they would have seen a small blue shape blasting through the chemical plant, leaving a trail of destroyed robots in his wake. As it was, the sheer scale of the spectacle stopped them from examining any single part of it in great detail.
“Wow”, breathed Rouge, "Glad that's not my problem."