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The cold air strikes her as surely as a physical punch to the face.
Her body instinctively tries to gasp, but some kind of liquid fills her mouth and throat, thick and warm and tasteless. Her chest lurches and heaves in primal alarm as she feels her body pitch forward, pain blooming on her palms and knees.
There's a loud, obnoxious sound repeating endlessly around her, red lights blinking on and off overhead, but the only thing that feels blurrier than the world around her is herself. She's heavy, and cold, and only vaguely aware that she's violently spilling green fluid, from her mouth, nose, even leaking from around her eyes. Her stomach spasms, over and over and over again until her airway clears and her breaths come through in gasps that feel like swallowing knives.
There's a figure standing over her, but it's indistinct and greenish in her fluid-clouded eyes. A mobian, she thinks. Big ears. Like a bat.
"Hey, hey." The figure reaches out, and she feels ungloved hands pulling her upright by her arms. She coughs, burning her throat as surely as her breath freezes it. "Look at me. Can you stand?"
She isn't sure, but when the figure lets go of her arms, her legs at least seem willing to hold her, even as they feel nearly numb. More like metal cylinders than actual flesh-and-blood legs.
"You got a name?"
Several wires cross in her brain. She opens her mouth to say something, but whatever it is gets tangled together on the way up and doesn't come out. A name. She knows she must have a name, but her head feels heavy and full of cotton, and the more she tries to reach back the worse it seems to get.
It takes a solid ten seconds for something to pop into her head. "A—Ashura," she wheezes, and immediately, if she knows nothing else, she knows it's right.
"Ashura, huh?" The bat lets out a faint laugh, almost swallowed by the alarms. "Looks like it's your lucky day."
Is this lucky? Ashura certainly doesn't feel like it.
A few more blinks, and she can actually make out her immediate surroundings. She's standing in a room with metal walls and metal boxes, lit only by the flashing lights. Next to the bat's leg rests what looks like a slightly dented lid from one of said boxes, emblazoned with a red grinning face that immediately makes Ashura flinch, but scribbled over with a series of asterisks. Ashura's feet rest in a pool of green goo, flecked with blood and shards of broken glass.
And next to her, in a similar puddle before the remains of half a glass tube, stands a blue-furred fox half her size, soaked to the bone. His arms are wrapped tight around himself as if he's trying to hold himself together, and his big droopy ears somehow make him look even sadder.
She's never seen him before in her life. But when he turns to stare at her with big blue eyes, though they clearly struggle to focus, he looks at her like she's the only thing in the world.
"…It's you," he whispers. "Y-you're her."
"My, aren't you a stubborn one." A voice fills the room from the same overhead speaker as the alarm. "It's quite rude to peek at projects that aren't finished yet, you know!"
Something about the voice causes Ashura's body to immediately seize up, her breath choking in her throat. Her whole being screams to run away from it, and yet some treacherous part of the back of her mind keeps her still.
"Make this easier on me and stay put, won't you?"
Make this easier. It would be easier. To sit down and wait for whatever this is to stop. It sounds like a reasonable idea.
"Ashura!"
Ashura is violently shaken out of her stupor, and she finds herself face-to-face with the bat again. "What—"
"Don't listen to him. And if you run into me again, you shouldn't listen to me, either. Come on."
The bat helps Ashura step over the broken glass, then does the same for the fox, before leading them out of the small metal room. The air outside is somehow even colder against Ashura's drenched fur, especially now that the liquid's cooled down, and the gown—gown?—she's wearing isn't doing much against it. The sun is burning orange, like it's setting, though it's hard to see through the tall buildings surrounding her.
A couple of those buildings have the same red face on them. Eggman's face, she suddenly remembers. Is she in an Eggman base?
But that voice…she knows it doesn't belong to Eggman.
"Focus," the bat chides, and Ashura can hear faint footsteps that are too heavy to be human. "Take the fox and follow the sun until you get to the fence, then follow the fence until you find an opening. Then get as far away from here as you possibly can. The Restoration is where Emeraldville used to be, head there as quick as you can and tell them everything you saw here. You understand?"
"Fence. Restoration." Ashura's brain still feels like it's full of the green goo, but she follows well enough.
"Yes. They can help you. And, if you happen to run into a black hedgehog with red eyes who looks like he hates the entire planet…"
The bat smiles. It's completely mirthless, about to break, and for the first time Ashura notices the bat's eyes look dull and exhausted.
"Tell him Rouge is too dangerous to be left alive."
Ashura opens her mouth, a thousand questions trying to escape at once.
But the bat hoists the box lid, turning her back on them. "Go!"
The bat charges forward with the box lid, straight into what Ashura faintly recognizes as one of Eggman's robots.
(They'd swarmed the place, you practically couldn't open a closet without one of them popping out, their metal eyes watched you wherever you went…)
She has to get out of here.
Ashura reaches over and scoops the fox up. He's heavier than she expects, but she's also stronger than she expects, and he's quick to climb onto her back, gripping her shoulders so tightly that his claws dig through her skin.
Ashura runs.
It's what Ashura does. Her favorite thing. The one thing she's good at. Even if her breaths still sting and her knees still bleed, and the path is rough under her bare feet, adrenaline forces one foot in front of the other in a rhythm so familiar she can do it without having to think, without having to waste what limited capacity her brain seems to have.
Behind her, she hears an altercation—shouts, clangs, the thud of a body hitting the ground. Ashura glances over her shoulder, catching a glimpse of a small figure glowing blue heading in her direction.
Fast. Incredibly fast. Too fast for her to outrun.
But she has to outrun it. She can't let it catch them.
Turning forward, Ashura clenches teeth that feel wrong in her mouth, sharp enough to split her lip open. Something more than adrenaline spikes through every vein and nerve in her body, setting them alight and vibrating with energy.
Ashura runs faster and harder than she's sure she's ever run before, sparks of static trailing behind her heels.
Robots of various types she can't identify try to block her path, but at her speed, she doesn't so much dodge them as plow through them, ignoring the bruises and sharp pains their metal and blasters leave on her. Electrical shocks dissipate across her skin without her being fully aware of them.
She follows the sun. She finds the fence.
She follows the fence. She finds a gate.
She rips the gate off of its hinges before she can think about how impossible that is.
And she just keeps running. Where, she isn't sure—as far away from this place as possible, like the bat said, but the direction doesn't matter. By the time she next glances behind, the industrial complex is small and the glowing blue thing is no longer following, but she doesn't dare slow down.
Time loses meaning. She only stops when her legs give out on her, causing her to stumble and fall onto her stomach, still going fast enough to painfully skid several feet.
With the wind thoroughly knocked out of her, Ashura simply lies there for what feels like several minutes, trying to force breath back into her lungs and feeling the rapid heartbeat of the fox still pressed against her back. His weight rolls off of her the moment she lets go of his arms, and she turns her head to see him panting on his back as if he'd also been running.
The world is dull and dim. The sun has set. Just how far had she gone?
…How far could she usually go?
"You—you okay?" Ashura manages between gasps, trying to keep her mind off of that question and its implications.
The fox nods, weakly.
"What's your name?"
The fox screws his eyes shut, his face twisting up. He does not reply.
"…You got any idea what the f—" Ashura quickly catches herself.
"M'older than I look, I think," the fox mumbles, still not opening his eyes. "I know swears."
"Okay. Then do you have any idea what in the ever-loving fuck happened to us?"
The fox shakes his head again. It's a rhetorical question, anyway.
Ashura heaves a heavy sigh, trying to push herself into a sitting position. The moment her palms touch the pavement, pain screams across them, no longer curbed by the adrenaline and the whatever-else-it-was. She hisses, instead using her elbows to get herself upright.
They're on a road against a stony ridge, one of those windy, nothing roads that show up everywhere, but that nobody really thinks about or wants to be on. Ashura scoots the two of them out of the middle of the road just in case.
Ashura finally gets the chance to look over the both of them. The wind from the run had dried them slightly, but now the fox's longer fur is ruffled and stuck together in dull blue clumps. Broken glass is embedded in both of Ashura's hands, and her knees, not quite covered by her gray gown, still ooze blood from likely the same, though don't appear to have any glass in the wounds. She's bruised, battered, and even burned in places, but she thinks she's more exhausted than anything else.
"Are you hurt?" she asks the fox.
He grimaces, holding out one of his feet. Sure enough, there's a big chunk of glass in it.
Ashura bites her lip, then remembers the state of her teeth as she tastes blood again. "I think it's either really important to leave the glass in, or really important to take the glass out, and I don't remember which."
"In, I think. So it bleeds less."
"Makes enough sense to me."
Ashura braves the pain to try and clean her hands on her gown, for as little good as that does. The green liquid stings, and she hopes that means it has some antiseptic in it. She at least brushes the dirt off of her and the fox's wounds, wishing she could do more—she suddenly really wishes she'd gotten that first-aid certification in college.
College…right. Ashura shuts her eyes and thinks, now that she has the time and oxygen. She'd been going to school in Sunset City. SCU was most famous for finance and business programs, but she's pretty sure hadn't been going for either of those.
Being there is the last thing she can remember clearly. Ashura can't, for the life of her, follow the sequence of events that had gotten her stuck in an Eggman base, presumably inside a tube full of green goo. It feels like one of those cheesy sci-fi movies she thinks she used to laugh at.
Or a horror movie. That also feels accurate.
A distant rumble causes Ashura's ears to twitch, bringing her back to reality. She opens her eyes and squints into the distance in one direction down the road, then the other.
Headlights. Maybe the bat had a point about them being lucky.
Ashura tries to rise into a crouch, but her legs aren't obeying her anymore, and she's forced to sit down hard to avoid falling onto her injured knees. She sticks her arm up as far as it can go, holding her thumb out and hoping she's doing the gesture right.
The headlights turn out to belong to a medium-sized box truck, more gray with road dust than it is white with paint. Thankfully, the driver sees them, as the lights flick down to a lower brightness, the truck gradually slowing and squealing to a stop beside them.
The middle-aged mobian who jumps out of the driver's seat doesn't even bother to close the door behind him. He looks like a lizard of some kind, maybe a gecko or an iguana, with blue-green skin and a purple shirt with TRUCK DAD printed on it in big white capital letters. His eyes look like they're about to bulge out of his head, though Ashura can't be sure if it's from surprise or if that's just how he looks.
"Good Gaia!" At least partially surprise, then. "What happened to the two of you?"
"Wish I could tell you." Ashura tries to stand again, but fails. "We need to get to the Restoration."
"You need to get to a hospital, is whatcha need. Have you seen yourselves?"
Ashura glances down at herself again, frowning. Okay, maybe he has a point. She's still not a hundred percent sure if leaving the glass in their hands was a good idea.
"I don't think I can go any further. If it's not too much trouble, could you…"
Truck Dad has the passenger door open before Ashura even finishes her sentence. Maybe getting in a stranger's vehicle is a bit of a risk, but the guy seems decent enough, and it can't exactly be worse than where they'd just been.
He's quick to help Ashura up, throwing a rough, scaly arm around her shoulders to support her as he guides her into the truck. Behind her, the fox jumps to his feet with a warning hiss, and he flinches away when Truck Dad tries to pick him up, only allowing himself to be helped after Ashura meets his eye and nods.
It's you, he'd said. You're her. Ashura doesn't think she knows this fox from anywhere, and she's too much of a nobody for him to have heard of her. What had he meant? Who is her?
Soon enough, they're all piled into the front of the truck together, Ashura squished between the fox once again clinging to her and Truck Dad. Truck Dad doesn't seem to be a stickler for seatbelts, despite the fact that she's certain he's driving a lot faster than he'd been when he'd come up the road towards them. She can't bring herself to care. Now that she can rest, her head feels fuzzy again, and her whole body feels like it's being pulled down with the weight of an exhaustion so deep it can't be natural. Maybe there was something in the green stuff, and she'd been fighting it off until now.
Ashura immediately doesn't like the feeling. It reminds her of something she can't quite place. So she forces herself to stay awake, staring intently out the front of the windshield, even as the fox's breathing slows beside her.