Chapter Text
Eggman was having a bad day. It was actually a bad two days and, with the way things were going, it was going to be a bad week.
Two days ago there’d been an earthquake—a bad one; a 6 on the Richter Scale. Unfortunately for the doctor, he had several hidden bases in the area where the quake had occurred and they’d all taken damage, as had the badniks and his half finished projects inside. He had Metal Sonic and the Hard Boiled Heavies working on cleanup—clearing out badnik parts and salvaging what they could, but it was looking like Eggman himself was going to have to get his hands dirty and get involved. It was such a waste of time! He had other things he could be doing at his other, not destroyed, bases, like working on upgrading their defences against natural disasters!
And that wasn’t even getting into the resource drain! So much time and effort building those robots just for so many of them to be unsalvageable! Not even to mention that he’d have to go looking for more critters to use for power sources for the new robots he would have to build! Because he knew at least half the flickies and rickies he’d had would either be dead or too injured to be of use to him anymore.
“Ridiculous,” the doctor grumbled as he flew the eggmobile through the outskirts of Emerald Hill Zone. He had an alert from one of his bases around there that he needed to check in on. “What good is an evil secret base if it can’t even handle an earthquake!”
Eggman continued his grumblings as he flew. His frustration only got worse as a new round of beeps started screaming at him from one of his monitors. “What now?!” he seethed as he pulled up the screen.
His frustrations bled away when he saw that it wasn’t an alert from another ruined base. It was coming from his energy detector, the rapid onslaught of beeping alerting the doctor to a large amount of Chaos energy not too far away.
Eggman grinned and turned the eggmobile in the direction the detector was indicating. Maybe the last few days hadn’t been so good, but a Chaos Emerald would definitely put him in a better mood. If he got the opportunity to put the gem to use before the blue rat found out and got involved? Even better!
He flew for a while, following the signal deeper into Emerald Hill. He synced up his chaos detector with another screen that would turn the vague information into a graph so he could actually see what he was dealing with. He quickly realised that that had been a good idea because, the closer he got to the location, the numbers on the chart began to climb higher—inching past his recorded numbers for the Chaos Emeralds’ power.
Oh, Eggman was suddenly having a very good day indeed.
It was another twenty minutes before he found what he was looking for: a ravine that had definitely not been in Emerald Hill before the earthquake. It must have been the epicentre of the whole thing, or at least very close to it.
Eggman landed the eggmobile and got out, bringing his detector with him. He circled the edge of the rip in the planet before, very carefully, laying down and sticking the detector in the hole. It beeped with renewed vigour. “Well, well,” he mused as he pulled the screaming device back and looked at the rough data on its screen. “I wonder what we have here.”
He got back in the eggmobile and checked the more refined numbers on his graph. Whatever was down that hole it was, without question, more powerful than the Chaos Emeralds. It wasn’t as powerful as the Master Emerald, but anything that could rival the seven smaller gems was something the doctor wanted in his possession.
It was starting to get late, however, and he didn’t have the tools for exploring a ravine on him. He’d be back the next morning, though. He sent a few of his still intact robots the coordinates of the ravine with instructions to guard it, and then he started making his way to his nearest surviving base. Whatever Chaos-filled treasure was in that pit was his, and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.