((OOC: Collab with John))

Toby planted his hands firmly on his hips, checking out the scene as Rock made use of green bean's quills. "Heeey, good thinkin'!" As the hedghog literally slammed his body into the door, it creaked, and finally gave way to the pressure. "...And I'll blow your house down," Toby muttered to nobody in particular, finishing one of his earlier thoughts. Once the noise of Sheffer's clearing the way with his balled-up body died down, Toby was the first to catch another, much softer sound behind the group. Cotton whipped around, only to get a glimpse of some fox kid who looked like he'd been a bit roughed up. Stepping off his board and popping it up into his hand, Toby began waking towards the boy. "Hey, little dude. You okay down there?"

"Spffh--hfff!" Tails breathed, staring down at his feet with wide-eyed concentration. He looked up as he heard the approaching footsteps of the kangaroo rat.

"I'm--I'm ok!" he said, with reasonable affability, "I think I just hit myself a little funny."

He looked down again at his feet and crunched his face up in a wince, before standing upright and gingerly stretching his back, leaning backwards a little to ease the strain of being bent over. Another wince over-took his face before he laughed in mild exasperation and straightened up.

"Ooh, ow!" he said, and rubbed his side, then blinked uncertainly.

"I'm ok now, I think," he said, "I guess I'm getting a little tired."

"Tired, huh?" Toby had a hunch it was a bit more than that, and the fact that the kid had "hit himself" was a bit unsettling. Cotton continued to make his way down to the fox, and once he arrived, he did something a bit... unexpeceted. "'Kay then. Hang on!" With that, without asking, Toby grabbed the kid and tossed him up onto his back.

"Hwoop!" Tails yelped as he was unceremoniously heaved up onto Toby's back. He coughed as he connected with Toby's body, and then, without much else to say, Tails draped his arms around over the kangaroo rat's shoulders.

From Toby's back, Tails peered over at the crowd in front of the door with intense deliberation.

With his cargo in tow, Toby began to jump up the ramp, making it back to the group in about three hops. Once there, he set the kid down, much gentler going down than it had been coing up. "There. Didn't even have to walk." Toby grinned at the little guy.

Again on his feet, Tails rubbed at his eyes, and shuffled back and forth on his feet a couple times to ensure he was fully balanced, before turning to look at toby.

"Thanks," he offered.

He inspected the rest of the environment, and the people, and everyone.

"Wow," he said, "this was stored under lava!"

Then his face changed, he looked around, "but this couldn't have been built here if it was a real magma vent, drilling into the base of the crater could cause an eruption then..."

They (thankfully?) had something else to focus on soon enough. A loud whir turned shrill as small propeller blades spun rapidly, and the three or so surveillance drones that had been filming Eggman moments before swooped from their mounts near the walls on either side of the cylindrical metal room, and darted straight for the group. A minor threat, but one that could take a good piece outta somebody if he or she wasn't careful.

The room itself was thankfully not all that defended, past those robots, though. It was actually pretty small, due to the relative narrowness of the tower at that point, and actually quite refreshing, thanks to all the cooling systems running throughout the walls. In fact, it was probably bordering on cold inside, at the moment, not that anyone who had been prancing around lava-land moments before would likely complain.

At the dead center of the chamber was a set of metal banisters surrounding a round hole in the floor, where it appeared an elevator platform of some sort had been moments prior. There was a call button next to it. Nothing else inside looked very interesting—Just lots of ducting, pipes, conduits, and all the other stereotypical guts of a mega-industrial-looking, high-tech-machinery-laden structure.

OOC: Collab with the David. Kinda like the Donald, but considerably poorer and nicer.

A little less poised for action than Sheffer was, Jam was still theatrically stretching and popping joints, while her shield gradually encircled her at a leisurely pace.

She stepped forward a few paces before shooting a glance back to the still similarly hued Kyle, and jerked her head indicatively back towards the two remaining drones.

"You comin', poser?"

"Ahh, bi tuja!!" With little hesitation, Kyle's tiny, stolen shield crackled to life. The chao shook his head back and forth as sparks made their way around him, until the shield completely covered his tiny, gelatinous body.

"Tu mi, Jami!" Kyle joined the girl, floating just to her side.

With nary more than a smirk, the momentarily matching pair of electric monkeys advanced, their shields, perfect mirror images of the other, reacted to the proximity of their threat in synchronization, spitting voraciously, like a ravenous dog gone days without food.

There was a ethereal sort of grace to their movements as the duo diverged and slipped casually up to their individual prey, meeting eyes for a split second. Their volatile orbs contracted and brightened not entirely out of theatrics, before suddenly surging outward, instantaneously encompassing their soon-to-be-scrap-metal quarry, and exploding in a shower of light and sparks.

A toothy grin and a frizzy-furred thumbs up was flashed to her travel-sized counterpart, along with an approving,

"Not bad, runt. Y'could almost pass fer th'real deal."

Kyle giggled as the shield around him dispersed. "Heehe! A bebi juga! Oh yu bi!!" Kyle flitted around a bit before flopping over Jam's shoulder. "Bi ju?"

Sheffer may have aimed to cut the drone in half, but the fact that he was a speeding, blunt cannonball fairly larger than it meant that he actually ended up one-upping that, and bursting the machine into a fine mess of little metal and electronic bits. Score.

Meanwhile, Jam and Kyle's success resulted in their two robots pretty much popping apart at the center of their two hemispheres (where the prop was seated), as their electric motors completely freaked out, melted, stripped every gear they had, and so on, and so forth, with a little fire and a nice spray of sparks to boot. The propellers themselves were left spinning at such a high, humming RPM that they remained flying for several seconds, oscillating about the room, threatening to take off various heads, before whizzing off in random directions and embedding themselves in some important-looking equipment.

Then came a voice—They all knew whose.

"So, you think you're going to play hero, is that it?" asked a scratchy loudspeaker in some unseen location. "Well, there's no turning back now!"

The ramp outside disengaged loudly, groaned, and dropped straight to the lava far below.

"You've made quite a mess, I'll give you that much. But much tougher than you have tried their luck with me, and failed. Why don't you come down and see, hm?"

He laughed jarringly as the elevator platform slid into place in front of the group.

"You don't trust me?!" gasped Eggman in mock incredulity. He had been listening. "Find a way down here yourselves, then!"

He cackled in his unique ohoho sort of way and dropped the elevator platform back down into the big, circular hole, leaving everyone with an open shaft and no ride down it. It vanished quickly into the darkness until all that was visible in the hole were the strips of dim, orange-glowing lights lining the walls all the way down. There was no telling how deep it was.