"No I wouldn't! That was completely your fault," replied Eggman smugly. Still listening.

The structure began to rumble around the group—Not that those falling would feel it, but anyone still standing at the top definitely would.

"You better hurry up! I lose my cool when people make me wait!" Eggman taunted laughingly and made a horrible pun as the tower itself began to sink into the lava, which, as a result, grew ever nearer to the open door right behind Ace, Jam, and Tails. It would start spilling in at any second. Simultaneously, a safety door over the elevator shaft began to slide shut.

OOC: I'm tired of doing scenery for the moment, and John is just itching to write words and be generally helpful in the wild sculpting of plot and scene, so here's your new host. Take it away.

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Rock's footsteps echoed back at him, the sound bouncing around and around the room until it lost all distinction and became a chalky, metallic clang that stung the ears and seemed to go on forever.

The roof arced up and up and up, to where countless floodlights had been bolted, giving the impression that the viewers were trapped in a large inflatable football stadium. The massive, ribbed pipes lining the ceiling, however, combined with the safety glass and blast doors that were installed over all the lights, gave a slightly different impression.

As the sound of rock's footsteps joined the background atmosphere, another, newer sound became audible; a deep, booming gurgle. Faint, almost sickeningly deep bubbles and hisses rattled the floor, and made the air in the room ripple and warp as the bass tones rolled through the metal.

There was a long, silence, broken only by the distant roaring that seemed to fill the whole structure, then, from somewhere on the far wall, a klaxon blared out one long, saw-edged note, and the room went dark.

The klaxon kept going, and was gradually joined by a clamouring rattle, and the whine of electric engines, which went on and on as steel shutters began to roll away from the far wall, exposing… purple.

Purple light spilled out from the ever-expanding opening in the wall, illuminating everyone in a slightly sickly periwinkle hue, and as eyes adjusted to the rays of light spilling in, the source of the light became apparent.

Under a surging, glittering violet sky, vast metal fields stretched out around the vantage point the viewer occupied, hundreds of feet above the rest. The metal fields, crude platforms that burgeoned under the weight of hundreds of thousands of robots, of every make and every variety, were staggered on top of each other in the nightmarish, distorted equivalent of a parking garage. In the distance, the toppling metal sandwiches, loaded with layer upon layer of robots, gave way to huge, drawn, gaunt factories—grim skeletons that stretched even further up, out of the spiderwebs of cables that hung like silly-string off the flanks of the massive structures. Sparks and activity could be seen among the factories, the nearest of which seemed bent on churning out more and more robots, which crawled, rolled, paraded and lurched at varying speeds to their waiting areas on the rapidly filling parking garage.

Past that, half-constructed monorails and infrastructure buildings leaned against each other, braced up every which way against imminent breakdown as building project fought building project for labour and resources, and further away, at the rim of what appeared now to be a large, glowing cavern, created out of… crystal, were massive massive pump buildings that forced fluid through meters upon meters of pipe. Pipe which crawled up the walls of the cavern, and, by the gallon, created the incredible roaring noise that had been audible before. If the function of these pipes was not obvious immediately, it would not take very long to realize what they were for.

The walls of the cavern were crystal—beautiful, shimmering, bright blue crystals, of every size and shape, cascaded down in shimmering heaps, to the bottom of the immense room, where huge metal insects, with mouths made out of spiked rock crushers ate the gems, sucking them in with the sound of complaining engines and shattering rock. Where the giant metal beetles were working, it was obvious that the wall of crystal was getting too thin, and this abuse was evident everywhere along the face of the inside of the massive cave, where huge dish-shaped pits had been cut out of the crystal wall. It had been shaved, inch by inch, down to its thinnest, where behind the walls of crystal, magma raged and boiled.

Struts reached from the ground to the ceiling. Huge metal beams shored up the sides of cave. The pipes that laced the ceiling—obviously cooling pipes—siphoned heat away from the walls of the cave in a desperate effort to keep the supports from melting away.

The entire installation was inside a massive geode, which floated in a sea of magma. The red light from the liquid rock shone through the blue crystal and created the eerie periwinkle twilight that bathed the whole ghostly city.

In the centre of the whole thing, a tower rose away from the ground, supported by bare struts and pipes with empty space between them, as if it was a tree that had had all the dirt washed away from under it, and was now being held up by its roots.

Underneath the tower, just visible behind the never-ending swamp of buildings, a huge, huge pit opened up, even deeper than the one they had to travel into to get here, and from that pit, far away, an odd gold light shone up at the ceiling, where it was lost in the glow of the cherry-red magma, and the ice-blue crystal.

On top of the tower—huge, bulbous and graced with a model of a hideous yet luxurious moustache, a gigantic head was perched. It was massive and far too big for the tower it was perched on, but perch it did. It had, as eyes and grinning mouth, windows, from which light shone out, and as a nose, it had an incredibly large landing platform, where a egg-mobile could just be seen landing, in the distance.

The egg-mobile moved along the landing platform towards the head until a pair of shutter doors snapped open in front of it. Another ray of light shone out for a moment, as the doors waited, open, and then egg-mobile moved through, and the doors slammed shut again.

They had found Eggman's hideout.