Work Text
"Sir, what are you doing?" Orbot had been watching the doctor for a while, but he couldn't puzzle out exactly what he was trying to accomplish. No less than seven monitors were online, half of them depicting diagrams and blueprints of some experimental piping system and the other half showing his most despised adversary in varying poses, but mostly in his infamous spindash.
"I'm trying to figure out the bare minimum diameter this stupid pipe can be before Sonic can't fit into it anymore." He paused his typing and glared over his shoulder. "What's it to you?"
Orbot blinked. "...Well, if this is going to be part of this base's systems, then I suppose I should ask why you're building it to let Sonic of all people in. Wouldn't the obvious course of action be making it too small?" He really questioned his creator sometimes.
"That's what you think," he snorted. "Doing it my way keeps him busy. If I only took the time to block everything off, he'd just take the obvious way--and in case you haven't noticed, we need an obvious way in order to do anything around here." He leaned back in his chair and swept a hand over his keyboard. "If this thing's too big, he'll just plow into it no question. Make it too small, and he won't even look at it twice.” He sighed and rubbed at his temples. Orbot paused to take in that new information; he had to admit that sometimes there was a method to the doctor’s madness.
"...So what exactly are you trying to accomplish here? If you want to 'keep him busy' as you say, then why not make it narrower as it goes on or force him to turn around?"
Dr. Eggman huffed. "I can't. This thing does need to connect between these two rooms," he said, pointing to a pair of diagrams of the base, "and as funny as it'd be if he got stuck, it's too important to have a hedgehog-shaped clog in there for long. No point to it either, since I can just take him down with the other work-in-progress."
Orbot paused again. The strange tug-of-war Dr. Eggman and Sonic fought was approximately 70 to 95% preparation, construction, and execution, with the last 30 to 5% being destruction at the hands of Sonic and his friends. It was much easier to be the breaker of things than the creator. He wondered if Sonic ever considered how much time and effort went into stopping him--and, really, for all he insulted Dr. Eggman it should have worked by now--but all the fights he'd seen suggested otherwise.
Orbot had previously watched Sonic on the monitors as the doctor frantically readied his last machines, zipping and jumping and ducking around and blasting into robots, but he realized he'd never taken in the sheer level of care Dr. Eggman put into stalling Sonic, making him pause or think his way around problems without sacrificing his own bases' integrity. It really was incredible, the resources he placed into stopping one single being.
Sonic certainly didn't care, or at least didn't show any sign of it. It was always a quick smile, snarky remark, and last heave of speed and power that did them in before he was allowed to run off and celebrate, just another achievement on the wall. He acted like the fight for his and often many others’ lives was a simple pastime quite a lot, and in a way it made sense. For someone with supersonic speed and, depending on the number of Chaos Emeralds acquired, invincible, it could almost be seen as entertainment for such a powerful life.
Perhaps, for Sonic, against all of Dr. Eggman's genius, it was all... just a game.