Hey. This is inspired by some struggles a friend of mine has been going through lately, as well as my own psychological issues. If you're going through anything similar, with regards to self-esteem or depression, I hope you'll find some semblance of comfort and inspiration in this story.
Tails is slightly younger here, closer to his Classic portrayal than his Modern one.
"T-minus…" Tails stopped to yawn. "...twenty seconds to launch!"
That voice, chipper and cheerful by sunset, had been poked away by exhaustion and burnout as the stars twinkled and the moon rose over Westside Island. A portable tape recorder clutched firmly in his right hand, meant to record the details of this experiment for posterity, picked up little but stilted breaths and fragmented sentences. The jaunty skip in his step, the youthful spirit that led him to pursue this mad dream in the first place, had long since worn out. Instead, he paced back and forth across his temporary hilltop workstation – which mostly consisted of one cheap table and a plastic mat that didn't extend nearly as far as he needed it to.
Amongst the machinery at his disposal was the MilesElectric, the personal portable device he carried virtually everywhere he went. Stored in its memory were volumes upon volumes of digital books and research articles on amateur rocketry, every detail of which Tails had spent the past week devouring in sleepless wonder. To the right of the device sat a thick, college-ruled notebook, stacked with leaves of meteorological data gathered from his own machines. From this, he gathered that the best place to observe the night sky, undisturbed by either cloud cover or artificial light, was this diminutive island in the middle of nowhere. (Over the past week, friends came across Tails' bleary-eyed form in his Mystic Ruins workshop, jotting down facts and figures while struggling to keep his head from collapsing onto his desk. They begged him to, as Amy put it, "forget this whole silly thing and get some sleep!" Tails rebuffed them at every turn, repeatedly insisting, "This is something I have to do on my own.")
His eyes darted to and fro across his chemicals and machinery and observation equipment. He checked everything. He checked everything again. Then his mind flashed a warning that he may have overlooked something on the previous run-through, so he checked everything again. Deep down, however, he knew it was all pointless. He had performed every action within his control, even delaying the launch to perform last-second adjustments. He tweaked the ratio of oxidizer to fuel, in the hopes of giving the rocket added thrust. He altered the shape of the fins to counteract wind resistance in the upper atmosphere. But it was all little more than a crapshoot. After all, there wasn't exactly a set of instructions he could consult for launching a tiny three-stage rocket into a lunar orbit on its own power. There could always be an unknown variable, an unforeseen circumstance, or something that he just couldn't plan for. Or…perhaps something he, in his own absent-mindedness, failed to spot.
Failed...
"…urgh!"
He pounded on his skull, as if to flush the unclean thought from his head. Don't even think about it, you idiot! This will work! ...Won't it?
No. He couldn't let this happen again. He needed to distract himself. In a pre-emptive measure to prevent him from losing his nerve, he raced toward the table and grabbed a crude metal brick. His thumb hovered over the only button on the simple device.
"T-minus five…four…three…two…"
He took a deep cleansing breath of fresh island air, closed his eyes, and fired. There was no turning back now. Everything from this moment onward would be placed in the hands of fate.
Instantaneously, the roar of the engines shattered the evening's calm, rippling off every cliffside and palm tree in close range. The shockwave hit Tails in the chest like a right hook, forcing him to fight just to maintain his own balance. His hopes heightened as soon as he looked for his creation, only to find a glittering speck in the distance. Insight I was nearly out of sight, leaving little tangible evidence of its existence but the raging flames tailing from its exhaust, ascending into the distance to flirt among the stars themselves.
His heart fluttered at the soaring spectacle. Without realizing it, his heels lifted from the lush grassland, followed by his tippy-toes, both propelled by the sheer rotational force of his tails as they wagged to and fro in the raw emotion of the moment. It wasn't enough to see its infinitesimal form. He needed more. More detail. More information. Knowing every wasted fraction of a second could prove costly, he rushed to his homemade optical telescope.
Having extended it to its full length, it took a dizzying few seconds of reorientation for Tails to spot his device among the many clusters of stars. It took only one second for his blood to run ice-cold. He saw Insight I do something no interplanetary vessel should do on its exit from the atmosphere.
It wobbled.
"No…" said Tails, the word coming out in a light squeak. He stood transfixed at the telescope, as if trying to read the mind of something that couldn't think. Why was Insight doing this? What could he do to make it stop?
Please…I'm begging you…
But the rocket, coaxed by the fierce winds of the upper atmosphere, refused to heed its builder's silent command. It swayed left. It swayed right. It swayed in any direction other than up. Then the shedding began. As he watched from thousands of feet below, the construction that consumed an entire hour of his blood, sweat, and tears, came undone in a matter of seconds. First, one of the aerodynamic fins buckled and gave way under the intolerable friction. The imbalance sent Insight on a violent curve to the right, further stressing the entire structure as it expanded and contracted under the strain, peeling away one of the three heat shields like the skin of an onion.
No…not now! Not this close! Hang on to it, baby, hang on to it…you can do it!
Deep within his heart, he held out hope for a miracle. Maybe it would correct its course. Maybe it could survive a lunar orbit without a heat shield. Maybe he had been too cautious. But even deeper within, he was a scientist. In there, he found no room for frivolous emotions such as "hope". There was only logic…cold, emotionless logic that told him to await the inevitable. And like clockwork, the inevitable happened. A roaring plume of flames poked through a mangled hole once occupied by the missing heat shield, and two words flashed through Tails' mind.
Fuel leak.
All the hopes, dreams, ambitions, and fears which he had bottled up over the evening's work finally escaped in the form of a faint gasp. Raging thoughts obscured his view of the doomed rocket.
But...I planned for this. I built it for this exact scenario! I thought I had it all figured out!
The eyepiece of his telescope fogged up with moisture…the same moisture he had tried to conceal within his eyes. His hand reached for the lever that would cap the lens and spare his fragile heart from further torment. Yet somehow, despite the horror of it all, he couldn't quite bring himself to turn away. Only an indescribable affection compelled him to keep following the rocket as it proceeded on its fatal journey. Even though from his point of view, Insight I melded into an amorphous silver blob trailed by an even longer streak of detail-less flame, it was no less recognizable to him than when he launched it...recognizable as his own. He wasn't just a builder of machines…he was a father, watching his son writhing in agony his final death throes. Soon, the silver mass in the telescope was overcome by the light. It was only a matter of time.
Then the time came. A flash, and Insight I was no more.
Tails finally gathered the fortitude to turn away, his eyes stinging after minutes of sustained focus. There was nothing more for them to observe but the ruins of his own creation, plummeting toward the ocean in flaming fragments. Tape recorder still in hand, he summoned what little remained of his voice, and dictated the one note he had hoped not to dictate.
Only to find he couldn't.
He stood frozen, waiting for the words to come to him. How could he speak of something he was still trying to come to terms with? How could he explain something he himself needed explained to him, even if he didn't want to hear it? Each second added more dead air to the recording. Three seconds. Four seconds. Five…then, finally, something.
"Ins...excuse me...Insight I..."
It wasn't until after he spoke that he realized his voice cracked with every word. He thought of stopping it there, but it was too late. The first five were already etched onto the tape for all time. He might as well keep going, even if he could only utter short, incomplete sentences before losing himself.
"...Insight I launch has ended in failure. Reason unknown." And…stop. That was all he could handle.
He let slip the tape recorder from his grasp, letting it fall straight-up in a pile of thick mud. He hardly even seemed to notice, walking in vague circles without direction or goal. A collision between his left shoe and a foreign object finally brought Tails out of his zombie-like trance, compelling him to look down to examine it.
A clipboard.
The papers once clipped to the board were scattered and blown about by the collision, but Tails recognized it immediately. On these pages were piles upon piles of calculations and formulas. He had gone to the trouble of factoring in every possible variable – down to the weight of the alloy used for the sheet metal – and had come to the conclusion that his experiment could be done.
…could be done by someone who knew better…
Tails jerked his head away, hands holding back a torrent of tears. He went to his last idea of saving himself from the brink of meltdown.
"It was just a stupid experiment," he muttered to himself. "It was just…" Sniffle. "…a stupid…"
It didn't work. All manner of negative emotion surged through Tails at once, narrowing his eyes, flexing his limbs. He needed to take this out on something, and there was only one object within reach that could provide that catharsis.
One swift booting sent the clipboard into the leaves of a faraway palm tree…without the clip.
Finally, he looked toward the sky itself for answers. Even for all the times it played cruel tricks on him, the sky was the one place with which Tails felt a certain kinship…a sense of belonging. Perhaps it would pay him back this once. But this time, all he saw as he stared into the night was the specter of his goal slipping just that little bit further out of reach. No matter what, he couldn't escape that one word burrowing a corner for itself in the back of his mind.
Failure.
The very word…the very concept…made him sick to his stomach.
But his stare had turned toward the skies, and it was too late to wrench himself away. He kept looking. Gazing. Pondering. Stretching for any sort of meaning in this cluster of symbols. In the end, that's all it was - a cluster, a collection of scattered figures whose true meaning would be left up to the interpretation of the viewer.
But it was beautiful. There was no denying that.
Far removed from civilization, separated from the cities and their glittering downtowns which polluted the atmosphere with their artificial glow, the heavens were free to shine down on the world in their full, magnificent splendor. These stars, these constellations, these mysterious twinkling giants of the sky…each one of them had its own story to tell, but together, they formed a rich tapestry that seared itself into Tails' consciousness.
And at the centerpiece of this celestial tapestry was the moon, commanding his full attention. He found himself hypnotized by its imposing stature, squinting to decipher every crater and crag he possibly could.
Then, as if by divine intervention from the goddess Selene herself, Tails was hit by a burst of perception.
He flashed back to all those nights tossing and turning gleefully in bed, MilesElectric in hand, devouring the timeless stories of astronomers, astrologers, astronauts, and engineers who came before him. He imagined all of them, once upon a time, taking in this exact same view of the full moon against a pitch-black night sky…and finding the same swelling inspiration.
Wow…they must have gone through all this, too… he thought.
Some of them were dreamers. Some were purely idealistic and pursued only the best for the future. Others were reckless fools who risked their own lives for nothing. But they all had one thing in common. All of them saw in the moon the inspiration and the audacity to break the bounds of their own sky, to break new ground in the universe.
A wave of understanding swept over Tails, as forceful and dramatic as the waves pounding against the shore wall of Emerald Hill. Suddenly, everything made sense. Not just theself-appointed mission he set out on...but his entire purpose. This crash wasn't the end, but a new beginning…the control…a chance to learn what went wrong.
Though he didn't fancy himself on their level – and he probably never would – he was among everyone he read about during all those sleepless nights alone. He was a scientist. And after all, what good is an experiment that isn't finished?
His spirit renewed, he raced back to the workstation and switched on the MilesElectric one more time. This time, however, he wasn't in need of any stories. He just needed to check the time of day.
1:32 AM.
There was nothing stopping him from building Insight II.