Sonic Boom

I am the smartest man on the planet. I've always known that to be true.

After all, could anyone else have been able to build a corporate empire as massive and successful as Eggman Enterprises? Very unlikely.

Could they have done it without ever having to hire a single employee? Nigh impossible.

Could they have managed to drive out all competition throughout the entire vast city of Mobotropolis? Definitely not.

Could anyone else, in the entire world, ever be able to do all that in a matter of only five years?

There is only one person on all of Mobius that could do that, and he is Ivo Robotnik. Me.

But even with all of my genius, skills, and resources, there was one discovery I made that shocked even myself. There are some secrets that no man or Mobian was meant to know, yet one night, out of sheer accident, I managed to discover the greatest secret of them all.

The Chaos Zone.

Now, we generally tend to think of the world as following natural laws. What goes up must come down; creatures are suited to their specific environments; there are limits to physical accomplishment; and so on and so forth. For the most part, that's all true- in our dimension.

There is one scientific question that has always baffled even the greatest minds on Mobius: just where do rings come from? Those gold round things are everywhere- in the ground, in caves, underwater, just floating in the air. Many primitive Mobian civilizations even use them as currency. Yet, there seems to be no rational explanation for their existence. They disobey every existing law of physics- they floated despite being solid, they were light as a feather despite appearing to be made of gold, and they had no natural purpose. Rings were a total enigma.

At least, they were until I applied my genius to the task.

I ordered my robots to collect as many rings as they could find- which took longer than I'd have wished, since they had to venture all of the way outside of Mobotropolis to find any. I didn't count exactly how many they had, but I believe it was over 200. I subjected the rings to various tests, but they did not react in the slightest to any of them- until I accidentally spilled tea onto the machine, causing it to erupt in sparks.

All at once, the rings reacted in the most peculiar fashion. They all disappeared in a bright flash of light -accompanied by a chiming sound- and seemed to be absorbed into the machine itself. After the flash ended, floating next to the machine was this incredibly large ring, as big as I am. It spun in an even, clockwise circle, and aside from its giant size, looked like any other ring. As I stepped forward to touch it, I was suddenly thrust through its center…

…and found myself in the Chaos Zone.

In the Chaos Zone, there are no rules. Everything you could ever imagine can be found there. Giant crystals, animals of bizarre and fantastic shapes and sizes, amusement park-like architecture… it was unlike anything any living thing had ever seen before. Logic does not exist in the Zone- nothing is constant, not even you. After a short while, I've found, anything that has entered the Chaos Zone is forcibly kicked out of it.

After I made my first trip, I was fascinated by what I had seen. I devoted myself full-time to uncovering the mysteries of Chaos, never leaving my main laboratory, and barely ever eating or sleeping. I knew that I was the only person on the planet that knew of the Zone, and if I could just find some way to make use of it, the possibilities would be endless.

Before I made this monumental discovery, I had used Mobians as my power source. It was the most sensible option- there were plenty of them, nobody important would miss them if they disappeared, and their life energy powered machines better than any other energy source on Mobius. But this new energy, this Chaos Energy, was something far stronger. Harnessing them for use as a direct power source proved fruitless; the energy was too volatile to be condensed into small enough containers. But I found an alternative option: exposing the Mobians to the Energy, and just seeing what happened.

I used a high-powered pressure cannon to bathe the animal from head to toe in extracted energy. Many of the test subjects had no reaction at all, or died in gruesome ways; no big loss, even if it did cause an awful mess. What fascinated me were the successful results.

The ugly little creatures gained new attributes that simply should not have been possible. A rabbit could suddenly fly with its ears. A chameleon was now able to turn literally invincible. A bee grew to giant size. A fox grew a second tail.

But the most incredible of all was what I called the Sonic Project.

The little hedgehog had a terrible attitude, and at first, I had to put him under if I wanted to even strap him into the testing chair. But as time went on, he stopped resisting. I suspect that he was starting to like the changes- and who wouldn't?

The Sonic Project became fast. Incredibly fast. With each experiment, his speed grew, until he was finally able to break the sound barrier simply by running. He eventually became so fast that his fur turned a deep shade of blue. If I could duplicate his results, then I would no longer need a robot army- just one or two more Sonics in my possession would be more than enough to defend my future Empire. I saw such great potential in him. That is, until last night.

You see… he's escaped.

And I do not tolerate escape.