Hi! My name is Miles, and I'm going to save the world today.

Maybe twice, actually, if I survive.

If I don't… Or didn't, I guess? Then this recording will explain everything that happened, why I did what I did, and hopefully show why I failed. I'll also attach some schematics to the file, so whoever finds this can try again where I've failed.

I really hope it's you listening to this, Sonic.

I'm so sorry I let you down. I hope you're okay.

…

Okay, assuming you're not someone who already knows what's happening, I guess some background is in order, especially if you're a native, and I could use some distraction while I finish setting all this up, so here goes, I guess.

Um...

I'm not sure where to begin, actually. It must seem pretty weird if you lived here and all of a sudden a fat lunatic with a rock addiction turned up out of nowhere and made himself god, or you found this weird recording by some fox you've probably never heard of. So… I guess I'll start at the beginning. Sorry if you actually know all this stuff already, but don't worry, I'll be quick with this part so you can get right to hearing about how I died. Or saved the world, I guess, but hopefully I'll remember to come back and delete this if that happens.

Okay, so my full name is Miles Prower, I'm a fox, and I am, as far as I can guess, thirteen years old at the time of this recording. My friends call me Tails, because I have two. Tails that is, not friends. I'm not sure how many friends I have left right now. Hopefully more than two.

Anyway, I grew up on a place called Cocoa Island. Don't remember my birth parents, so I'm not sure if I was born there or not, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they just abandoned me there after inflicting me with the groan inducing pun that was my birth name. Not a great start in life, but the flickies on the island took care of me when I was too young to take care of myself, and the old workshop I lived in made me grow up to really treasure technology. Especially when the Kukku empire attacked when I was six or so, but that's another story, and not a very important one, since neither Cocoa or the Kukku even exist on this planet as far as I know. Well, if they do that raises an interesting question of convergent transdimensional history- wait. Sorry, getting distracted. Been awhile since I last ate, hard to focus.

Anyway, growing up living on Cocoa was pretty cool. Learned to speak flicky, learned a lot by taking apart the old machines there, and learned to fly too. Like, actually fly. With my tails. Not with a plane or anything, I actually spin them to generate thrust? The physiology of my butt is actually pretty impressive, if I do say so myself. But again, I digress. When I left Cocoa island at the tender age of seven I was bright eyed, bushy tailed - doubly so - and keen to find my place in the world.

Didn't go great. That's where I first got the nickname Tails, and first found out that while some mobians (do you have mobians here too? I saw a human when I arrived) have tails, they don't generally have two of them, and don't generally like weird mutant kids who lapse into flicky tweets when they get flustered. Which I did, a lot, back then. I was so excited to find more people like me... Well, I guess the Kukku empire were mobians too, but they were avians, so kid me thought they were a lot closer to the flickies than me. Plus we were generally trying to blow each other up or shoot each other at the time, so not the best first experience. I still get on edge around avian mobians, if I'm honest. It was a strange time in my life.

Anyway, where was I? Right, little kid, excited to meet people like me, but nobody was like me, and nobody liked me either. I just drifted from place to place until I met him.

Uh, Sonic, if you're the one listening to this please skip through this stuff, it's embarrassing, y'know?

Okay, so there I was, West Side Island (again, probably doesn't exist on this planet), middle of nowhere, talking to flickies and being a weird lonely little kid when I saw this blue blur streaking through the palms. Fastest thing I'd ever seen, and I'd seen my share of rockets. So? I start following it. I mentioned I could use my tails for thrust? If I build up enough speed and then angle them just right then I can juuust about break Mach 1 along the ground, but it was all I could do to barely keep up, and even then because the blur had to deal with obstacles that I could just fly over. Day after day, just stalking this amazing blue… thing. All because it was new, and it was cool, and there was nothing else like it anywhere, ever.

It took me all day moving flat out before I even saw that it was a hedgehog, and I'm sure he could have lost me at any time before that if he'd really wanted to. He was weird, just like me, bright blue and faster than anything on two legs had any right to be, but unlike me he wasn't chased out or yelled at. He wasn't hanging around in the trees at the edge of villages. He was cool, he was popular, and I was fascinated. Scared too, if I'm honest. I ran and hid whenever I thought he might see me… And then on the third day I lost him… Wow, um, I really swear this is relevant, by the way, sorry if I'm rambling.

It was that afternoon that I ran across a plane, parked on the beach. Now, I've loved machines all my life, grew up around a lot of them in the workshop, and made a few vehicles of my own by then, so I was admiring it when, who did I see sleeping on the wing? The blue hedgehog I'd been chasing!

My first instinct was to sneak away. I was intimidated after all, but I was too slow.

...Heh, not the last time that;s happened. But I'm glad in this case, because it was about then that the whole island went to heck. Fire everywhere, animals panicking, flickies squawking like crazy. I hid under the plane, the hedgehog did too. I was panicked too then, I kept saying it wasn't me, that it wasn't my fault. Probably started chirping at him too. I hadn't quite kicked that habit back then, hadn't been socialised properly yet.

But the hedgehog wasn't mad. At me at least. He told me his name was Sonic, that the island was under attack by a human called "Doctor Eggman". Actually his real name is Ivo Robotnik, but like me, I guess the nickname stuck. Gave him a bit of a complex too, since he started making a bunch of egg themed robots and going crazy.

And that's history. My world's history at least. That was the first time I helped to save the world. Though I'm not sure how helpful I was in the end. I didn't have any gadgets with me, it was just me and Sonic fighting an army of giant robots trying to recover the purple Chaos Emerald before Eggman did, while getting the other six away from him so he couldn't use them to power an orbital killsat called the Death Egg. Told you the guy had a complex.

Oh, right. The Chaos Emeralds are important, even though you've probably never heard of them before. You don't even have power rings here, after all.

Chaos Emeralds are native to my planet, and for now let's just say that they're powerful. Incredibly so. And Sonic was a genius at using them. When he found all seven and held them all in his hands? He started glowing. Bright yellow, nothing could even hurt him anymore. And fast? There was no competition after that. In the end I could only deliver him into the Death Egg on his plane and then just watch the sparks fly.

I can say, at least, that I helped though. When he used up the last of his rings - hard to explain those, sort of like coalesced sources of ambient free floating energy, I guess? They're actually pretty common, seen more dimensions with them than without, though that doesn't mean much to you if you've never even seen one, I'm sure. But yeah, when the last of the rings fuelling his transformation were used up he bailed out of the Death Egg, which was crashing at the time. I managed to get underneath him with the plane before he hit the ocean and saved his life.

Well, not like the fall itself would have hurt him much. You can't move like he does and get bothered by something like terminal velocity. But since he never bothered to learn to swim- Ow!

Sorry, burned my finger… Wait, I'll edit this part out later.

And that was the start of my longest, and best friendship I've ever had. Sonic seemed to like having me around. He taught me a lot, really helped bring me out of my shell, and never picked on me for being the weird little fox geek that I was… Still am, I guess. The cool big brother I never had.

And hey, not long after that I helped save the world again, when Eggman tried to fix the Death Egg by getting someone to steal the Chaos Emeralds from Sonic. Um, that reminds me, if it's you listening, Knuckles? Please remember that Doctor Eggman isn't your friend, and that he is going to try and trick you. I know you're not dumb, but you need to stop being so trusting, okay? Take it from me.

Once the Death Egg crashed again, it landed on Angel Island, which is like a regular island, except it flies around in the sky and has, or had, the Master Emerald in it. Another important one you may not have heard of. Without getting too technical I guess it's… Kind of like a control mechanism for the Chaos Emeralds? It can control the chaos in them, condense it, shut them down… Again, this is important, sorry. Well, we managed to recover all the emeralds, and thanks to the Master Emerald they output enough power that even I could use it. Kinda. I'm no Sonic. He used all that power no problem, the most powerful I've ever seen him, or anyone, for that matter. Me? I had to dump most of it into a flock of flickies we'd saved, and it still felt like I was tearing apart at the seams trying to keep the power inside. Robotnik didn't have a chance after that, and I'd helped Sonic save the world again. Three for three. Does wonders for your nce.

Well, I'm skipping a lot of stuff that isn't important, but that was the big pattern of my life, of my world, right there. Someone, usually Eggman, tries to take over the world or destroy a big chunk of it, and someone, usually Sonic, sometimes with me helping him, stops them and saves the day.

… Huh, wow, even trying to talk about myself I'm talking about Sonic a lot, huh? I'm not bitter. I love the guy, but that's just how it is. You can barely even talk about anything without mentioning Sonic back on my world, that's just how big a deal he was. And he earned it. Big thing about Chaos Emeralds is that they… "repel" each other. Like magnets. When all seven get together, sooner or later, one way or another they are going to separate and appear somewhere else in the world. Maybe not if they're kept in the Master Emerald's chamber, I guess?

But yeah, anyway, it wasn't as though Sonic could just grab all the emeralds and then just fly around until he caught Eggman once and for all - and for a fat guy, that human was seriously good at running away. That stuff only stuck around for a day or two, then the chaos emeralds were gone to cause chaos somewhere else around the world. It was a lot of work, and I was usually just flying a plane around, not the one fighting all day every day.

Well, I never "saved the world" by myself, but I did finally achieve something a bit bigger than stopping small time villains and saving flickies. Eggman launched a nuke on a town, and I, all by my lonesome, somehow managed to stop it. The town gave me the yellow chaos emerald that had showed up there as a reward... Well that was a whole thing. I managed to fabricate a copy of it back then, nowhere near as powerful as the real thing, but close enough to trick Eggman and help Sonic save the world a few days later. Wait, that's important too, so just bear it in mind, it'll save time later on.

Well, I wasn't always by Sonic's side. As the years went by he spent more time with other, faster heroes than the tagalong kit. Usually Hedgehogs, actually, never really thought of them as a particularly fast species before. That was fine. I never really cared about being in the spotlight, you know? And the downtime let me get back into science and engineering in a big way. I made big strides on things like synthetic rings, robots, weapons. It was never easy to keep up with someone like Sonic, so I was always looking for an edge, technological or otherwise, to help bridge that gap, to be useful. Even if he didn't always listen to me, or need me, I- I guess I just hoped that I'd at least be useful enough that he wouldn't abandon me.

…

Wow, this got pretty heavy. Funny to say that considering the circumstances, right? Well, anyway, I'm almost done with the backstory anyway. Only two or three more things to mention, all of them pretty important to understand what's happened with your world right now.

First, I guess, is that there's not just our dimension and yours. I mentioned that earlier I think? And at least one of those dimensions has a world a lot like mine, rings, mobians, and reality warping emeralds - the Sol Emeralds. I guess call them the Sol dimension, and where I'm from the Chaos dimension. Well, I mentioned that Chaos Emeralds repel one another? Well Sol Emeralds do the same thing, but, again, like magnets, the two different kinds of emerald attract one another, and when all seven of each are combined, you can actually use the energy interaction to travel between dimensions.

Yeah, I was the one to figure out how to control that, so I guess that makes it my fault what's happening right now. So... sorry. Again.

Secondly, there's several other cosmic stones we know about over in the Chaos dimension, the most important one right now being the Phantom Ruby. In terms of power, it's possibly another dimension's equivalent to our Master Emerald, granting near infinite abilities to augment physical reality with hyper-real illusion matrices. Getting that near the Chaos Emeralds messes with reality hard enough to break the space time continuum on top of just warping dimensions.

Finally, you know I mentioned being able to create a copy of a chaos emerald? Well Eggman managed to do the same with the Phantom Ruby. Of course, I did it first try, but I'm just surprised he didn't call it a phantom egg or something.

Like I said earlier - I think? My fake emerald was nowhere near the power output of the original, but in the hands of a proficient chaos user they could use it's ambient energy to do some of the things they could do with a chaos emerald - stuff like low level spatial distortions, energy blasts, and physical enhancement. Nothing so great as the transformations with all seven real emeralds working together of course, but still, really wish I could do all that stuff, especially right now.

By that metric, Eggman's replica could be called a failure - the phantom ruby prototypes didn't output power at all. On their own, they were useless. But when enough charge was poured into one, it worked almost like the original did, full on reality bending super powers.

Well, we destroyed them, saved the world again, but the funny thing about technology? Once it's been created once, it's there to stay. It's not like water dripped on the first cavemobian's fire and he said "Well that's that, guess I'll never try that again.".

But I guess that's enough backstory that you should understand what happened. Sonic never managed… or never wanted? To stop Eggman for good. He'd make new gadgets, new schemes, and we would stop him. Over and over again, year after year.

But when you fight someone long enough? One day they're going to win.

And with someone like Ivo Robotnik?

He only needs to win once.

And this was the time he did.