Revenge of the nerds

[Bo]

I just want to say that I finally read through this thread and endorse every aspect of it.

Good work; I expect some conclusions to be reached.

[Dr. BUGMAN]

Did that damned tanuki build an engine that's powered by the power of team work, or am I nuts. Seems pretty blatant emotions are a fuel source in Sonic's reality, question mark??

[Yami CJMErl]

Maybe it's following the same premise about how the Chaos Emeralds can be powered/re-powered by positive or negative emotions, a la Sonic Adventure?

[Frieza2000]

IT'S THE PILLAR!!!

MERCIFUL TIKAL, IT'S THE PILLAR!!!

Random thoughts from a conversation with Chris:

• SA1 was right on the heels of Chaotix, so it'd make sense that they were considering using it.
• The concept artist was probably given some vague direction like "draw some ideas for Emerald shrines and Echidna ruins." So any one of these pictures is probably not a fully-fleshed out and finalized concept. There are similarities to what we saw in the final product of Sonic Adventure, but there are also similarities to what is described in Sonic 3 and perhaps Chaotix.
• #3 could be an early version of the emerald shrine from the past, given the large Chaos/Super Emeralds surrounding it. However, it has echidna icons carved in the base, so either this is before they decided to retcon the legend (shifting possession of the shrine to the Chao), or this is actually on Angel Island in the present, in which case it could be an early version of the new altar that the Master Emerald was transported to between S&K and Chaotix (makes a lot more sense than the cheap one floating over the side of the island), or it could be a new area specific to the Pillar (probably directly beneath Hidden Palace, since Eggman was [almost certainly] transported to Hidden Palace in Chaotix and witnessed Pillar energy crystallize right there).
• The bottom two pictures both have elements of the Chao shrine. The 4th one definitely appears underground similar to the description of the Pillar in Sonic 3. It's hard to tell if the 3rd one is also underground or just glowing at night (perhaps the night that the elders tried to direct the Emerald's power for themselves and caused an explosion).
• It's possible that all or some of these are one building. 1 is the outside of the structure (doorway between its feet), 2 is a hallway leading to 4, which is the outer shell of the structure containing 3.
• 4 definitely looks like...the most important thing we've ever seen. Very raw looking giant emerald floating over it, surrounded by floating emerald shards. From memory, the only time we've seen unpolished emerald pieces like that was the small bits of emerald that appeared to be growing around the Master Emerald in S&K.
  
  Maybe that chunk on top of the dome is still growing. Maybe that's crystallized Pillar energy. Food for my pet theory from page 8 about it being a horizontally oriented mono-directional portal.
• It's clearly a nexus at the center of something. Those tubes could be anything, but given that it's Sonic I bet they're entrances that you roll in through.
• There appear to be flowers growing on top of the dome, just outside the circle. And there are hourglasses with different amounts of sand carved around the sides.
• The Pillar is described as sleeping in Sonic 3 and being controlled by the Chaos Emeralds, but in Chaotix it is active (Pillar energy is released, crystallizing into Chaos Rings) despite there being no Chaos Emeralds present. Did Sonic unknowingly reawaken the Pillar in S&K? Is this what transformed the Chaos Emeralds into Super Emeralds?
• Was the idea that, in the past, the Chaos Emeralds were brought to what would become Angel Island and they caused the Pillar to release it's energy, which crystallized into the Master Emerald and lifted the island? Like how that same energy caused Neutrogic High Zone to raise out of the ocean?

This is a HUGE BREAKTHROUGH. It's almost certainly not the Master Emerald because it looks nothing like it, but it's at the center of an emerald shrine so it's obviously important. The Pillar is the only pre-existing thing that fits the bill.

[Locit]

Am I the only one who can't see the pillar images and has no idea what the hell Frieza is talking about?

[j-man]

Take a look at the bottom left image in particular - definitely seems to be a crystal pillar, rather than an Emerald on a stone plinth like the final game.

It's all very exciting! I like perving over concept art at the best of times, especially Sonic stuff as it seems a lot harder to come by, but the story ramifications are quite significant. I'm not particularly enamoured with the idea of a Sonic Adventure remake, unlike most of these Discord fandom goblins, but I'd certainly love to see a new game with similar storytelling and visual style - maybe even something that fleshes out the world-building and Echidna/Emerald lore, although I realise that's probably pushing it at this point.

[Frieza2000]

Higher-res versions now available: https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog/stat ... 7049459713

It would've been great if Sonic games had continued to have ongoing storytelling, whether they'd picked up where SA1 left off or continued the new thread SA2 started, or both at once. But whoever was interested in developing that continuity seems to have died with the Dreamcast. Now Sonic Team appears to be actively disinterested in having any kind of connection between one game and the next. The last exception was ShtH, which was a fairly nonsensical conclusion to SA2. Every game since has been self contained, limited to references like using wisps as weapons in Forces (and wasn't the whole point of Colors to stop Eggman from using them to power machines? Why are we doing it ourselves now?). At this point I'm kind of glad they don't, though. They'd just cock it up. But I would like to know who wrote the old manuals and ask them what they were thinking.

[big_smile]

https://twitter.com/CFWhitehead/status/ ... 0770981888

Christian Whitehead gives his thoughts on Hyper Sonic/Super Emeralds. Basically, he mentions they weren't written out of the story and the Chaos Emeralds did change shape into the Super Emeralds. But Sonic Team didn’t want to have multiple power levels, so they just kept the naming moving forwards.

Higher-res versions now available: https://twitter.com/sonic_hedgehog/stat ... 7049459713

It would've been great if Sonic games had continued to have ongoing storytelling, whether they'd picked up where SA1 left off or continued the new thread SA2 started, or both at once. But whoever was interested in developing that continuity seems to have died with the Dreamcast. Now Sonic Team appears to be actively disinterested in having any kind of connection between one game and the next. The last exception was ShtH, which was a fairly nonsensical conclusion to SA2. Every game since has been self contained, limited to references like using wisps as weapons in Forces (and wasn't the whole point of Colors to stop Eggman from using them to power machines? Why are we doing it ourselves now?). At this point I'm kind of glad they don't, though. They'd just cock it up. But I would like to know who wrote the old manuals and ask them what they were thinking.

Storytelling in Sonic games has always been... 'ropey'. But I loved the ongoing nature of it. I didn’t like the direction the series took with SA1 onwards, but I did appreciate how the games still followed lines from each other (even if many of these lines were badly written and focused too much on Shadow).

Sonic Team have said that they wanted the games to be self-contained, and the American writers they have been using since Colors Wii have said they aren't familiar with past games. However, interestingly, Sonic Runners and Sonic Colours DS weaved in threads of previous games and these were both written by Sonic Team Japan. And recently, Sonic Channel posted artwork of Blaze in her palace (that had a hidden portrait of Big the Cat). So I think there probably is a part of Sonic Team probably would want to do more continuity, it's just not the direction that the higher-ups are big on.

[Wombatwarlord777]

As someone who actually enjoys aspects of Colors and Lost World's stories, I do have to admit that the interconnected plots of past games were way more engaging. It used to feel like Sonic had a world with an ongoing history that had some really interesting elements. Now we just kind of have a series of generic settings.

I'll give the IDW comics credit for doing the best they can to create a coherent world with a basis in most of the post-Adventure games. They still can't touch the Classic games for some reason (even though they're planning on doing a separate miniseries based on the Classic characters later next year), but fortunately Angel Island and the Master Emerald fall under the purview of Sonic Adventure, so that's present and accounted for. Still, I wonder if they'd ever do anything interesting with a distinct South Island, Hidden Palace, or Newtrogic High Zone if they were allowed to.

[Crazy Penguin]

Take a look at the bottom left image in particular - definitely seems to be a crystal pillar, rather than an Emerald on a stone plinth like the final game.

I wonder if they were using the Sonic 3 manual as a point of reference when they designed that. It's underground (like Hidden Palace), so maybe? Hidden Palace essentially being dropped from the lore was a jarring change at the time, but I can see why they went in the direction they did, to accommodate Sonic Adventure's plot. A water god and little water babies living in a crystal cave beneath a volcano might have felt incongruous.

It's all very exciting! I like perving over concept art at the best of times, especially Sonic stuff as it seems a lot harder to come by, but the story ramifications are quite significant. I'm not particularly enamoured with the idea of a Sonic Adventure remake, unlike most of these Discord fandom goblins, but I'd certainly love to see a new game with similar storytelling and visual style - maybe even something that fleshes out the world-building and Echidna/Emerald lore, although I realise that's probably pushing it at this point.

I really liked how Sonic Adventure simply went the route of "the echidnas tried to steal the Chaos Emeralds and failed". They've guarded the Master Emerald ever since, but the Chaos Emeralds were never under their control.

In the concept art above, the emerald altar has echidna markings, but in the final Sonic Adventure game it's a complete mystery who constructed the altar and who gathered all eight emeralds. It wasn't the Knuckles Tribe and it wasn't the Chao, so who was it?

It's been a long time since I last touched Sonic Unleashed, but the Gaia Temples were implied to be even older than that weren't they? (And the Master Emerald didn't seen to figure into those. Another mystery!)

I think it would be a mistake to ever give the emeralds a definitive origin, but it's so wide open how many people have wielded the Chaos Emeralds over the millennia that they could give them multiple backstories and have them all be true.

[j-man]

It's a shame the Chaos Emeralds seem to have been dropped entirely from the recent entries - a bit of game-spanning lore would do wonders to unify the series right now. I appreciate the desire to try new things, but I think it's fair to say that hasn't really worked in their favour for a while now.

Thematically I think it makes sense to get into a bit of ancient history. Sonic vs. Eggman is already a classic story of nature vs. technology, sure, but you could also introduce a starker contrast between old ruins/artifacts and new machinery/cityscapes - Sonic appreciates the power and importance of what came before, Eggman wants to tear it down and recreate it, etc. It's not exactly unfamiliar ground in terms of fiction, but there's still good story potential and it works well with what the characters represent.

Basically, just sit the team down with a boxset of Ghibli and say "Do this, but with robot insects and televisions that have shoes inside them".

[Frieza2000]

I've noticed that several of the images on previous pages have been lost to time. But, as it happens, I saved a copy of them, so in the interest of preserving this for future generations, here are all of the images in this post and all previous posts in a convenient zip file. I may update it later with images from future posts.
---

Greetings, fellow nerds! Much time has passed, and world shaking events have transpired. I speak, of course, of the new concept art revealed in Sonic Origins, but also of a few other esoteric sources that have recently resurfaced. The implications of these are subtle but significant, and have led us down many new avenues of theorycrafting. Let me share with you some of the fruits of these latest expeditions. We have such sights to show you.

But the landscape of Sonicdom has changed in the last 10 years, and so have I. These days I'm much less interested in trying to invent continuity where there was clearly none devised. Not that there isn't still some fun to be had in the intellectual exercise of constructing a grand unified collage from disparate shards of narrative. But with so much carelessly conceived, tonally incongruous, and obnoxiously bad material having been stirred into the pot at this point, and after having lived the journey through so many eras of Sonic games and now finding myself in a world where a literal fanfic writer (God bless him) is managing the official lore and what used to be considered sacred gnosis, whispered of only by the erudite sages in hallowed halls such as these, has been shotgunned into common consciousness under the banner of "deep cuts" so frequently that every Tedy, Paty, and Lidy knows it, the endeavor has simply lost its luster.

No, my attention now is more focused on what the designers were thinking when they made a given game, and the questions that continue to captivate me surround the fate of Angel Island's Chaos Emeralds, the meaning of the Hidden Palace cutscenes, and the Pillar. So while this post will dip into the later games here and there for fun, I will be confining my scope to the Classic era.

At this point, with all that I've learned, it must be acknowledged that SA1 was effectively a soft reboot. While far more closely connected to the classics than what came after, the changes were truly more substantial than they seemed at the time. The Pillar was ejected from the lore entirely, the origin of Angel Island was reimagined into the Pachacamac/Chaos story, the Special Stage was retired (with the exception of Heroes it has only appeared in 2D and handheld games since), the setting shifted from a surreal south Pacific island chain populated by talking animals to the human world, and, perhaps most significantly of all, it was firmly decided that there were only 7 Chaos Emeralds.

It is well past time that I finally came to terms with this. It should always have been fairly obvious that, prior to SA1, Chaos Emeralds were a natural resource that had been refined into tools, not a unique set of magical artifacts. From the very beginning, the Sonic 1 manual's description of them as a "super substance" leaned in this direction. As the series went forward, their varying number, shape, color, provenance, and sometimes even function (keeping South Island from sinking in Sonic & Tails), made a case for it, but there was always room to dismiss these as inconsistent storytelling. Sonic 3's manual confirmed that there were at least 14, but because of the interaction between the Master Emerald and the West Side emeralds it was conceivable that both sets were connected and that they were the only ones. Even Iizuka's answer to Big Smile on page 1 of this thread, where he explicitly said Sonic Team felt that there were too many emeralds and so for Sonic Adventure they went back to 7, was in response to a question about the Super Emeralds, so you could have argued he was only addressing them.

But it's time to put this to rest once and for all. The heart of the Classic series, Sonic & Knuckles, has been hiding a definitive answer in plain sight all along. We have recently discovered (or rediscovered - I feel like someone posted this here a long time ago and we just kind of forgot about it) this factoid buried in the Sonic Jam Official Guide, in its description of Lava Reef Zone (via Google Lens, which has been wondrously helpful in exploring the less well-trodden Japanese sources):

Act 1: The Lava Cave Zone stretches even deeper inside the Lava Pyramid. It seems Eggman is mining for the Super Emeralds that lie hidden deep within. ... Run through the Chaos Emerald Mine. It's complicated, but it's mostly a straight road. ... Act 2: Deep in the mine where the Chaos Emerald crystals shine. The flamethrowers hanging on the walls and floors are extremely troublesome.

Lava Reef was a Chaos Emerald mine.

LAVA REEF WAS A CHAOS EMERALD MINE!!!



They are presumably referring to these RGB glowing crystals throughout Act 2 (for the record, the gif above is from Sonic 3 A.I.R., which shows a wider spectrum of colors than the original). Now, before we delve into the implications of this geological bombshell, it is worth pointing out the obvious: the stuff in the mines is not of the same potency as the sets of cut and polished emeralds we collect in the games. Otherwise Eggman would not have wasted time with the Master Emerald; he would have grabbed as much of this unguarded crystal as he could carry and had unlimited power. Therefore, this would appear to be a raw, unrefined precursor used in the creation of Chaos Emeralds as we know them. Going forward, we'll refer to it as chaos crystal. Given that there are so few fully formed emeralds compared to the amount of crystal down there, perhaps a large amount was needed to make a single emerald (either because the crystal structures only contain trace amounts of the actual Chaos Emerald material or because they have to go through some kind of concentration or enrichment process), or perhaps it was just one component and production was limited by some other factor.

Note that chaos crystal is NOT crystallized Pillar energy. That's what Chaos Rings are, and this stuff is clearly different from and less powerful than them. Chaotix came out much later, so it could have originally been conceived that way, but if we take the Classic lore as a whole then a different explanation is needed. I'll take a crack at that later.

The fact that this mine is located almost directly below the ancient civilization's population centers obviously tells us something about how they became so advanced and prosperous. Whether they happened to settle there by chance, built up around it after its discovery, or seized it from previous inhabitants, their control over and eventual mastery of this rare and powerful resource would have cemented their position of dominance in the political order (they're said to be usable "as nuclear weapons or high energy laser weapons" so they probably were in fact used that way at some point, though you could take it as just establishing what Eggman could do with them). In fact, given that all of the south Pacific islands we visit in the games are relatively close to where Angel Island originally was, you could make a good case that each of their sets of Chaos Emeralds originated from the Lava Reef mine (you can actually see a few islands in the background on the left side of Angel Island Act 1 - perhaps West Side).



Further, Eggman never goes looking for emeralds in any other part of the world and they're so rare in the modern age that "no one knows how to obtain them" and all he has to go on are local legends about ancient history (in Sonic 1 he plans to "dig up this entire island" looking for them, meaning he doesn't even know about the Special Stage yet!), which raises the strong possibility that this was the ONLY source of chaos crystal ever discovered and thus, once it was removed to its new sanctuary in the sky, it was no longer possible for anyone living on the ground to make new ones. And, since the remaining sets were "sealed" in the Special Stage "by the gods" (or were otherwise lost, if you want to take the gameplay of Tails Adventure literally where they're just buried around the island) they eventually passed into myth.

As an aside, this could be used to explain how Eggman powered the Death Egg enough to get it off the ground in Launch Base without any emeralds. There are drilling machines in Lava Reef that are actively digging through the rock, so Eggman may have taken a bunch of this low-power crystal with him and used it to fuel the booster rockets he stuck to the sides of the ship. The guide says he's down there "mining for the Super Emeralds," and that "the power of the Super Emeralds causes the Death Egg, an aerial fortress, to rise once again." It calls the Master Emerald a Super Emerald several times though - likely meant in the sense that the Master Emerald is essentially a giant Chaos Emerald, as described by the S&K manual - so when it says he's mining for Super Emeralds it may just mean he's digging around looking for where the Master Emerald is hidden.



Related aside: based on the Sonic 2 level select icon, it looks like the Death Egg was constructed in orbit. This is why it needed the emeralds to get back into orbit; it was never intended to fly inside the atmosphere. If the Master Emerald was powerful enough to levitate a huge island, he probably figured it'd be able to handle a miniature moon.

Speaking of Sonic 2, one of its longstanding mysteries has finally been solved! As anyone reading this well knows, the Sonic 2 cheat codes were all references. The level select, 19 65 09 17, is Yuji Naka's birthday, and the debug code, 19921124, was the global release date of the game (and the 14 continues code is 1124, which is just the MMDD portion of that). But nobody's ever been able to figure out what 4126, the Super Sonic code, could mean. We were looking into dates, DBZ chapter/episode numbers, hex color codes - everything we could think of - but couldn't come up with anything. Then, while looking through the Sonic Jam guide, Chris noticed a mention of it. Google Translate led us astray, but then our prestigious pear-colored primate got a look at it and immediately cracked the reference.




It's wordplay. 4126 can be pronounced "yo-i-fu-ro" in Japanese, which means "nice bath." Hatoya is a reference to the Hatoya Hotel group. 4126 was part of their phone number, and they popularized this pun with their commercials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTC3ODoL5Kk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnRHhqMs1U4

So, while the answer has been out there all along and would have been obvious to anyone living in Japan, I'd still call this a triumph we can all be proud of.

The next revelation for us to explore originates from a holy codex that, after all this time, we never thought would come to light: new Sonic 3 concept art.

https://tcrf.net/Prerelease:Sonic_the_H ... oncept_Art



These documents are so early they predate Knuckles having a name and even a species, so there are a few juicy bits of cut content. We already knew Flying Battery was shifted from Zone 5 to Zone 8, but Knuckles was also going to have exclusive levels he went through instead of Flying Battery and Lava Reef, and he would fight a different boss in Sandopolis. Some of the mid-level events were changed too; it looks like Knuckles turning off the lights in Carnival Night was originally some sort of "high voltage generator," Hydrocity had a "vibration generator" that caused rocks to fall, and Ice Cap had a snow machine, among others. But the most significant thing about this may be how closely it matches the final story sequence. Many have pondered how much the game being split in two had affected the original design but from the looks of it pretty much everything was there, including the Master Emerald. It wasn't called that yet, but we can clearly see Eggman stealing a single large emerald from a shrine in Hidden Palace (he even uses it to knock Knuckles unconscious, so it's not just large for the sake visibility in the drawing - it's quite hefty). Because the Sonic 3 manual made no mention of the Master Emerald other than "a signal of a huge Chaos Emerald" (which was unclear to us whether the signal itself was huge or the signal indicated a huge emerald), and because the S&K manual and cutscenes made no mention of Angel Island's set of Chaos Emeralds or the Pillar, there has been speculation in the past that the story was revised after Sonic 3 was released and the Master Emerald was invented to replace the other missing elements, but based on this that doesn't seem to be the case. The Master Emerald was always part of the story and was just kept secret so that it would be a bigger reveal later on.



What most excited me was the temple below Mushroom Hill. This calls to mind the room described in the prologue where Knuckles gets knocked unconscious in several ways. The roped-off dais has something oddly shaped on it that may well be the "partially destroyed emerald altar," especially given the mural of the dragon above it, which is almost certainly showing the legend of the dragon's egg that the prologue said was "described/depicted in the Chaos Emerald's altar." The fact that Mushroom Hill is close to Launch Base also fits well with him immediately noticing the Death Egg when he goes outside. Aside from confirming that this was an element of the story early on and possibly even that the prologue was written before any real work was done on the game, it addresses a long standing question. Because of the vagueness that sometimes exists in Japanese with regards to plurality, there has always been some debate as to whether this was referring to the Hidden Palace altar housing all 7 emeralds, or if there were 7 separate "side altars" hidden around the island with one emerald each. The fact that Knuckles took several days "patrolling" this/these altar(s) suggested the latter, but it was possible to read as just a thorough search of a single large area. This document would seem to lend support to there being multiple, especially because of the mural. A blank mural is also shown in the art for Hidden Palace, so it was not transferred later in development - and there's a third one below that on the Sky Sanctuary page. It would be interesting if Knuckles was meant to pass by several of these altars during his playthrough, each with a mural that unveiled the next part of the legend to the player, concluding with the one in Hidden Palace.



This shot of Doomsday Zone even suggests that a dragon was originally going to be the final boss. Given that the "egg" was mechanical, I suspect the dragon would also have been one of Eggman's mechs, which would "hatch" from the exploding space ship. This would've been much more interesting than just chasing his escape craft (in fact, they could've done both and just had the escape craft launch from the destroyed dragon instead of the Death Egg). I was going to say that maybe they didn't have time to make it, but they DID have time to make that whole 3 phase chase sequence, with unique mechs and objects and mechanics (and even controls!), so making one large enemy sprite and a few extra boss mechanics doesn't seem like it would've taken that much longer or that much more cartridge space. Then again, they were working on Sonic 2 until a few hours before it shipped so maybe it really was too much to squeeze in.



This one has an odd detail about Sonic being the "legendary god," "god of legend," or "spirit of legend" of the floating island. This is most likely what the hero was referred to as in the dragon prophecy. The egg wasn't really an egg, the dragon wasn't really a dragon, and Sonic wasn't really a spirit (though you could certainly use this as fodder to build some interesting theories on his origin and where he gets his speed).

Discussion of these long overdue disclosures (and of a replica of Angel Island made out of Legos) led me to revisit an old gem from 2014 that those of you whose minds have not yet succumbed to the ravages of our old age will remember, which outlined the many obvious parallels between S3&K and Studio Ghibli's 1986 classic, Laputa (aka Castle in the Sky). If you haven't read it in a while, take a minute to at least look at the pictures. It's not subtle.

https://stockpotinn.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... ction.html

Having not seen the movie in about 20 years I decided to watch it again with this relationship in mind, curious if perhaps someone more deeply familiar with hedgehog hermetics could find connections that were less overt. In terms of visuals, there were a few others...




(In the English dub he's voiced by Jim Cummings. Yes, really. He's also the one who commands the Flying Battery ship.)

(Also, while the movie is from 1986 and thus predates Eggman, Motro is probably not who he was based on. Masato Nishimura has mentioned the resemblance before, but he thinks Ohshima's actual inspiration was Lonebach from Lupin III.


When he originally saw the design he thought it was based on the Kurodako Brothers from Muteking, but one day they were discussing who should voice Eggman and he suggested the actor who did Lonebach in Lupin III, and Ohshima said something like, "That's too direct!" Lonebach was from a Miyazaki episode, which explains the lookalikes in Laputa and Spirited Away.[1][2][3])




One connection that's greatly underemphasized in the article is Lava Reef. If you were skeptical that the Sonic Jam guide's casual dropping of the most sensational bit of background storytelling we've ever gotten for the Classic games in a piece of flavor text most people probably skipped over, as though it were a fact as notorious and well-trodden as Popcorn's mom, was really reflective of the developers' intentions and not something a wayward editor slipped in, consider this. There was a scene in Laputa with an "ancient" volucite mine, presumably owned by the Laputans during their reign, that was almost certainly the inspiration for Lava Reef Act 2. It contained volucite ore, which could be seen glowing through the rocks, just as the Lava Reef crystals glow different colors. But volucite loses its light as soon as you break the rock open and expose it to air. Only the Laputans knew how to properly extract the volucite ore and process it into volucite crystals and when they vanished the technique was lost, just as the lost civilization was the only group who knew how to make Chaos Emeralds from chaos crystals. Sheeta's pendant is made of solid volucite crystal that's been "programmed" to function as a personal protective device that slows the wearer's descent if they fall from a dangerous height, and as a key to the island's systems, responding directly to the user's intentions (it also responds to certain incantations but Muska was able to control the island's systems just by holding it up to the control panel and thinking about what he wanted it to do), similar to how Sonic can make use of the emeralds' power through pure will, without needing any kind of control interface. And, obviously, the castle is held aloft by its central power source, a giant volucite crystal about the same size as the Master Emerald.

Friends, I tell you this is not just another Death Star situation. These are not merely Easter Eggs or an extended homage. My primary thesis for you today is that Laputa is the heart of the S3&K story and no less than the key to understanding its lore. And with that new paradigm as our backdrop, I'd like to take a fresh look at some of the questions we've discussed previously.

But first, a brief architectural and anthro(echidno?)pological analysis of the various ruins of Angel Island.

We've suggested as early as the first page of this thread that not all of the structures in S3&K are necessarily from the same time period or even the same culture. With no details whatsoever on the formation or history of the ancient polity, and the fact that they suffered two separate extinction events (one on the ground and one likely concluding shortly after Knuckles was born), there are numerous possibilities. It could have been similar to what we see in SA1, where the Knuckle tribe conquered the surrounding nations, and several of the zones are what was left behind by these fallen peoples (the manual says their society was peaceful, but that could just mean domestic peace, not international peace). Or, we could cast them in a more utopian light and envision a multi-ethnic state, where diverse nations were peacefully incorporated (willingly or unwillingly) into the empire and retained their native flavor and way of life while sharing in the prosperity afforded by the emeralds. Some may not have been part of the empire at all, and just happened to be near enough neighbors to end up as residents of the new floating landmass. Some ruins could have been ancient even at the time of the empire's formation - relics of the early stage of their own development or from a different people entirely. And, given the widespread destruction caused by the accident that ended their civilization overnight, it would be logical to suppose that much of it could have been built after the island was banished to the clouds. They were likely up there for at least 1000 years, which is plenty of time for their architectural styles to change - and even then, it's possible that more than one tribe was living on Angel Island (as an aside, I was a little stunned when Sonic Frontiers Prologue: Divergence mentioned multiple echidna tribes and decided to put the cyber space portal in Sky Sanctuary of all places. Sometimes I wonder if Ian has read this topic. Not that we're the only ones who think about these sorts of things, but still.)



Given how small the island appears in the post-Classic material, it may be worth emphasizing just how huge it was portrayed in S3&K. Angel Island Zone, Marble Garden, Carnival Night, Icecap, Launch Base, Mushroom Hill, and Sandopolis are the only zones where you're on the surface, but in each of them, looking at the furthest background layer, you can't see the end of it (I don't think the trees around the lake in Launch Base are Mushroom Hill; you see the same trees in the foreground, on the side that Sonic's on). At sea level, standing 10 meters above the water, you can see about 10 miles before you're cut off by the curvature of the Earth. I'm not going to do calcs for this because the devs obviously didn't put that kind of thought into it (and besides, we'd have to assume that Sonic's planet is the same radius as ours), but we've got to be talking 50 square miles per zone on the low end - and in the case of Icecap, where you can see across a vast mountain range, probably over 200. Pixel measurements (such as this one Chris put together) yield much lower estimates, in the vicinity of 5 square miles for the whole island. That seems far too small to believably contain all of the zones we see. The actual size the artists envisioned is likely somewhere in the middle. I'd say the whole thing could easily be as big as the state of Rhode Island (1,500 sq mi), or even Hawaiʻi (4,000 sq mi).

I'm sure someone else has thought of this but the Death Star was 120 kilometers in diameter, which is a little too big for even a generous interpretation of Angel Island's size. Launch Base alone would have to be at least 150km across in order to contain it with the considerable room it has on all sides, and you've got Sandopolis, Carnival Night, and Angel Island Zone between there and the far side of the island (possibly also Mushroom Hill, and you'd probably cross part of Marble Garden too but it's kind of off to the side). So if they're all that big across both ways then the island would be around 139,000 square miles, which is bigger than New Mexico. That's not impossible, but you'd think something that big would've been discovered much sooner. It would also have made some absurdly huge tsunamis when it landed, even at low velocity.



The Sonic Origins concept art did confirm one of our prior bits of speculation: Hydrocity is a sewer (aqueduct might be a better description - the archways and some of the stonework are reminiscent of a Roman aqueduct - but they call it "sewer"). As it is directly beneath Marble Garden, it was almost certainly created in service of that city, though it's also possible that the city it originally served was destroyed and Marble Garden was built in its place. Its absurd size suggests that it either supported an immense population density or that it was designed for more than just hygiene and watering crops. Perhaps some of the turbines and assorted devices were originally part of a hydroelectric power system. There's a sort of railing at one level, so it may have also been used for underground transport of heavy loads, whether by floating barge or other means (there are several conveyor belts). But realistically, it's probably just that big because it's a Sonic level and it looks cool. In a less prosperous city there would probably have been an underclass taking shelter in it, or at least nuisance wildlife, but they may well have been so advanced that neither was an issue. The Sonic statues in the ceiling are most likely just Easter Eggs, but you could interpret them as suggesting that hedgehogs were one of the races present in the region, or as being another reference to the Doomsday Zone prophecy from the mural.

Marble Garden itself features columned buildings modeled after ancient temples that look more Greek to me than Roman. That's mostly based on the stonework being rougher than Hydrocity, but being above ground it's been more exposed to the elements so that might just be weathering. The style is close enough that they could believably be from the same period, but there is very little here in the way of technology. Hydrocity's turbines may or may not run on electricity; the water flow in one area could be mechanically powering the devices in another area. There is definitely no sign of technology here in the living area. There's just the hovering tops (which, given how fast Sonic can run, may not even have been meant to be used that way and are probably only hovering using the pure rotational force of his legs) and those blue wheels that can move large chunks of land around, again through what appears to be direct torque. There are many different explanations you could apply here: this could indicate that the ancient civilization was a people who liked living in a more natural environment (buildings of stone) but who also made use of advanced technology and just kept the two segregated; that the original city connected to Hydrocity was destroyed in the first apocalypse and Marble Garden was built afterward in a time when their former technology was no longer available; that neither the city nor the sewer existed prior to Angel Island being risen and this was one of the first habitations the refugees constructed, which they eventually abandoned in favor of something better; or that it was the remains of a people conquered by the ancient civilization whose city was just left in ruins after their defeat. It's heavily overgrown and in disrepair, so it definitely has not seen the population it originally housed in a long time, but there may still be people living amidst the ruins. It's one of the only places in the game with anything resembling habitable structures.

A type of fruit tree grows here that looks similar to peach or orange. It's one of the only obviously edible things we see on the island. As they're in the middle of a city, they were probably planted. They may be growing wild at this point, or maybe the recently departed echidnas were propagating them, if Knuckles's love of fruit is representative of the species.

It would be a purely creative exercise to compare the architecture between games as there was obviously no thought being put into even basic continuity at this point, let alone that sort of world building minutia, but we could imagine that any similarities (such as between Labyrinth, Tidal Tempest, and Hydrocity, or between Marble Zone, Aquatic Ruin, Marble Garden, and Rusty Ruin) are the result of either borrowing architectural traits from one another or because those islands were also part of the ancient kingdom. Newtrogic High Zone (NHZ) is explicitly confirmed to be part of the same civilization, so there's precedent. They also all happen to be populated by the same types of animal friends, and we know that "small rings" engraved with ancient characters are an artifact of that civilization, which could refer to, or at least be connected with, the normal gold rings found in each of these settings. In fact, ChrisCaffee came up with an idea that I love and am going to expand on a bit: we know Angel Island used to be part of "the continent" but what if the other islands were too? What if it all used to be one big peninsula and the emerald cataclysm fractured the coastline (which, come to think of it, is basically the plot of Advance 3)? We already know that it caused NHZ to sink into the ocean, and that Pillar energy raised it again in Chaotix, so it seems to have caused a lot of tectonic activity. But maybe we're not just talking massive earthquakes. Maybe it left some sort of permanent scar on space-time in the region that created the various strange phenomenon we see across the games, like South Island's movement. Angel Island is moving, too. In fact, it would make complete sense if all of the islands were moving as each is emphasized as being hard to find despite the seeming prevalence of modern technology. It could also have created weird magnetic anomalies, oceanic currents, or bending of space that makes navigation in the area dangerous - sort of a Bermuda Triangle effect. West Side is referred to as a phantom/illusionary island and Eggman makes a big deal of the fact that he "finally found" both it and Flicky Island (he followed Sonic to the former and spotted the later with a spy satellite). Great Battle Kukku XV lets out a similar cheer (with the addition of a "cock-a-doodle-doo" or two) about having "finally found" Cocoa Island, and the manual confirms it's not on any map. Flicky Island may have sank along with NHZ. The Flickies' Island manual says that Rusty Ruin is the lost city of Atlantis, "a legendary island that emerged from the depths of the ocean." It may have been raised at the same time as NHZ, which would explain why Eggman couldn't find it until then and why it, like NHZ, doesn't seem to have animal friends living on it, just Flickies that pop in and out of their home dimension to eat the tree nuts that grow there (and, if you like, there's evidence the North Star Islands at least partially sank because Lagoon City is half underwater). This same effect creates the ring portals on each island (and maybe even the normal rings), and perhaps the Special Stages themselves. The Chaotix manual says the Bonus Stage was "created by Pillar energy" so there is precedence for creating a pocket time-space as a side effect. We could even go the SatAM route and say that there were only humans in the past and the talking animals evolved on those islands as a result of the energy bathing the region.

Also, Prison Island is in the southern seas. Coincidence that they kept Shadow in that region? They were researching the emeralds...



This is where things start to get complicated. This human face (with a third eye) could have been built by Eggman. It doesn't start shooting until you get near it, so there might be some kind of motion or pressure switch trigger. It's hard to say if the third eye is illuminated or just red glass. But the way it triggers doors to open when defeated makes it seem more like one of the native traps. It could also have been an existing carving that Eggman upgraded into an enemy, as the Flickies' Island manual says he did with the traps in Rusty Ruin. That would almost certainly indicate that humans were around during the ancient era, either as members of the empire or at least inhabitants of nearby lands. Which leads nicely into the reason most people think to have this conversation...



In terms of aesthetics, Sandopolis sticks out like a sore thumb. Not only is the architecture completely unique, but everything is covered in hieroglyphics that don't appear anywhere else on the island. It is so wildly unlikely that these buildings were made by the same people at the same time as literally anything else here that I will not even bother entertaining the idea. This zone was either a relic left over from a conquered people that nobody made any use of (because who wants to live in the desert), was owned by one of the primary cultures making up the empire, or was built after the disaster. I highly doubt that they were merely neighbors who got taken up with the island by chance as there is a tunnel directly beneath their principal structure leading to the empire's most valuable and well guarded resource, the chaos crystal mine. They would never have allowed a foreign power to get away with that. The tunnel could have been added afterward, but the zone is so close to the mine that it's unlikely they were not politically aligned.

It is interesting to note that, while there are humans depicted in both Marble Garden and Sandopolis, there are no Echidna reliefs anywhere in this game. Realistically, that's probably because the guys designing the level assets either started work before the story was finalized (Knuckles was originally a hedgehog) or just worked completely independent of story considerations. If we want to incorporate some of the later material, Regal Ruin (which, according to the Sonic R Sega Official Soft Bank Guide, is set in "ruins of the South Seas") has several Echidna-Sphinx statues and SA2 has Echidna statues in the desert. SA2 also features somewhat similar hieroglyphics in both Wild Canyon and Death Chamber. The Mystic Ruins, while they more closely resemble Marble Garden, do feature a type of pyramid. And the Sandopolis pyramid, more than any other zone, is filled with tricks and traps and security gates, which is sort of Knuckles's thing. So, lacking anything else to use as a guide, I'm going to propose that Sandopolis was the principal architectural style of the Knuckle Clan and Marble Garden/Hydrocity was from a different group within the empire (though potentially still another echidna clan). If we assume that Hydrocity is not running on electricity then the level of technology on display here is about the same - torches that ignite when you pull a chain, rope and pulley systems, and doors that open and slowly close when you push a metal weight on a track (probably connected to a clockwork mechanism) - lending support to their being contemporaneous.

Fun fact: the SA2 hieroglyphics were either copy/pasted or heavily based on real Egyptian hieroglyphics. I got these descriptions from a professed Egyptologist on Reddit, but I did verify them myself.



I'm going to indulge in a little creative writing on this one. I say Sandopolis didn't used to be a desert. It was the empire's capital city, once a high-tech metropolis, and ground zero for the emerald reaction that destroyed them. It's more or less centrally located on the island (based on the map in the background of the story pages in the Sonic 3 and S&K manuals), and it would make perfect sense for the main entrance to the chaos crystal mine to be right there. As guardians of the Chaos Emeralds, the Knuckle Clan took up residence in this now permanently blasted wasteland and built a new city over the entrance to the mines, the main pyramid essentially being designed as a fortress to keep people out. The other pyramids were for housing. They have no windows because echidnas prefer the dark, but torches were set up to accommodate visitors. The tunnel to Lava Reef is not the only one; all of the pyramids are connected by a vast tunnel network, allowing the residents to commute during the day without having to face the bright desert sun. While echidnas no longer live there, they could potentially still be occupied. I doubt it though, as nothing anywhere on the surface shows any sign of recent activity and the whole zone has an abandoned feel (and is literally haunted).

Incidentally, the Sonic Jam guide confirms that Eggman did not create the ghosts, but rather captured them in one of his capsules. Could they be the ghosts of Knuckles's ancestors, angry at him for disgracing the honor of his race by letting Eggman make a fool of him? I'm more inclined to look at this as a Marioverse Boo situation where the ghosts are just a species of semi-corporeal beings that like dark places, not souls of the dead.



The Sonic Jam guide confirms that Eggman built Launch Base over existing ruins. The only structures that might fit that description are the yellow brick towers and domed spires that look extremely similar to the minarets around the Taj Mahal. The concept art shows that Knuckles was supposed to go through the ruins in his version of Launch Base and they appear to be underground, so this may be lore that didn't make it into the final product. Whatever these towers were, they are now devoid of anything save for Eggman's toys so there isn't much we can speculate on here. But they certainly don't look modern and the style is distinct from either of the other cities we've looked at.



So far we've had zones inspired by ancient Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Indian architecture. This is the first one taken from modern day, inspired by the traveling carnivals Sonic team would see in San Francisco, making it even more of a sore thumb than Sandopolis. So much so that there has been speculation in the past that Eggman might have built the whole of Carnival Night Zone by himself given his penchant for erecting amusement parks at inappropriate times and places. But Knuckles seems to know his way around quite well (turning the lights off and sucking Sonic up a transport tube, which I pointed out on page 4 both use the same button mechanism as all of his other traps but now I realize they're also the same as the buttons on Flying Battery so that's just a matter asset reuse) and it's littered with secret chambers containing ring portals like the rest of the island so it's very likely native. That is extremely important as the city in the background is quite large and the lights in the windows give it the appearance of being populated.

Fun fact: no canon source prior to SA1 actually says Knuckles is the last of his kind, or that he lives alone. The STI internal document from 1993, prior to Knuckles having a name, says "he believes that he is the sole descendant of that civilization and he must protect the emerald which has mysteriously disappeared," so that was probably the intent all along, but strictly speaking that's not canon. The Sonic 3 manual just says, "having been born and raised on this island, all of its nature and animals were his friends." Highlighting friendship with nature and animals could be taken as implying that he has no regular friends, but it also says "his friends on the island call him Knuckle" and that he's "shy around girls," meaning he must have some kind of social interaction with people. The STI document also says "he is the best all-round athlete of the natives on the island," another tidbit suggesting that there are other people living there with him. At this point in the series' history, the "animal friends" were probably meant to represent the same sort of anthropomorphic animal people as the playable characters, and their appearance as icon-sized sprites is just so that they can fit inside the enemy sprites without having to make all of the enemies huge or busy the screen with full-sized anthros escaping every time you kill one. In any case, there were other people living on the island somewhere, whether it was tiny talking animal friends, full sized animal friends, or something else. So while it's not inconceivable that Knuckles has been maintaining the lights in a ghost city purely out of a sense of duty, those friends have to be living somewhere and the background of Carnival Night is by far the best candidate that we see (for our debate on whether or not the houses and hot air balloons in SA1's Icecap Zone are part of Angel Island or the Mystic Ruins, see page 4).

Before we bring up the elephant in the room, we need to discuss the technological progression on display. The manuals tell us almost nothing about the lost civilization other than that they built a peaceful and prosperous society of wealth and abundance, made possible because they possessed Chaos Emeralds and knew how to control their energy to at least some extent. It's entirely possible they accomplished that without flying machines or electricity or even steam engines. It's also possible that they had Star Trek levels of tech and got instantly blasted back to the Bronze Age by the emerald reaction, and in that case they may or may not have advanced back to where they were (or even beyond) while on Angel Island.



Most of the zones we've talked about so far are fairly primitive except for Carnival Night. Aside from electric light, it has those tubes that suck you up and those yellow platforms that levitate you about 4 feet off the ground. It's possible those work via air currents, but the sound effects give the impression that they're anti-gravity devices. Given that every other zone is either wilderness or seemingly abandoned, this is probably where most of the remaining population has congregated (there may well be some who prefer a more rural environment living in small villages in the woods, but we don't happen upon any sign of them in the game). It could be a city that survived from the antedefluvian age but this tech doesn't look like the kind that would last thousands of years without parts needing to be replaced, so I'm more inclined to believe that they either never lost the knowledge required to build these devices and the skyscrapers filling the horizon or they regained it over time.

Lava Reef is also worth considering as there's a good chance this zone was shielded from the devastation caused by the "power stone" incident by all of the rock surrounding it, so some or all of what's down there may be left over equipment from when the ancient workers were mining the cavern. It features pipes, with analog gauges and manual valves, carrying lava (the various orange "lights" might not be electric - they could just be lava visible through transparent sections of pipe), the spin-dash bicycles that let you traverse a vertical shaft using personal locomotion, a few belt-driven platforms, and some tubes that seem to push you through with vacuum pressure. While this Steam Age tech is not impressive next to Carnival Night, it adds to the argument that the old civilization did feature such technology. Combined with Sonic 1's mention of Chaos Emeralds being useful for lasers and nukes, Chaotix's contribution that the lost civilization were using Super Rings for transportation before the fall, and the typical portrayal of the Advanced Ancient Humans trope the story is obviously drawing on (including the specific example this game is a homage to), I think the case is strong that the ancients had at least moderately futuristic levels of tech.

[Boiler plate: the games vary their terminology for the various types of ring portals. Sonic 1 calls the Special Stage rings big rings (ōkina ringu); Sonic 3&K calls those Special Rings (Supesharu Ringu) and the rainbow flashing ones that go to Hidden Palace Super Rings (Sūpāringu); Chaotix confuses things a little by calling the rings that go to the bonus stage big rings (ōkina ringu), the rings that go to the Special Stage Special Rings (Supesharu Ringu), and the manual describes the one Eggman goes through in the prologue as both a Super Ring and an ancient Special Ring in the same paragraph; and in Flickies' Island the portals to the Flicky "subspace" world are called big rings (bigu ringu) and the Special Stage is called the bonus stage. For the sake of clarity, I'm going to refer to the ones that go to a different dimension as Special Rings and the ones that go to a different location within the same dimension as Super Rings (on previous pages I was calling these Hyper Rings).]

And then there's Hidden Palace.

So far, this has mostly been a lark. In all likelihood, every prior zone in this game was just intended to be part of the lost civilization and the architectural and technological disparities are conceits for gameplay and coolness. They did not actually put thought into when they were built in relation to each other or to the ethnic diversity of their denizens. But given how much narrative focus there is in the outro, I think these last two may actually have been meant to stand out in-lore. And this brings us back to Laputa.

It isn't really meaningful to say that Hidden Palace and Sky Sanctuary don't match the style of anything else because none of the zones really match, but that makes it all the more noteworthy that they DO match each other. The Sonic Jam guide directly connects them as a common holy ground, stating, "From here onwards, it is a sacred area that only Knuckles can enter. The Hidden Palace is where the Master Emerald is kept, and the Sky Sanctuary is a sacred area located above Angel Island that no one has ever been to." Not only are they the only zones featuring teleporters, they're literally built out of palette swaps of the same tiles.




But as I mentioned on page 1, every other zone is inspired by something out of real life. Hidden Palace doesn't just look futuristic; it looks alien. Everywhere else on the island we see decay and ruin, but this place is pristine. Almost sterile. In fact, the manual even emphasizes this: "The great hall had not a single speck of dust." This could be meant to indicate that Knuckles is very meticulous in cleaning it, or that it's a technologically maintained sterile environment, but I think the intended image is that it's made of some advanced material that repels dust. I'm not sure if it's built from stone or metal or a mix of both, but the softly pulsing red lights recessed in the walls are definitely meant to give it an unsettling vibe, as though the temple edifice is a facade and this is really a high tech facility. The blue/violet square pattern making up those walls is cold and harsh, reminiscent of the metal cubes that made up the walls of Laputa's core. The teleporters here are the most impressive tech in the game. Their design features revolving spiral rods around the base (not literally helical but perhaps meant to look that way) and stacked rings circling the crystal orb, like the rings of a planet, which are both typical designs used to evoke a space-age aesthetic (ex. The Jetsons).



Moreover, when you touch one of the Super Rings on the island you don't just pop out of thin air by the altar. You enter from a teleporter. Stepping back onto that teleporter sends you back through the ring you came in from (you only do this if you enter the ring from the Mushroom Hill cutscene with no Chaos Emeralds). This means that the Super Rings are not point-to-point portals; they are all part of a centralized network and that green teleporter can send you to any node on the island (this is how Knuckles stays one step ahead of you, BTW). There's a computer running somewhere in the palace, and it's programmed to, at a minimum, operate this network. There is a good chance it is also generating the Super Rings rather than just linking to naturally occurring ones like we see on South Island, since every one of them appears in a well hidden room - and besides, the portal doesn't open until you get close to that spot and it closes if you walk away, suggesting a proximity sensor is involved. It's even possible that when you jump on the Super Emeralds it's the computer that sends you to the Special Stage and not the inert emerald itself (though apparently there's a cooldown of some kind because you have to leave for a bit and come back before you can teleport there again).

Yet, there is also a flower motif. There are sunflowers with a fleur-de-lis in the middle, tiles with a four pronged shape that looks like a blooming flower bud, some triangular designs on the stairs that might be flowers, pink metallic flower petals crowning the Super Emerald pedestals (or at least they appear metallic because of how square and sharply angular they are), and what might be flowers drawn beneath them (though, looking at it now, I think Wombatwarlord777 was right and those are supposed to be the stems of the metallic flowers). Flowers also played a prominent role in Sonic CD. One bloomed every time you killed an enemy, and the good future levels are remembered to this day for their overt synthesis of nature and technology. I'm not suggesting an intentional connection between the games, but in both cases I think this harmonic juxtaposition is used to portray a hyper-advanced civilization that has not lost its connection to the natural world and, by extension, its soul. A people that have grown to the heavens but still have their roots in the earth.

It is unlikely that this place was built by the survivors on Angel Island. If that was the case, Sky Sanctuary would probably not be considered sacred (there'd be nothing mysterious about it if they made it themselves, and they don't appear to have been keeping anything special up there). It would also probably not be in such disrepair, though if we go with Dr. BUGMAN's "Knuckles was an egg in stasis" theory then it might have been a long time since the last of the guardians died out and nobody else was allowed up there to maintain it. It's also possible the Death Egg crashed into some of it on the way down, but the part we see is clearly decayed, not destroyed - vines and moss cover everything, platforms crumble when you walk on them, and columns are broken at opposite angles. Though, despite all of this, the teleporters still work and the rotating plates are still spinning, showing the resilience of this zone's technology.

It is not impossible that this represents the peak of the civilization before it fell. You could also go the Frontiers route and suppose that it was ancient even in the time of the legend, left behind by a race completely lost to time. But I argue that the narrative leaves room for only one good answer as to who built the Hidden Palace, when, and why. And Ghibli's first blockbuster points the way.

The architecture in Laputa's core does not suggest a synthesis with nature, but that theme is expressed another way. The most valuable thing on the island from the perspective of the heroes is not the gold or the super weapon or the lost knowledge, but rather a garden on the top level being tended by one of the few remaining robots. With no one left to direct it, one of the trees has become so wildly overgrown that its roots have dug into the inner sanctum, covering most of the harsh metal walls and completely enveloping the giant volucite crystal in the central control room, allowing other plants and insects to take up residence, creating the same juxtaposition of nature and technology coexisting in harmony.



But its original inhabitants had not embraced this philosophy. They had used their superior scientific knowledge to build a floating island fortress to isolate themselves and rule over the earthbound population as tyrants, and in doing so lost their connection to the earth - to their own humanity - and died out as a result. Standing before the ancient throne of this once dreaded empire, now covered in roots, its true heir confronts the ghost of its past and delivers this theme's climax.

"What is a king when his country lies ruined? ... This is why Laputa died out. There's a song in my valley. 'Put down your roots in the soil. Let us live together with the wind. Pass the winter with the seeds. Sing in the spring with the birds.' No matter how powerful your weapons or numerous your poor robots, you can't survive apart from the earth!"

The fall of the antedefluvians, whether because of "using the stones in unintended [evil] ways" in Sonic 2's version or a coup attempt by dark-minded elders in Sonic 3's version, could likewise be viewed as a story of a people who'd lost their way because they'd lost their connection with their inner selves (and yes, we've talked about the possibility of the West Side and Angel Island legends speaking of two different civilizations destroyed by two different Chaos Emerald incidents, but that's just narratively cumbersome. That would be like putting Tears of the Kingdom and Ocarina of Time into the same timeline. Sure you can make them fit, but...why?). But while this legend is one of the many obvious connections to Laputa in S3&K, it has a major difference. In Laputa, there's only one super advanced ancient civilization. In Sonic, that role has been divided between two: the one that "built a peaceful and wealthy society" using the energy of the emeralds, which ultimately destroyed them...and the one that rescued them by creating Angel Island.

The sky gods.

And after this incident... It is said that the gods that came down from the sky restored part of the civilization as an "island," and released it into the sky along with the "power stone."

It hasn't come up in this thread, but we have elsewhere speculated about the gods being mortals who just literally flew down from the sky, whether space aliens or dimensional travelers or just another people living in a floating city. That did not used to be my preferred interpretation, but that's because I was operating in a post-Adventure mindset where the Master Emerald showed clear signs of intelligence. That may or may not have been the intent when Sonic 2's backstory was written and the gods sealed the emeralds in the Special Stage, but in this game, looking at it now through the Miyazaki lens that the entire thing was framed with, it is much easier to read this in the way that, honestly, should have been the obvious interpretation all along based not only on the wording but on the outcome. They are the real Laputans in this story - an idealized version that never lost their connection with nature, instead using their technology to assist it and achieve something greater than either could alone.

(If I were Sonic Team's Lore Master I might say these were also the Babylonians, but I'm not working for a corporation that, after two decades with no concern for continuity whatsoever, decided that everything has to fit into canon now so I don't feel compelled to take a crowbar to these round holes to make them more amenable to square pegs. And, as somebody who spent hundreds of hours in this venerable forum trying to do exactly that 20 years ago, it is my professional opinion that we are well past the point where that puzzle can be solved in a way that services the storytelling rather than hinders it. But if you'd like, we can pretend it's the same civilization that built the good future on Little Planet, who eventually went on to transcend time and space, and that they looked like this:



Random aside: Chris had a cool idea that the Time Stones are "lost in time" in the same way the Chaos Emeralds are "lost in (sub)space." When Sonic goes to the Special Stage in Sonic CD, he's going to various points in time on Little Planet, and the reason you see Jupiter in one particular Special Stage is because at that time Little Planet was passing by Jupiter. You could also say that they left behind the dragon egg prophecy because they'd been to that future, but I prefer to think the Knuckle clan had its own mystics with prescient visions.)

The key question that leads to the answer we're looking for is this: how did they make Angel Island fly?

If you said, "The Master Emerald," please take a seat at the back of the class and write a 500 word essay for Gibbon-sensei on the influence of the American cereal industry on 90s pop culture. As mentioned previously, plurality in Japanese can be vague, so I will grant room for debate on whether or not 力の石 refers to the Master Emerald or Chaos Emeralds and, by extension, whether or not the ancients already had the Master Emerald...if you're ignoring Chaotix, because that makes it very clear that it's the Master Emerald. But in either case, the Master Emerald is not a float stone. It does not just cause anything it touches to levitate. The modern lore has flirted with the idea that the energy reaction during the incident caused the land to start floating naturally, but that ignores that the gods had to "come down" to make this happen. Taking all of the evidence into account, I think the only good answer is that they made it fly the same way that they made their own home fly. The same way that the Laputans made their island fly. They built a machine.

Angel Island is a machine.

Hidden Palace is just the control center. In Laputa, there were no computer terminals. There was one metal tablet in the room with the giant crystal that controlled the fortress's systems by holding the royal pendant next to it and willing a command, but you could also issue a command pretty much anywhere in the core and it would take effect. Hidden Palace, similarly, has no visible computers but there is an autopilot program running the island's systems that can most likely take some commands, perhaps using the Master Emerald as an interface since emeralds can interface with life directly and respond to will. Or, we could take the Laputa connection even further and say that the Master Emerald is itself the computer, "programmed" in a way similar to Sheeta's pendant (and possibly the giant volucite crystal - the movie is vague about that). This could explain why they decided to name it Master Emerald - it's the island's controller. It could also just be their Engrish way of saying 'granddaddy of all emeralds' or something. Knuckles doesn't necessarily have to be aware of this; he could just be 'praying' to the emerald when he needs something, which effectively issues a command to the system.

At a minimum, it controls the island's altitude, operates the ring portal network, and controls the island's defenses. Laputa's defense system generated a constant wall of storm clouds around and below the island, a weather phenomenon known as a dragon's lair, both hiding it from sight and preventing access by low-powered aircraft. Angel Island is similarly hidden within "a single huge, floating mass of clouds," likely also generated by the island's defense system (Knuckles's 1994 STI character profile explicitly states that the clouds are always there). The only thing we are ever told about the Pillar's function is that it protects the island (specifically "all of its nature and animals"), so it is most likely a part of this system. We are also told that the 7 Chaos Emeralds control its power.

The "altar" is just the power core. There's nothing religious or spiritual about it or the "temple" that it's in. Note the extremely utilitarian-looking metal railing around each pedestal. The striped yellow triangles on the bottom of the ones in the back look like hover devices. And see that brown thing in the center of the metallic flowers? Doesn't that look like an illuminated mechanical socket for the emeralds to fit into? This is how the emeralds "control" the Pillar. They have to be plugged into the system in order to either use or adjust its power.


The piping in Lava Reef could have been part of the mining operation, or it could've been added as part of the Hidden Palace device. Perhaps as an auxiliary power source, or as a heat sink/exhaust - in real world physics, any lava taken up with the island would have hardened long ago since the massive geological pressure that was creating it was no longer present after the landmass started floating, and that device is the only thing on the island that could feasibly be generating enough heat to sustain a massive lake of molten rock. Though it's also worth noting that, in the concept art, it's coming from a "lava generator," presumably set up by Eggman.



Sky Sanctuary is exactly what its Laputa counterpart is: the core's outer shell, the actual castle in the sky (the subtitle for the zone in the Sonic Jam guide is literally "Climb the floating castle." It also calls it a garden, which is what the top level of Laputa was). While the tiles matches Hidden Palace, whatever it's made of is either not as resilient or does not fare well outdoors because it's just as weathered as Laputa's stone castle. It's also easily the zone that most closely resembles Laputa visually. The screenshots from the article are good, but here's a few more to drive it home. Both of them even end up crumbling at the end :P.



It may have served a residential purpose. Maybe every other city was destroyed and this was the shelter the sky gods gave them to start off with, or maybe this area was reserved for the guardians. The Jam guide says it's above Angel Island, but it's possible that's just referring to its present location. Sky Sanctuary does not seem to have fallen with the rest of the island. Based on the background layer its lowest part is at about the same level that Angel Island is hovering after Mecha Sonic steals the Master Emerald, though it stretches far above that. It's possible that part of Sky Sanctuary isn't usually above Angel Island, or isn't only directly above but rather encircles it, sort of like Laputa's outer parapet. This could be where the battle with Super Mecha Sonic takes place. If it does not fall with Angel Island, it is worth pondering if it drifts with Angel Island or if parts of it are in fixed positions all along its flight path. It is not necessarily being held up by the Master Emerald; it could have its own dedicated float system, since keeping a castle airborne requires less energy than levitating a chunk of a continent by several orders of magnitude.






With these exalted epiphanies now eruditely expounded, let us throw open the curtains on some heretofore impenetrable mysteries and reexamine them in the defluent light of this newfound clarity.

SINKING/FLOATING
We've commented before on the seemingly incongruent conditions under which the island sinks and floats in S3&K, but it's possible to explain in a deterministic way. It starts out with the Master Emerald in Hidden Palace and its native set of Chaos Emeralds on 7 altars spread across the island. Then the island crashes when the Death Egg plows into it and its native set of Chaos Emeralds disappears. It doesn't sink into the ocean, but we can't confirm if that's because the ocean is shallow enough for it to touch ground (and soft enough for it to settle in without tilting over), because the island's composition is somehow buoyant, or because it still has enough power to keep itself partly afloat (which wouldn't really make sense unless it was at least a little buoyant but the manual could be seen as hinting at this by going out of its way to mention that it "did not sink to the bottom of the ocean"). In any case it can't get back into the air despite the Master Emerald still being in place, so evidently there isn't enough power in the system to gain altitude with the added weight of the Death Egg and the seawater soaking into the base of the island. The Death Egg jumps briefly from Launch Base to Lava Reef at the end of Sonic 3, but it's not off the ground long enough to make a difference. Sonic plugs the 7 Super Emeralds into the Hidden Palace core and the Master Emerald starts glowing, but the island still doesn't move. That could either be because the Super Emeralds are not part of the circuit that powers the float device, because Sonic is currently making use of their power, or because throwing more energy at the device does not make it stronger after a certain point; it has a maximum weight limit. Eggman takes the Master Emerald into space on the Death Egg and the island still doesn't sink into the ocean. We know there's enough power stored in the system somewhere to keep it up for a few minutes because when Mecha Sonic steals the Master Emerald the island wobbles and slowly descends but does not immediately fall. It also didn't rise after the Death Egg took off, which means that either the Master Emerald is the only power source for the float system or it's at least some kind of critical linchpin. Sonic returns the Master Emerald and now, with the Death Egg no longer weighing it down, it's able to rise again. Alternatively, the system may require a manual command from Knuckles to take off, or to increase its lift to compensate for the extra weight, and he just wanted to get Sonic and Eggman off of the island first.

The only thing about this that doesn't work is the S3&K ending where it shows that extra scene of Knuckles standing on the surface with the Master Emerald just sitting there, not back on the altar, yet the island is rising. I'm going to call that a cinematic conceit so that Knuckles could watch Sonic and Tails flying away after dropping off the emerald, and so that we don't need a separate scene of it being put back before the island starts rising. Though even this could be explained. We don't actually see a slot that the Master Emerald plugs in to; it looks more like it's just growing there. So maybe the system can use its power as long as it's in range (and the part of Sky Sanctuary where Mecha Sonic takes it is out of range).


WHERE DID THE ANGEL ISLAND EMERALDS GO
I think I legit figured this one out. West Side's emeralds were not originally meant to appear in Sonic 3. The intro cutscene was a late addition, added for cool factor and a sense of continuity with Sonic 2 for those who couldn't be bother with reading. But it was added without considering the fact that the game never explains where the other set of emeralds from the prologue ends up and nobody went back and updated the manual.

Seriously, if you just eject that cutscene everything makes perfect sense. If the West Side emeralds were returned to West Side Island before the game started then it would just follow the same formula as every other Classic game, where we collect the emeralds native to the island we're on from its unique Special Stage, except this time there would also be a giant emerald at the end. The manual never implies that Sonic still has the West Side emeralds, and it says Eggman told Knuckles that Sonic was after his emeralds, not that he had already stolen them. The 1993 STI document says that Knuckles's goal is to find the missing emerald(s) and prevent Sonic from stealing them, not reclaim them, which backs this up. Besides, Knuckles sees Sonic arrive on the island for the first time well after they disappeared so how could he believe that he was the one who took them? The concept art shows no sign of Knuckles robbing him at the beginning yet it does include a sketch of the cinematic transitions at the start of each level and entire half-page storyboards dedicated to every other major cutscene (Launch Base, Hidden Palace, and Sky Sanctuary). But, most convincing of all, the Sonic 3 prototype has a different opening animation. You might debate that the surfing sprite is a stand-in for Super Sonic, but I strongly contest that for several reasons. Not only is the surfing sprite unique and unused in the final game, but they bothered coding the splashing effect to follows his vertical movement as he drifts back and forth on the waves, which it does NOT do in the final version since Super Sonic flies over the water perfectly straight. More importantly, there's a fully complete and unique animation for Knuckles, which also isn't in the final game, where he simply challenges Sonic and runs off rather than attacking and mugging him. If Sonic started out super and didn't lose the emeralds in this scene, then experienced players would be confused and annoyed as to why they couldn't go super again right off the bat. By contrast, a later version of the scene does include Super Sonic and there's a balled version of Knuckles in the ground where he's supposed to pop up and knock Sonic down. An object of the previous animation is still there but no longer moves, so this build appears to be in the middle of the original sequence being redesigned.

The only thing left to explain would be the prologue scene where the emeralds vanish. In the above scenario they somehow end up in the Special Stage where Sonic collects them, but how did they get there? One possibility is that Angel Island's Special Stage is linked to the island's movement, just like South Island's is, and when the Death Egg violently shoved it out of its normal orbit it opened new Special Stage portals all over the place and the emeralds got sucked in, or the movement drew the emeralds into the Special Stage because of a link they share or some kind of weird inter-dimensional physics (in the Classic lore it does not seem like they automatically go back to the Special Stage, and Knuckles didn't think to look for them there so that is probably not something that's ever happened before, but we could imagine something similar at play), and this same effect destroyed the altars they were on. But I'm going to go a different direction with this.

Before it vanished, the emerald in front of Knuckles gave off a flash of light and began vibrating, increasing in intensity until it made an anime "kiin" sound effect paired with a twinkling light, then Knuckles feels himself floating and gets knocked out. There was some confusion about this in the past, but with the new translations it's pretty obvious that the floating sensation at the end is the island falling and he gets knocked out when it hits the ocean. So the emerald's flashing and vibrating is clearly a reaction to the Death Egg. There's nothing on board for it to be reacting to, so it has something to do with the crashing space station itself. It seems like the reaction started before the impact, since the floating doesn't come until the end (though it could be possible there was a brief delay between the crash and when the island started losing altitude). I propose that we're seeing part of the island's defense system in action. One of the obvious ways the Pillar probably protects the island is by blocking incursion from foreign invaders and meteorites with a force field. But it was not designed to stop a metallic mini-moon from slamming into it at terminal velocity. The emerald's reaction was the system pulling as much power from it as it could, straining to slow the Death Egg down to minimize the damage and/or to move the island out of the way (or at least into a position where it would cause the fewest casualties). It still took out mountains and forests in the immediate area, but realistically it would probably have nuked the whole island if not for the shield.

But why did the system then teleport the emeralds into the Special Stage? Either a security protocol automatically triggered by intruders landing on the island, sending the emeralds to what was believed to be the safest hiding place, or an operational protocol sending them there for some kind of recharge or something following the system overload (or, again, weird physics because they used up too much of their energy), or to protect them from the shaking and impact damage that destroyed at least one of the altars. We had always assumed that Knuckles stashed the stolen West Side emeralds in the Special Stage anyway, since the ones he's juggling on Sonic 3's "Try Again" screen match the ones you failed to collect. He obviously knows how to use the Super Rings as a shortcut to Hidden Palace, so presumably he's gone through the Special Rings to the Special Stage before.

But if you still want to try to come up with something that makes sense with all of the canon material presented...you could say that Sonic took the West Side emeralds with him after returning the Master Emerald and then Knuckles, during his playthrough, finally discovers the Angel Island emeralds in the Special Stage, which Sonic somehow never encountered. I doubt that idea occurred to anyone, though. They went out of their way to change a number of background details to make his playthrough fit the story (the ocean is no longer visible in Angel Island Zone, the Death Egg is gone, etc.) so they could have found a way to show that if they'd wanted to. For example, they could've used a different set of emerald sprites, or at least had Sonic's set contain a yellow emerald to more closely match Sonic 2 (there are already sprites for one in the game - one was even used in the Special Stage of Sonic 3), and Knuckles's set could've included the orange one instead.

Another option would be to just say the Angel Island emeralds were destroyed in the crash, the system having used up too much of their energy and destabilized their physical structure or something causing them to just wink out of existence. Or explode, which would explain how the altar got destroyed, though it says there was not even "a single fragment" of the emerald to be found, as though to specifically address this possibility. They go out of their way to set this up as a mystery (and so does the STI document by saying Knuckles's goal is to "find and protect" them), so it would be ridiculous to have it turn out this way without ever addressing it in the narrative, but in reality that's functionally what happened to them - they fell in a plot hole and were never seen again. So just removing them from the plot, either by going with the manual story and ignoring the intro cutscene or by rewriting the manual so that the Angel Island emeralds never existed, is the closest you can get to the (lack of) author intent.

Being honest, the fusion theory was never viable as something that Sonic Team would have actually conceived. They just didn't do that sort of off-screen storytelling. If they'd meant for there to be 14 emeralds in the story then they could very easily have had both sets appear in the ending or during the Hidden Palace cutscene.


THE HIDDEN PALACE CUTSCENE


If the West Side emeralds were never supposed to be part of story then this was obviously meant to show Angel Island's emeralds being boosted to Super Emeralds (or West Side's, if you rewrite the manual). But there are still a number of other questions to be answered. First, was there going to be anything like this before the decision was made to split the game in two? As the devs tell it, the first 6 months were spent working with the Sega Virtua Processor chip but in June of 1993 they found out it wouldn't be ready in time for their deadline (coinciding with the McDonald's promotion). Naka claims that they had been planning a 3D game up to that point and had to "start entirely from zero and re-do everything," but that does not seem to be true. The STI document is dated April 12, 1993, and Knuckles's design is almost finalized (those shoes in particular do not appear in any of the early sketches). It was decided that he was a mole by the time they arrived at that design, yet in the level and story sequence documents he was clearly still a hedgehog (easiest to tell in the Hidden Palace art), which means they had been planning a mostly 2D game all along. They probably just had to remove several 3D sequences and assets that were planned. Maybe from a coding perspective he had to scrap most of what he'd written, but not from a level design perspective. More importantly, they were also expecting to have a 24 megabit (4MB) cartridge available. Street Fighter 2 had used one that same year, but for some reason Sonic was denied this privilege and that was when it became obvious they wouldn't be able to fit everything in one game. We don't know exactly when Naka came up with the lock-on solution, but the trademark application was filed November 9, 1993 (hat tip to GG). For our purposes, it seems safe to assume that the design docs from Origins were written with the expectation that it would be released as a single game, and the manual's story probably was too.

With S&K needing to stand as a full Sonic game on its own, it would be expected to have its own Special Stages and emeralds to collect. The concept art shows no trace of the Mushroom Hill cutscene where Knuckles comes out of the secret room, the emerald transformation scene, or the 7 pedestals around the altar in Hidden Palace. The "shrine" of the giant Chaos Emerald is drawn like a real-life shrine that you'd put an object of religious veneration in. So, there were probably no plans for anything like the Super Emeralds prior to the split (Iizuka says as much in this Q&A, though he's unreliable). But in that case, how was it going to play out? Lee brought up in Discord that Sonic 3's 7 Special Stages have color palettes that reflect its 7 Zones (including Flying Battery), so it might have worked similar to Sonic Superstars where there was only one Special Stage layout per zone and thus you could only get one Chaos Emerald per zone, spreading the experience out a little more. Alternatively, they could have left it as-is, where it's possible to get all 7 emeralds by Hydrocity, which would have been far more generous than usual but given that most people probably did not successfully get all of the emeralds their first playthrough (or second, or third) this would honestly not have been a bad idea.

The original ending probably would have played out much the same as what we got. A Doomsday level is not shown but is mentioned in the Death Egg outline, so if you got the Chaos Emeralds you would have recovered the Master Emerald in the extra zone and if you didn't the game would end with Eggman either escaping or destroying the world with his dragon mech. Sonic would presumably have given Knuckles his Chaos Emeralds back in the version prior to them being replaced with West Side's emeralds (though if he did he would not have been able to transform in the credits sequence like he did in Sonic 2 without bending the rules). In the reverse scenario, I would think Knuckles would insist on giving back the West Side ones, both as an apology and from a sense of honor, not wanting to deprive another island of their sacred emeralds.

There's a chance that this cutscene was also a late addition. Page 45 of the S&K manual says, "When you first enter the Hidden Palace, you'll see seven Chaos Emeralds displayed on the altar. If you spin jump onto the Chaos Emerald-decorated platform, you can proceed to the Special Stage. ... Clear the stage ... Return to the Hidden Palace and you'll get a Super Emerald." That sounds like maybe they flirted with the idea of the Angel Island emeralds just sitting there when you arrive, or that these are just decorative platforms that serve as gateways to a different Special Stage with a new set of emeralds. But it's likely that they're just being intentionally obscure about what happens so that the cutscene will be a surprise.

So, recognizing that this was conceived after the split for purely gameplay reasons, what causes the emeralds to transform? It's possible that the Master Emerald does this any time Chaos Emeralds are brought into its presence. But given that we've established that there's some kind of operating system in play on Angel Island and probably Hidden Palace in particular, I'd say it was something the computer triggered (and, again, the Master Emerald itself may be the CPU). Not necessarily an intelligent computer, mind you. It could just be following the programming it was left with, which could include 'power up emeralds in the same room' for any number of reasons (it's less of a cop-out than the 'fickle gods' excuse we've been using, anyway). But there are at least a few logical motives here. We know that it needs the emeralds to control the Pillar so it could be related to that, but why Super Emeralds? I think there's a good chance that the main altar didn't have spots for the Chaos Emeralds in the original version of the story; there was only the side altars around the island, and that's where the emeralds would be plugged in to control the Pillar, then later they retconned the idea of the side altars and replaced them with the single altar in Hidden Palace (the Sonic Jam guide supports this, saying on page 76, "Return the Chaos Emeralds to the Hidden Palace, which can be accessed via a Special Ring, and challenge the Special Stage to obtain it," as though Hidden Palace was where the emeralds were normally kept.) But this can be explained even with both sets of altars. Maybe Angel Island's emeralds were kept on the side altars, not plugged into the Master Emerald shrine, as a security measure to prevent someone from just walking into Hidden Palace and making adjustments to or unauthorized use of the Pillar. There may also have been slots on the side altars (designed for round emeralds) for standard applications, while the ones near the Master Emerald (shaped for brilliant cut, though it's possible they can accept both) are used for higher power operations, and Super Emeralds are required to utilize the Pillar's maximum power. This extra power may have been necessary to pull the island out of the ocean (though the island does rise even if you only collect Chaos Emeralds). Maybe Super Emeralds are basically overcharged Chaos Emeralds and keeping them in that state long-term is dangerous, thus it was not safe to run the system at maximum power all of the time, or the danger of an intruder gaining access to Super Emeralds was high enough that they didn't want to keep them in that state regularly.

Random side note: in Windii's SA2 translation, Knuckles says, "The Master Emerald has the important role of preventing the Chaos Emeralds from going out of control." That could be meant in the sense that it's a fail-safe against someone like Chaos abusing their power, or that it's actively needed to stabilize the Chaos Emeralds when all 7 are together for long periods of time.

What does Sonic jumping on the emerald and going into the Special Stage to collect a smaller version of it represent, and where is the power coming from that the new emerald is being filled with? There aren't many options. If the system had enough energy to create Super Emeralds, it probably wouldn't need to create Super Emeralds. It could just do its task directly. My best answer is that either Sonic is gathering energy for it in the Special Stage or it's using the Pillar on its low setting to power up the emeralds one at a time so that it can use them to enable the higher power mode. Another common theory is that the Special Stages are actually inside each Super Emerald or are time-spaces generated by them, and collecting them there is some kind of cold start or initialization procedure that whatever transformed them could not do by itself.

The real answer is probably just that it boosted them to help Sonic, either figuring he might need the extra power or because it was told to do this in light of the prophecy from the mural. It's something of an adaptation of the scene that was supposed to appear in Sonic 2, where Sonic learned how to go super for the first time. Playing the 7 Special Stages is a gameplay conceit and you're not supposed to think about where the power is coming from. Kind of like how Sonic catches Knuckles on the Tornado after the Super Mecha fight. How did he know where he was and what was he even doing there? It's just there to be cool; don't think about it.

What does the Master Emerald's glowing represent? Removing the Adventure games from consideration, and working from the position that there was only ever one set of Chaos Emeralds in this game, removes a few of our previous theories but we are largely still in the same boat here. The ring of stars that goes into each Super Emerald seems to represent energy filling the inert emerald, so the same ring coming out of the Master Emerald would logically represent an emission of energy. Chaotix backs this up, stating that the aftermath of this causes "increased motion in the earth's crust stimulated by the power of the Master Emerald Pillar," so there is a substantial amount of excess energy involved here somewhere. The Master Emerald continues glowing even when it's no longer connected to the altar, so whatever gathering the Super Emeralds did has either changed the Master Emerald itself and it no longer needs them to maintain this new state or they're continuing to affect it remotely, even at a huge distance (the ISS orbits at about 250 miles above sea level, so we can assume the Death Egg was at least that far, not counting any lateral drift after takeoff). Sonic is also able to transform at this same distance away from the Super Emeralds, which lends some weight to the latter, though it's possible that the Master Emerald has sort of 'synced' Sonic to the Super Emeralds for the time being to enable this, or that it's actually the Master Emerald that's giving him the power to go hyper, and that's what the glowing is.

Connecting this glow to the Pillar has always been a popular choice given its connection to the emeralds and its role in Chaotix. Since nothing appears in the game that stands out enough to be readily identified as the Pillar it seems a bit unlikely that the devs had it in mind at all when they scripted this, but it fits so well and there are not many convincing alternatives, so it remains a compelling theory. One thing I want to comment on is that some (coughchriscough) have held to a literal reading of the manual's line saying that it "sleeps" or "lies" (眠) in the depths of the island. I argue that this is being used figuratively in the same way that you'd say in English, "the treasure lies within." The same kanji is used in Sonic 1, Sonic 1 (MS), Tails Adventure, and Flickies' Island to describe the Chaos Emeralds lying somewhere on their respective islands. Sonic CD uses it to describe the Time Stones lying on Little Planet, and Chaotix uses it to describe the remnants of the legendary civilization "lying" in Newtrogic High Zone. This is simply intended to communicate location, not state. We're also told that the Pillar was protecting the island and its animals, so it must have been at least somewhat active prior to the crash. But it's possible that it was disabled in the crash, and the glowing signals that it's active again (either the Master Emerald is resonating with it or it's been super charged with Pillar energy or it's a component of the Pillar or something like that). However, if we factor in Chaotix then something has happened here that hasn't happened before since it causes NHZ to rise out of the ocean and immediately blossom with new life. This is part of why I proposed giving the Pillar high and low power settings; it's not unthinkable that, even for thousands of years, there has never been an occasion to use the highest power setting.

Or it could just be the Master Emerald resonating with the Super Emeralds because it looks cool. I think SA1's glowing may have been intentional, but the only thought put into it was 'well, it didn't start glowing until that scene in S&K so it shouldn't be glowing in the past, right?' I kind of doubt they even knew what the glowing meant, if anything, making it effectively just a nod to the previous game rather than world building.

Sadly, this remains one of the Classic era's biggest mysteries. Right up there with...


WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN CHAOTIX
Chaotix is a complete mess. The concept started with the Sonic Crackers demo on the Mega Drive, then it was developed as a Saturn game, but they needed more titles to support the 32X so it got chopped up and revamped to run on that. Even before that, Tom Kalinske says it was too ambitious, over budget, and behind schedule. Looking at it now, there are many signs of it. The mini cutscenes that play before each boss were probably supposed to look impressive but end up looking worse than Sonic 3's sprite acting. The janky cutscene that plays before the final boss basically has no background layer and very limited assets. The good ending is literally just the word "COOOOL" surrounded by the Chaos Rings, and there's random artwork of Sonic and Tails on the credits screen even though they're not in the game.

This very likely affected the manual too. There are exactly 3 people from the S3&K credits who also appear in the Chaotix credits: Mamoru Shigeta (executive producer), Jina Ishiwatari Tsukahara (special thanks/attraction designer), and Jun Senoue. The person who wrote the prologues has always gone uncredited for that contribution, but it was most likely done as a side job by somebody who was listed in the credits for their primary contribution. It's possible that it was Tsukahara - she's actually the only person who worked on the entire 'quintology,' if you want to include Chaotix as a main game, so if anybody can find her contact info we should follow up to see if she knows anything - but it's fairly unlikely. I suspected that the Chaotix manual was by someone new even before checking the credits because, while the previous games' prologues are whimsically vague on certain details, this one is aggressively confusing and badly worded - and that doesn't seem to be a translation problem. That's worth keeping in mind because the new writer most likely didn't know what the Pillar was and just wanted to reintroduce it into the lore. It feels very shoe-horned in either way. Nothing in the game looks like ruins of the lost civilization. It's possible there might be some mixed in but nothing is distinguishable from the psychedelic amusement park Eggman has built over them. This could easily have just been a random island base like the Veg-o-Fortress and the Chaos and Dark Rings could have been given different origins, so either someone just really wanted to expand on that one paragraph from the Sonic 3 manual or this backstory was written for an earlier version of the game and parts of it were kept in because they liked what they'd written. In any case, I'm going to take another crack at deciphering what the plot of this game is.

Newtrogic High Zone (which is actually the name Eggman gives to his resort; the island has no name so we just call it that) rose out of the ocean months after S&K. Why did it take that long? This is the last of our Ghibli connections. Uncle Pom says that "the rocks [in the volucite mine] shift when Laputa floats overhead." Chaotix shows no sign of being inspired by Laputa, but I still think this is a good explanation. It took that long for Angel Island to get close enough to NHZ for it to be affected by whatever relevant changes took place in S&K. This would mean Angel Island either moves quite slowly or has a very long flight path. Another possibility is that the tectonic activity was slow to bring it up, but once the land breached the surface the emergence of greenery was extremely fast.

Knuckles looks at this "ongoing" transformation and it leads him to comment that he believes something [on NHZ] is amplifying the power of the Pillar. We're given no indication why he thinks this, but because of how it's written it raises the possibility that the writer is not referencing the events of S3&K as the cause of the new island's creation, but rather this amplification. The way that it's set up seems to me like a mystery that's supposed to get answered within the story, but no answer is explicitly pointed to.

That brings us to the most poorly sequenced scene in all of Sonic:

さらに、浮遊島にあったスーパーリングと瓜２つのものを発見します。それは伝説の文明が失われる前に使われていた、太古のスペシャルリングだったのです。
「これで再びマスターエメラルドにたどり着ける！」

その発見に驚喜するエッグマンでしたが、そのスペシャルリングが導いていたはずの“力の石”は、天空から舞い降りた神々によってすでに浮遊島に移されていたのでした。
しかし、スペシャルリングの作り出す不思議な空間には、“ピラー” エネルギーが充満し、「カオスリング」というリング状の結晶体と化していました。

「このスペシャルリングの秘密を探れば、ソニックたちの持つリングの秘密はおろか、マスターエメラルドを呼び寄せることもできる！」

In addition, he discovered a Super Ring identical to the one on the floating island. It was an ancient Special Ring that was used by the legendary civilization before it was lost.

"With this, I can reach the Master Emerald once again!"
Eggman was amazed by the discovery, but the "power stone" which the Special Ring was supposed to lead to was already transferred to the floating island by the gods that flew down from the sky.

However, the mysterious dimensional space created by the special ring was filled up with the "pillar" energy and turned into a ring-shaped crystal substance called the "Chaos Ring".
"If I uncover the secret of this Special Ring, I'll be able to summon the Master Emerald, not to mention find the secret of the rings that Sonic and his gang has!"

SamIAm's translation had implied that Eggman was transported to Hidden Palace and that the gods had moved the Master Emerald somewhere else after the end of S&K (which we connected with its new shrine in SA1, though now obviously we can say the shrine in SA1 was retconned to be where it is so that Eggman could have a clear shot at it from the Egg Carrier). Windii's translation makes it clearer that it's referring to the Sonic 3 backstory where the sky gods created Angel Island, sending the Master Emerald up with it, which implies that Eggman is standing where the Master Emerald used to be kept prior to that. I had previously argued against this, saying that it made far more sense for him to be in Hidden Palace here. I have since come around to Chris and Crazy Penguin's reading of it, primarily because the Master Emerald is only ever called the "力の石" (chikara no ishi, stone of power) when recounting the legend. It would also not make a great deal of sense for there to be a Special Ring in Hidden Palace once he got there, since all of Angel Island's Super Rings exit from a teleporter; there are no Special Rings in Hidden Palace itself.

So, contrary to what I said before, this probably means that Sandopolis was not the epicenter of the disaster. It would've been this room, and that's probably why this entire landmass sunk. Angel Island was a piece of land that was part of the same empire but off to the side far enough to escape total destruction. This is probably a retcon, though. I doubt they had anything like Newtrogic in mind when they make S&K. The fact that it looks like the Master Emerald is growing out of the Hidden Palace alter, and that the screen shakes a bit when Eggman pulls it out, gives the impression that it's never been moved from there (though it could just have gotten firmly wedged in place after a few thousand years).

However, I do not think there is a strong case that this scene takes place in the Special Stage. First, Eggman arrives here by traveling through a Super Ring. This terminology only appears in S&K and is used to describe the ring from the Mushroom Hill Zone cutscene. Yes, Chaotix calls it an ancient Special Ring for the rest of the text, but this is not inconsistent with S&K, which first described the Super Ring as a "sparkling Special Ring." In other words, a Super Ring is a specific type of Special Ring. They may be fundamentally the same thing (they can all be broken down into 50 rings) but it's an example of one that's been harnessed by technology. Eggman also recognizes it as being identical to the ones on Angel Island, and Super Rings were the only type of ring portal that were, up to this point, unique to Angel Island (and they are quite visually distinct so he would not mistake it for another type of ring). In fact, given that Eggman has obviously seen one before and knows that the ones on Angel Island led to the Master Emerald altar, I wouldn't be surprised if the way that Eggman snuck into the altar room in Hidden Palace while Sonic and Knuckles were busy fighting was by going through a Super Ring.

The only thing that distinguishes the behavior of Super Rings from Special Rings is that they do not go to the Special Stage; they go to a fixed location. That seems to be the case with this ancient ring as well - it always goes to the previous emerald altar. Special Rings tend to drop you in seemingly random places in the Special Stage. You also generally can't just stand there for very long in a Special Stage. The Chaotix version in particular drains 1 ring per second, and when you run out you're ejected. This scene doesn't take long though, so it's possible he was only in there for a few seconds and that's why he didn't grab the Chaos Ring before leaving. It's also possible that this is a unique Super Ring that sends you to a unique Special Stage that has much more stability and permanence than the ones we typically see. But the mental image of Eggman standing in a Special Stage feels like a violation of unwritten thematic rules.

I checked in Jisho and 作り出す does indeed mean to create or produce. Interpreting the "mysterious dimensional space created by the Special Ring" as the Special Stage would mean the text is saying that the ring created the Special Stage. A door does not create a room. We have no more reason to believe Special Rings create the Special Stage than we do to believe the Super Rings create Hidden Palace. They don't even lead to unique stages; if you only have one emerald left to find then they'll all take you to the same place.

To address something Penguin raised before, the manual's section on the Bonus Stage does not imply anything related to this. It says, "The Bonus Stage is created by Pillar energy, and you may find valuable items that can only be obtained here." I read that as the time-space of the Bonus Stage was created by Pillar energy - probably the same release of it that raised the island - not that it's a dimension filled with Pillar energy and certainly not that the many rings leading there had anything to do with its creation. The section on the Special Stage says, "In the space created by the ancient Special Rings, Pillar energy crystallized into a ring shape." That is just repeating what was said in the prologue (omitting the adjective "mysterious" (不思議な)) because the Special Stage is where you collect the Chaos Rings, not necessarily because that is the space it's talking about.

But it is possible that this is just badly worded or that "created by" is an artful way of saying that the ring takes you to a mysterious space and it just doesn't translate easily.

Interpreting this mysterious space instead as the area formed within the physical ring (i.e. the hole in the middle of the ring) is a much more logical read in that sense, and comes with a reason for why the energy crystallized in the shape of a ring as a bonus. Bear in mind that ring portals are not holes in space-time like they are in the recent movies. You don't see your destination in the middle of the ring. In the S&K manual, Sonic merely touches the Super Ring with his hand and is instantly transported to Hidden Palace. So if we go with this read then the Pillar energy is reacting with the portal itself, causing the energy to crystallize, either conforming to the shape of the physical ring or being bent into that shape by the same forces that cause the portal to be shaped that way. As for how it ended up in the Special Stage, it could be something like I suggested before where the Super Rings use the Special Stage as a pass-through similar to how Scorpion's or Nightcrawler's teleportation works and Pillar energy essentially gets stuck in transit. However, it is worth noting that ring portals close behind you (teleporting something uses up their 50 rings worth of energy, I guess). The only thing that might be an exception is Eggman's generated dimension rings in Flickie's Island, which don't close until all 5 flickies have gone through. If Eggman came in through the ancient ring then how is it still there to be filled with Pillar energy? It is possible that this ancient Super Ring is a stable portal between two rooms that doesn't disappear, serving as a point-to-point portal rather than going through a teleporter network like on Angel Island, or that something automatically reopens it shortly after use. This agrees with the next line, where he says that he intends to study this Special Ring - the one he discovered, which is the one he came in through. It's also possible that Eggman actually does grab this Chaos Ring, as Dr. BUGMAN suggested, and expended it in his research, but that leaves us with no obvious answer for how the other 6 end up in the Special Stage.

Adding further confusion to this, Google Translate renders the line as, "However, the mysterious space created by the Special Ring was filled with 'Pillar' energy, which had transformed it into a ring-shaped crystal known as a 'Chaos Ring.'" This is completely in the past tense, suggesting that Eggman was not there to witness this and just finds the Chaos Ring and is inspired by it. That's probably wrong, though.

Having said all of that...this scene is so badly written and constructed that I don't think the intent can be narrowed down through these kinds of logical arguments. The answer to questions like how the Chaos Rings end up in the Specials Stage is probably "shut up and don't think about it." So my only real objection to this theory is that having the original emerald altar in the Special Stage just isn't the sort of thing I think they'd do. It's weird.

This did give me a neat idea, though. If the altar had been kept in the Special Stage you would expect most of the damage from the Master Emerald's energy going out of control to have been limited to the inside of that dimension. You could imagine it leaking out of ring portals or affecting both worlds through inter-dimensional physics, but I like the idea that the altar got blasted into the Special Stage by the disaster and some of the random junk you find scattered throughout it used to be part of the temple housing it.

Next question: where is this Pillar energy coming from? My primary argument that the ring took Eggman to Hidden Palace was that, because Eggman witnesses Pillar energy crystallize into a Chaos Ring, he must be standing in front of the Pillar, which we know is somewhere on Angel Island (or in its Special Stage; Sonic 3 said it was "in the depths of the island's earth" but in Sonic 2 the emeralds were described as being somewhere in the island even though they were in its Special Stage, so that's a workable reading). He would also need to set up shop near a stable supply of Pillar energy in order to both figure out how to crystallize it himself and to feed the Dark Ring production line that powers all of the machines in the game. If he were in the Special Stage and it was just naturally "filled" with Pillar energy all of the time then why does it crystallize into a ring in that one spot at that particular moment? Wouldn't it be constantly happening? We can and have come up with all kinds of fanwankery about the Angel Island portal network linking to the newly reactivated ancient Special Ring on NHZ and Pillar energy leaking into it, or into its Special Stage, or that the Pillar is just showering NHZ directly with huge amounts of energy constantly as it passes overhead for the duration of the game and that, in addition to stimulating plant growth and causing the tectonic activity that raised the island, it bounces around for hours and gradually coalesces into Chaos Rings somehow, but the text skips over this hole in the narrative sequencing so casually that there's no way anything that complicated was envisioned. I think something very basic must have been intended that the author thought would seem obvious to the reader. And that has led me to a thought most blasphemous, but which cannot be discounted.

There's a second Pillar. In this room on Newtrogic High Zone.

That's what's amplifying the power of the Pillar on Angel Island. Either the two of them are resonating with each other or the Master Emerald is linking to both of them, increasing the energy output, or maybe getting close enough to the Super Emeralds still on Angel Island reactivated this Pillar or pushed it to maximum power. If this is the original Master Emerald altar, it makes some sense that there would have been a Pillar here as well, serving the same purpose. This would mean the Pillar is an artificially constructed component of the power core, and when Angel Island was created a new Pillar was made for the new power core in Hidden Palace. Given the context, it's probably made out of chaos crystal, though Google translates the line from Sonic 3 as "a crystalline column made of Chaos Emeralds" rather than the possessive "crystal 'Pillar' of the Chaos Emeralds" like all of the human translations.

Finally, we have the confusing statement that Eggman intends to "summon" the Master Emerald. Every translation uses this verb. Google translates it the same way, and Jisho says 呼び寄せる means to call or summon. The same phrase is used in Eggman's character profile:

今度は失われた文明のある島にある太古のスペシャルリングに目をつけ、それによって呼び寄せ
ることができるという、マスターエメラルドを手に入れようともくろむ。
This time, he sets his sights on a special ancient ring on an island home to a lost civilization, and plots to obtain the Master Emerald, which is said to be able to summon it.

If this is an artful way of saying he's going to pilfer it then that makes perfect sense. If in studying the Super Ring he learns how to set the destination then he could easily teleport into Hidden Palace and steal it when Knuckles isn't looking. But if he's going to somehow suck it through the portal then that's coming out of nowhere. Nothing we know about rings provides any logic for how that would work unless he's talking about opening a portal directly on top it, which would mean he'd essentially invented a Star Trek transporter. Or maybe it's related to the bungee rings - that he could remotely set up a link between the Master Emerald and something else and either pull it to him or siphon power from it without moving it, but that's a pretty big leap of logic. Also, why specifically the Master Emerald? Why not mention the Chaos/Super Emeralds? I guess because he knows exactly where the Master Emerald is whereas the other emeralds may have been removed from Hidden Palace, or just because it's a Knuckles game and guarding it is his thing. Whatever it is, it's poorly presented.


(Sonic Retro seems to think the small ones are power-sapped rings, but...they're obviously Dark Rings. That's what the whole game is about.)

Lastly, we have the ending. Given the game's troubled development, it's entirely possible that the people who made this scene never read the manual and had their own ideas about what the plot was. With that in mind, let's consider a few possible interpretations.

The rotating cube graphic around the Special Ring seems to me like either a containment field or an analysis matrix. When Eggman uses the computer, the cube first contracts into nothing. Then there are additional button press sound effects, distinct from the first set, after which the ring explodes, so the fact that it didn't immediately explode leans more toward analysis than containment. 16 regular rings fly out of it (probably not an intentional number) and it turns into a giant Dark Ring, much bigger than the ones found in the previous bosses. Incidentally, there's a single frame in the animation where both the Special Ring and the Dark Ring are visible but that's probably just lazy programming.

The cutscene is so low quality that I'm not willing to say with certainty that the ring is intended to be a Special Ring just because it uses the same sprite as them. But given the prologue, it's very likely a Special Ring and probably the same Super Ring Eggman found at the beginning. We're never told exactly how he makes the Dark Rings, just that it involves crystallizing Pillar energy. The artificial process he uses to do this renders them colorless compared with the naturally formed Chaos Rings. He may have been pumping Pillar energy into the Special Ring or just manipulating the natural flow of it, manually reproducing the same process he observed creating the Chaos Ring, to produce the small and medium Dark Rings. Maybe that's what the cube graphic was - this was his Dark Ring production machine, and he sacrifices it in desperation to make one last huge Dark Ring. On the other hand, he may have been working on a giant Dark Ring this whole time and just happened to be nearly done when Metal Sonic crash landed from stage left, and what we see is the last step in creating it.

Alternatively, since his main goal was to be able to summon the Master Emerald, it's possible that he's figured out how to set the destination on the Super Ring, or how to create his own Super Dark Ring. Given that it's able to power up Metal Sonic enough to go from barely functioning to a doomsday machine, there's either a lot of power in that ring or it's connecting to somewhere with a lot of power. Perhaps he's succeeded in "summoning" the Master Emerald and that's how Metal Sonic Kai is born, or he's linked the other end of the portal to the Pillar and is drawing energy from there.

The ring scatter animation is unique in that they don't spin, but that could be for technical reasons. My initial thought was that this explosion was from the containment field - that it was powered by rings and we were seeing the Dark Ring through a filter of ring energy, making it look like a Special Ring. But another possibility is that, in addition to Pillar energy, the Dark Rings are made from ordinary rings. The explosion of rings that appears when the giant Dark Ring is created may be indicating that he's removing the 50 units of ring energy from the physical structure of the Special Ring. Normally draining the energy causes the physical ring to disappear, but maybe by replacing it with Pillar energy it's possible to keep it stable, and somehow this offers advantages over using normal rings to power machines. In that case, the rings aren't "dark" in the sense that they're evil; they're visually darker because they've lost their normal golden luster along with their ring energy.

My initial read of the remainder of the cutscene was that Eggman fused with Metal Sonic via the Dark Ring to become the red metal behemoth. The color scheme certainly makes that possible (there's also a brief flash of green light from where they left the screen together). There is no logical reason for either a ring portal or a vessel of Pillar energy to facilitate a human-robot merger though, so a more likely interpretation is that the reason Eggman levitates into the center of the giant Dark Ring is that he's using it like a Super Ring. The fact that he peaks his upper body out of the ring in the bad ending lends itself to that idea (at least I THINK that's supposed to be him peeking out - it's extremely lazy sprite work if so). His presence in the bad ending suggests that he's at the final battle in some capacity so maybe, after powering up Metal Sonic, he uses it to warp into a cockpit area inside of him and pilots him like a mech. Maybe it's a G-Gundam kind of interface where they're not actually fused but they're functioning as one (Ryo Kudou says several of the devs literally compared it to the Devil Gundam from G-Gundam and called it "Devil Sonic"). He could also just be on the other end of the Super Dark Ring portal that's powering him, wherever that is.

In the bad ending, it shows the Chaos Rings that you collected. To me it looks like they're attempting to destroy the Super Dark Ring but aren't strong enough, so they are destroyed by it instead, or they fully spend their energy and the crystal structure just breaks down, disintegrating like the Big Dark Rings powering the bosses (an important point because it suggests that Chaos Emeralds are not just a different shape of crystallized Pillar energy, since they never seem to run out of power even after thousands of years). Given that, we can presume that the good ending was supposed to show the 6 Chaos Rings destroying the Special Dark Ring but there was no time to finish an appropriate animation for it. This would either undo the fusion or simply destroy his giant Dark Ring, preventing him from using it again. As I said last time, this only really makes sense as a conclusive ending if Eggman is no longer able to create Dark Rings, so I'm inclined to believe that the ancient Special Ring was the only Super Ring he found on the island, that it was converted into the Super Dark Ring, and that he did not learn how to create new Super Rings. With it destroyed, he could no longer get to the original altar and thus no longer had access to a supply of Pillar energy with which to make more Dark Rings (or the Super Ring was itself a critical component of their production).

Those are all logical ways to explain the ending, and the weird details like the ring scatter and Eggman entering the giant ring with Metal Sonic must've meant something to someone, but it's also entirely possible that the designer of this atrocious cutscene didn't know anything about the prologue and no greater thought was put into it than 'Eggman makes biggest Dark Ring and turns Metal Sonic into giant mecha.'

I do hope we get Chaotix design documents someday, because that's pretty much the only way we're ever going to shed any light on this, but Ryo Kudou says it was common practice at Sega to skip the concept art phase and proceed directly to creating pixel art and that Chaotix had very few pieces of hand-drawn concept art. As it stands, it's neat that someone wanted to bring back the Pillar but it was done in such a clumsy and incoherent way that I think I'd be fine leaving it out of the Classic timeline, especially given that it was probably written by a newbie.


WHAT IS THE PILLAR
...and what happened to the rest of the Knuckle Clan?

We're probably never going to get the real answer to this, but I almost guarantee you it's just as boring and disappointing as the fate of Angel Island's emeralds. To answer myself from the previous page, the katakana is ピラー (Pirā), so it is a Romanization. It's worth pointing out that no official source has ever confirmed that it's supposed to be the English word "pillar," but it's also described as 結晶柱, which Google says means crystal column.

It's been suggested before that the Pillar was scrapped and retconned into the Master Emerald when S&K came out (another consequence of them forgetting to go back and update the Sonic 3 manual after changing direction). That's possible. Maybe even likely, given that nothing resembling a crystal pillar appears in the games, and especially if Google's translation is correct and it's just a giant pillar-shaped emerald. But Chaotix makes it pretty clear that they're distinct yet related things (as I said on page 8, if they wanted to update the name they would not have continued calling it the Pillar throughout the whole manual and invented the term "Pillar energy"), so if it was a retcon then they un-retconned it in that game.

The other boring answer is that it's just another name for the core, or "altar," in Hidden Palace. Some version of it that was envisioned prior to the graphics being designed, or some other off-screen manufactured component of the island's power system. Calling it the "Pillar of the Chaos Emeralds" makes it sound like it's a column the emeralds either sit on or are embedded in. We know that it's underground somewhere and that it generates "Pillar energy." Presumably it can generate more energy than the combined Chaos Emeralds or at least has some kind of substantial advantage over them, because if you need to have 7 emeralds to even control it then it must be somehow worth the effort of setting it up rather than just using emeralds for power.

While we're at it, we might also ask what Pillar energy is. It's reasonable to assume that the Master Emerald and the Chaos Emeralds have the same kind of energy because Eggman's radar picked up a large Chaos Emerald signal on Angel Island in the Sonic 3 manual. That could either have been from its native emeralds or the Master Emerald depending on how you read it, but it's notable that he didn't mention seeing two different types of signals (also, in SA2 he straight-up mistakes the Master Emerald's signal for one of the 7 emeralds). However, just because the Pillar is called the "Master Emerald Pillar" here doesn't necessarily mean that Pillar energy is the same. It's possible, but being objective we must admit that the only real supporting evidence for that is that Pillar energy caused NHZ to instantly blossom, which you could connect to Sonic 1's note about Chaos Emeralds giving energy to all living things and its ending where the emeralds make South Island blossom. Also, the Chaos Rings were apparently going to be called Holy Rings but they changed it to avoid any religious connotations. So maybe Pillar energy is somehow more pure, or more stable, or safe, than chaos energy. In fact, given the shape it crystallizes in, it might be a variation of ring energy. Ring energy more or less has to be a different thing than Chaos Emerald energy because the 50 ring ante that's needed to transform would make no sense otherwise (surely the amount of energy in 50 rings is paltry compared to 7 emeralds). Maybe it's dangerous for a biological creature to channel that much chaos energy and the rings convert it into something more usable, a critical mass of 50 being needed to initiate the conversion reaction (the rings could also be protecting the user from harmful effects, but then explaining why you need 50 to transform gets complicated).

As for what happened to the echidnas, I genuinely think that nobody ever put any thought into that. It's just a trope that's meant to furnish Knuckles's character, not a mystery you're intended to ponder. (I've been thinking recently that there's a fair amount of under-thought in SA1 as well. Why did Tikal have to be sealed inside the Master Emerald with Chaos? Why couldn't Chaos and the chao leave the altar? Because plot.) Even Laputa didn't give a literal explanation for how the floating castle became abandoned, just a thematic one.

But screw that! Let's write some fanfiction! It's been 20 years since the last time I wrote a complete backstory for the Sonic setting - and that was before I'd even read the manuals. While this will not reach the lofty heights of Gibbon-sensei's recent masterpiece, The Last Teat, I will endeavor to honor this momentous occasion with a tale befitting the noble heritage of our checkered-hilled institution.

(Honestly the whole thing came out meh, but I've already spent over a month writing this post and all that I wanted out of this was a less clinical way of presenting some ideas so I'm not bringing my A game here.)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The Legend of the Chaos Emeralds
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
This is an electrified fairy tale. If you've never heard of an electrified fairy tale, just picture little fairies with wee-tiny Mega Drive controllers.

Once upon a time, in a land not far from here, there was a place called Serene Canyon. Everyone in Serene Canyon was happy, and this "joie de vivre" was guarded by its principal inhabitants, the mighty Knuckle clan. A noble people renowned for their strength and honor, these echidnas made their homes in the canyon walls and spent their days frolicking through its glens and digging in its tunnels in search of useful ores and rare gems.

One day, an especially boisterous burrower named Chuckles the echidna dug deeper than anyone had ever dug before and discovered something remarkable. It was a new kind of crystal, shining with an inner light and vivid colors. He showed it to his best friend Crackle, who showed it to his wife Jade, who in turn showed it off to everyone in the village square and instantly made it the object of every fashionable monotreme's desires.

The crystals were mined with all haste, polished, and embedded into jewelry and monuments to their gods. Before long, the people began to notice that their strength and speed was enhanced when wearing them. They also found that certain prayers were answered immediately when made before the statues they adorned, earning them the name "miracle gems." But after such use, the gems would soon lose their light and crumble to dust.

As the Knuckle made their living trading ore in the nearby towns and cities, they were excited to share this new treasure with the world. Their wondrous power became the talk of all the land of Pacifica, and demand for them was impossible to satisfy. Eager to increase their output, the fox clans to the west offered to improve their mining equipment and infrastructure. The rabbit clans to the south established dedicated supply lines to feed the operation. The bear clans to the north came to assist with construction. And the chickens generally just got in the way and cocked everything up, but they made good beer so everybody put up with it. Ambitious craftsmen, mystics, militias, and scientists from all fields flocked to the area in hopes of securing their supply of crystals before anyone else. From this menagerie of life and culture, the city of Echidona was born.

While the energy in the unrefined crystals could turn a trick or two, it was exhausted too quickly to truly satisfy. The top minds of the surrounding nations ran experiments night and day, racing to be the first to enhance their abilities. All efforts seemed futile at first, as the material rejected all known tools, losing its light at the slightest attempt to change it. But the mystics of the Sacred Caves, with their deep passion and intense focus, found that they could use the energy of many crystals to reforge a single one, and that the more who united themselves in this task with one heart and mind, the greater the changes that could be realized. The resulting gems no longer pulsed with many colors, but held a continuous green light. And while they were much smaller, they could accomplish far more before going dark.

This new generation of miracle gems, called 'miracle emeralds' in the common tongue, brought untold prosperity to all the land. Crops grew faster and larger, disease and deformity were all but banished, wealth of every sort was multiplied 10 fold, and all manner of scientific knowledge and technological development advanced at an astonishing rate. But jealous forces (and there are always jealous forces in such tales) had conspired against Echidona, seeking to overthrow the fledgling nation both by political intrigue and force of arms, and to take the crystal mine for their own. All diplomatic entreaty having been spat upon, the council of elders was called and it was decided that they should use the emeralds' power to defend themselves. All had been loath to use this hallowed gift in service of war, and the results were as terrible as they'd always feared. Scorching laser weapons and devastating explosives were but the beginning of the horrors they unleashed. Their enemies became their vassals, the nation of Harmony was founded, and its people grew in fame and influence.

Many summers later, another fateful discovery was made. Following the vein to its source, the miners had found a massive deposit of the rainbow hued crystals. And as they worked their way to its very center, they were met with a brilliant green light seemingly frozen in time. Surrounding it was a column of solid green crystal, 12 meters tall and 4 meters wide. The wisest men in the kingdom were brought in to examine it. Their many instruments and clairvoyants soon confirmed what a small group of human researchers had theorized from the start. The miracle gems were not a mineral at all, but a distortion in space itself. The 'magic' was a form of energy from another dimension that interacted with the willpower of a soul, making it seem like wishes came true if they were wished hard enough. Within the center of this crystal spire was a connecting point where the two worlds touched. And just as two continental plates rubbing together would create heat and molten rock, so the meeting of the two realms caused a reaction that released this new energy, forming a lattice structure in space-time that could be thought of as melted dimensional fabric. It had accumulated around the fissure as the energy slowly leaked out for untold ages, giving rise to the "natural" formation of the crystal field within in the earth.

Despite the incredulity of some of the scientists, the anomaly was entirely mobile, adhering to the crystal shell it had encased itself with, and so the edifice was excavated and brought to the city for further study. They would devise many names for it, but in common parlance it was simply called "The Pillar."

With this new understanding of their nature, the emerald artisans were able to advance their craft beyond all expectation. Combining the precision of their ever advancing technology with the skill of their greatest sages, a technique was honed that enabled them to rearrange the spacial lattice and concentrate it in a fractal manner. Different patterns produced different colors, and the different colored gems had a synergistic effect, exponentially magnifying their power (though it seemed to cap off at 7 colors). At the same time, a machine was designed to harness the power of The Pillar directly, using the space-time bending properties of the emeralds to expand the rift. This Pillar energy was in turn used to create even stronger emeralds, which in turn were used to further increase the Pillar's output. Many shapes and sizes of emeralds were tried, each more powerful and enduring than the last, until finally they created a set that seemed never to run dry, recharging through an invisible connection to The Pillar. While extremely difficult to produce, these latest emeralds could even be used to recharge lesser ones, giving their society an effectively unlimited supply of free and portable energy.



Decades passed, and their empire spread to the farthest known coasts. Having tasted the sweetness of conquest, the elders had gradually pushed for more and more expansion in the name of sharing their wisdom and fortune with all the world, by force if need be. All who challenged them fell, and the rest begged to be brought into their fold to enjoy the prosperity brought about by the emeralds, which were now tightly controlled and exclusively made in their new capital city, Megalopolis. Each city was given its own unique set of miracle emeralds (the common ones were still green, so the name stuck), filling their inhabitants with health and happiness. They built mighty ships that could sail to the bottomless depths or reach the top of the clouds. Dimensional gateways were constructed, using The Pillar as a nexus, that allowed anyone to travel to the four corners of the realm in an instant. Stone and wooden automatons were created to do most of the labor, freeing the people to enjoy a life of artistic, recreational, and spiritual pursuits. Every citizen was even given a pair of magical golden bracelets that prevented most forms of injury.

But that their power had become great, and their people fit to surpass the gods, was not enough. It seemed as though all of their wishes had been fulfilled, yet each wish was succeeded by another, and every new wish demanded more and more miraculous power. They dreamed of traveling the stars, of raising the dead, and transcending their mortal bodies. So their elders called upon their wise men once again to devise a way of pulling even more miracle energy from The Pillar. While this would be dangerous, it was theorized that The Pillar's flux could be actively kept in check by a continuous use of the emeralds. But the math was too complex for any mortal to factor, and the astral perception required beyond a machine's capability. They needed something that could combine both. An interface. A controller. Using the power of the strongest Super Emeralds and a year's worth of raw gems from the mines, their leading scientists and greatest sages crafted something entirely new. Its shape was optimal, its size beyond anything they'd ever managed before, its shade a deep, beautiful green. The most perfect miracle gem possible. It was their master work, like unto a god in its own right. They called it the Master Emerald.

And lo, there descended the prophetess Chanotti from the Diamond Dust mountains, her magnificent tail feathers shining like an aureole as she spoke. She warned that a stone so mighty could bring great happiness, but also great misery. And she foretold that, should they dare to reach unto the heights of the gods, the gods would bear witness to their demise. But no one was particularly interested in what she had to say, so she sodded off back to her cave.

Under the infinite light of the Master Emerald, the children of Megalopolis enjoyed immortality and near omnipotence. It seemed any thought could be made reality, even the creation of matter from nothing. Their buildings towered to the heavens, they could defy gravity freely without any technology to assist them, and they transformed their bodies at will, changing fur color or sprouting wings or glowing in the dark. But still, their hearts were not satisfied. A perverse faction within the council of elders had aspirations of creating their own pocket worlds filled with new life, modeled after their own appetites, to rule over as gods. The scientists warned them that such a use of the machine was beyond its intended design, and moreover that drawing that much energy from The Pillar at once risked destabilizing it, threatening the entire planet. But the elders said among themselves, "Though the earth may shake, let the planet tremble! Steady will we struggle onward 'til our dreams come true!" That very night, they snuck into the sanctuary to seize control of the Master Emerald. But as they made their wish, The Pillar began to vibrate intensely, a deafening high pitched sound echoing through the chamber. Finally, a crack appeared in its crystal shell and the last thing they saw was a blinding green flash.



Everything for a dozen miles was vaporized in an instant by the inter-dimensional nuke. Miles beyond that, the overload of astral energy killed every living thing. But this was only the beginning of their destruction, for the earth did indeed shake and the planet trembled, but not with tectonic motion. A cosmic divide tore space-time asunder, moving along intersecting dimensional currents and shattering Harmony. What little remained of Megalopolis sank into the sea, and the regions that had surrounded it were broken off into islands. The ground spewed fire, and the sky was an ocean of black. The survivors feared the end had come, but on the third day salvation descended from on high.



A magnificent golden city emerged from the pall of darkness, lighting over the sunken remains of The Pillar. On its parapets stood angelic beings of grace and beauty. Using their own miraculous power, they shrunk the rift back to its original size and formed a new crystal seal around it. As the sun returned and the earthquakes and volcanoes slowly abated the people thought their trial over, but it had only begun.

Chuckles the echidna - kept alive for over a century by the power of the emeralds - poked his head out of the mountainside. He and several other workers had been deep enough in the mines to be shielded from the blast. It had become an aquatic mine as the land began to sink, but their natural gift for digging had brought them safely to the nearby Valley of Silence, now transformed into a windy emerald coast. Since they were the nearest assembled crowd, the descended 'gods' sent their emissary to them. He told them they had come from a neighboring dimension that had been similarly affected by the disaster. While it had caused far less of a disruption to their way of life, he calmly informed his awestruck audience that their reckless handling of an astral fissure had caused widespread devastation across several universes and that the consequences could have been far worse had they not been passing by. While it was impossible to close the fissure completely, as it was an unavoidable consequence of the structure of their filament of the cosmic web, they could no longer be allowed to use it freely. But they would not leave them completely bereft of help.

And there flowed from the city above him a choir of angelic workers who, bowing their heads in prayer, used their miracle power to erect for them a new city, like in appearance to their own, floating above the mountain peaks. And deep within the remnants of the mine they carved out an ornate temple in which they enshrined the restored Pillar, one set of emeralds to control it, and the Master Emerald they had recovered from the seabed. And they weaved their magic upon them, binding their power with a seal that no one could ever hope to break. But they adjured Chuckles and his kin to craft emeralds no more, promising them that The Pillar would keep their people safe and secluded until such time as their hearts had grown pure enough to be trusted with controlling its full might once again. Then they willed that the entire deposit of crystals should be raised into the air as a massive floating island, which its new residents named Angel Island in honor of their winged saviors. And they all lived happily thereafter, until one fateful Taco Tuesday when the entire race died of dysentery save for one infant child who was raised by mountain penguins.

On distant shores, the other remnants of the fallen civilization watched in amazement as the land was taken skyward. Amazement, but also disbelief at how screwed they were. The 'gods,' it seemed, were benevolent, but not especially generous. Not only had they been left to fend for themselves on what were now scattered islands, but they had to contend with the consequences of the elders' final wish. It had been partially successful, but rather than creating fully formed worlds they had merely opened pockets in subspace - fragmented fever dreams where Euclidean sensibilities held no sway and the laws of physics were in constant flux. They pressed against the surface of their own realm like tumors, occasionally poking through, opening portals in random places throughout the region whenever enough energy was present, altering the geology and local flora. The pressure of these time-space bubbles caused all manner of strangeness, even setting the islands adrift on the ocean - not floating like a boat, but dimensionally shifting across 3D space. Those who left for the mainland were unable to find their way back, and many a sailor vanished in those misty waters, taken by the sea's churning and unpredictable currents and the compass's lying needle.

But most crushing of all, the miracle emeralds, the very foundation upon which they'd built their lives, were lost to them. Some believed the gods had taken each city's unique set as punishment, others that they'd been destroyed in a cascading reaction because of their link to The Pillar, still others that they'd been carried off by the waves or fallen into the depths of the earth. They had only a handful of lesser emeralds left, which would help them to rebuild but would lose their power all too soon. And with the mines now gone there would be no more to replace them.

The story of the great empire that vanished overnight circled the world, giving rise to various legends such as Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, and Rutas. Each of the remaining islands became legends in their own right, the entire southern sea shrouded in mystery. But the most captivating of all was the legend of the magical jewels that had brought them both untold power and complete annihilation. The legend of what became known as...the Chaos Emeralds.

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(I came so close to finishing with 1337 posts...)