Shadow’s Journal

July 23rd, 3235

The words you are about to behold below are an accurate record of events leading to the Awakening. My name is Shadow the Hedgehog, and I am the Ultimate Life form created for many purposes. But I am getting ahead of myself. Several of us have been chosen to chronicle our new age. What you will read below are some entries that have occurred about a month behind. I will attempt to do my best to keep them in order.

It was best to start this chronicle with my account. Although several things happened to several of us in several places, we had determined that I was the first to experience this adventure, because it started with my own awakening.

When I first awoke, it was from a small, cold place. I remembered opening my eyes and seeing a small, frosted window looking outward. It was some sort of viewing pane to a capsule I had been entombed in. I was a bit disoriented when the door to the capsule opening, and slightly warmer air had come to greet my ebony fur. The next thing I noticed was the sound of alarms. Wanting to get a glimpse of my surroundings, I had begun to stand and look around. It took me a few moments to recognize that I was in a military top secret facility. Bits and pieces of my memory, which seemed to lay dormant in my mind at the time, and still do at times, were slowly coming to me. I was in a GUN facility.

GUN. Guardian Unit of Nations. They’re a joke to everyone now, but they still like to pretend that they run the show. And during this time, they really were trying to control everything, even me. That was why I had been trapped in there.

But who was there to awaken me? Who set me free from these guys? My eyes turned about to the sound of a woman’s voice behind me, mentioning her shock at my presence. Thankfully I have a solid recollection of the conversations that I have with everyone; part of the gift of being the ultimate life form. I will try to provide them when I can, like here.

“Surely this cannot be the military’s top secret weapon.”

My eyes turned to a woman standing before me, with black hair and bearing black leathers. She had the deepest ruby eyes, much like my own, and I wasn’t the only one to notice. “But your eyes…”

I didn’t know who this woman was, but regardless, she did just free me, and I had to offer my deepest gratitude towards her. “My name is Shadow. I don’t know who you are, or why you have chosen to release me, I am, nevertheless, in your debt. In return, I shall assist you in any way that I can.”

At that moment, the woman and I were distracted by a much louder alarm sounding over the drone of the main one. The woman just couldn’t contain her groan. “Now what?”

That’s when both she and I both saw the robot that began to approach us from the entrance to the room. It was rather large. Definitely one of the military’s fighting robots. This woman must have done some serious damage to the facility to pull out the big guns this early into the game. It was definitely time to show her what I was capable of. I powered up the small jets built into my shoes by moving my feet. Sonic says they remind him some something called ‘rollerblading’ so I will have to use that to describe my movements as I passed her towards the robot. “Stay back, I’ll deal with this.”

I remembered as I approached the robot, the designation on it read as the robot being called the “Hot Shot”. Well, needless to say, Hot Shot was going down as it leaped into the air and hovered in the room for a few short moments, before it began to shower the area I was in with bullets. I swiftly dodged the storm of ammunition. Apparently they saw that wasn’t going to work, so they decided to land. A hatch opened and four missiles shot towards me. Apparently these guys were big idiots to think that was going to work, because I easily dodged the slower moving projectiles and used the opening to leap up, curl up, and slam myself into the cockpit of the robot. My body could easily take the slamming without pain or harm. In fact, I slammed into the cockpit so hard that the top shattered, leaving for a vulnerable spot. One more attack like that should do it as I leaped back, ready to take another aim.

The pilot, out of desperation, tried to fire the robot’s lasers at me, which, again, missed me easily. He was an idiot. That gave me the opening I needed to take that final shot, slamming into the robot and completely knocking it over in a shower of sparks. I leaped back, staring at the mess.

“Pathetic humans…” I muttered, folding my arms. They were no good, I believed.

Behind me, I heard clapping from the woman as she applauded my performance. “Excellent job. Spectacular work you did taking out that robot!” She smiled with a dark look in her ruby eyes as she approached me. “So…Shadow…you are the military’s top secret weapon. How can you help me though?”

I eyed the woman up and down, trying to gauge her. She was a human, just like any other. I wanted to see how far she was willing to go. I finally spoke as I turned, headed for the door. “Have you ever heard of something called the Chaos Emeralds?”

She could only grin with lips pressed together. “Of course…” She walked past me towards a control near the capsule in which I had been trapped. Sitting on top of it was a chaos emerald. “I had to use one to free you.”

So there was more to this woman than had to the eye as I nodded, continuing to walk. “In that case…bring me more.”

“More emeralds?” the woman asked, raising an eyebrow.

I added on. “I’ll meet you in the central control room on the Space Colony ARK.”

I had no idea that the woman I was helping at the time was Shaetore, queen of the vampires.