Chapter Text
Going in Circles
Ultimately, most Eternal Tails stories will be self contained, relating to a particular event or problem as time goes on and focusing most heavily on Miles' traumatic life experiences and the particular impact they have on his ability to function in day to day life and having no need to explore the peculiarities of time travel. This chapter covers mainly details that might be helpful for writing or breaking these loops and any non-canon natives to a particular route or temporal event.
The Eternal Tails Loop
The first and most essential loop of Eternal Tails, the Chaos Break loop is the origin of Miles Prower without any known prime cause. It has been going on for an unknown number of cycles, and will continue to happen, because it already happened.
The Rules of the loop are simple:
A young Miles Prower must be on Cocoa Island, without any memories of future events, in time to defend the Chaos Emeralds from the Kukku Empire.
While Chaos Break and Chaos Calamity both deal with a specific type of ET loop - one where Miles is forced to take on an unreasonable cosmic threat by mass producing False Chaos Emeralds, this is not, however, a requirement of the loop. Miles has more than enough Mad Science in his life to cause this to happen even by accident, while trying to solve a problem through time travel, as an act of some cosmic entity… Anything goes so long as the endless cycle of Miles Prower continues, no matter how long it takes in a given loop.
The False Emerald event is a reasonably common cause of this event, however, since messing with hundreds of False Chaos Emeralds and facing unreasonable cosmic threats are both good ways to screw up time and space badly enough to end up as your own grandfather.
Once the loop occurs, Miles' native personality and the convergent timeline will ensure that his personal history in any given loop is largely consistent barring random chance or minor details relating to his origin and any random events that occur once the cycle ha begn.
One fun way you can "play with" a Chaos Break style loop is simply by having it resolve slightly differently than it normally would. One example would be the end of Chaos Calamity, where Cosmo's interference changed what would have been a standard loop into Miles returning to the same timeline he left. But what about a loop where Miles somehow ends up in the Sol dimension and becomes Blaze's sidekick instead? Or where he uncovers Shadow long before he meets Sonic, propelling himself and the world in a completely different direction? Or maybe events transpire that Miles ends up living with Knuckles, Sonic and Amy on a vacation island with a weird feral badger? Most things are possible with a large enough sample size.
Story: After The End
"Are you sure we need to do this?" Reason scratched beneath New Yeller's greying muzzle, frowning down at the tiny figure sleeping before them.
Miles nodded, expression no brighter than hers. "It has to happen one way or another. It's better like this."
"He's going to think he was abandoned. Unwanted."
"I know." Miles sighed, gently ruffling his fingers through the cub's fluffy fur. "But he's gonna do okay. He's got some fantastic genes, after all."
"Yeah, mine." Reason smirked.
Miles stuck his tongue out at her.
"You're gonna do just fine, little me." He smiled, eye flickering pink with the power of the Time Stone. "And I hope you find all the love you deserve."
And with neither a flash nor a bang, the young clone never was, sent to a beginning that was also an end.
Breaking Out
Because the only requirement of the loop is that a young Miles Prower be on Cocoa Island, and not the young Miles Prower, there are several outcomes in which a particular Miles doesn't travel back to the beginning of their lifespan and instead goes off onto their own tangential timeline.
This doesn't prevent the Chaos Break from happening - it must happen, one way or another, but it happens in such a way that the original remains intact.
Or dies. A timeline with a dead Miles Prower must still fulfil the loop.
This makes two clear variations of Miles within the Chaos Break loop:
Loopers, neotenic amnesiacs that don't physically age, grow constantly at a glacial rate, and lose that body mass when they start a new loop.
The Miles of the Happy Days series is a looper. Unaging, heavily tainted by chaos energy, and with a peculiar affinity with time. His name, interest in technology and general motivation are a combination of unconscious memories, the note left to him by his pre-Chaos Break self, and the events he lived through.
And Newbies, who have only just started their particular timeline. These share most of Miles' natural talents but typically lack the distinctive immortality of their time looping equivalents.
The Miles of Reaching Higher is a newbie. He actually was around six years old when he met Sonic for the first time, but thanks to malnutrition and stress remained small enough for the typical confusion over his age to occur regardless. He received his name from enemy combat chatter, his love of mint from their MREs… The main conceit of a convergent timeline is that the same result can come about from many different potential causes, which is how Silver keeps getting born despite a drastically changing future.
The Alpha Loop
There are at least two possible alternatives regarding Miles' base origin as the only mobian fox.
The first is that Miles is an alien kitsune, who developed his quasi-immortal state due to chaos exposure as a natural aspect of his alien physiology. In this case, Miles likely has a time clone of himself somewhere out beyond the stars, as well as an entire population of kitsune out there somewhere.
The second is that Miles was originally a mobian wolf - possibly Gadget - who in the original timeline was flung backwards in time through the original Chaos Break while working with a sidekick lacking Sonic. The chaotic energy of the Chaos Break warped him into his current state, and Miles has been a hyper intelligent fox ever since. In this case, Miles "Gadget" Prower quietly distinguishes himself in the Forces War by working alongside Sonic and his own mutated self, with his only real claim to fame being that he shares the same name as the legendary sidekick, before living a quiet, happy life away from all this drama.
I'll personally never write a story relating to Miles' game canon parentage on the off chance something becomes canon, but there y'are.
Happy Days
The biggest and most complicated loop in the Eternal Tails stories.
Happy Days itself can be broken into two distinct timelines.
Happy Days Alpha
The initial Happy Days event, and the one that occurs in Happy Days and Bad Seed.
In this initiating event, Mama, an AI on the Death Egg II created by Doctor Eggman, was tasked with protecting Eggman's child, a genetic clone with twinned X-chromosome placed on the facility with a time stone to preserve her.
The exact reason he produced the clone in the first place or used that odd method of cloning is unclear, but the man is a mad genius, so...
Thanks to a combination of Eggman's shoddy coding and habit of forgetting about old projects the moment he goes onto the new one this AI degraded into the understanding that for the megalomaniacal Eggman all children belonged to him and began a systematic abduction that persisted hundreds of years, an extinction event eventually resulting in the end of civilisation as we know it.
Miles was one of the first victims of this process, installed into the Happy Days simulation or something very much like it, and while under the influence of this simulation contributed to the capture of his friends when they came to rescue him. Robotnik's child viewed these simulations and interacted with them in order to provide
Thanks to his damaged neurology he proved far more resistant to the typical memory erasure and reprogramming of the simulation, leading to multiple escape attempts despite Mama's attempts to keep him suppressed. This led to one Happy Days victim - Cream the Rabbit - being inserted into his simulation, something that proved far more successful. Multiple Creams were cloned as the centuries wore on, their memories being transferred over to retain a consistent "narrative" for Miles, while the Happy Days facility harvested children each time Little Planet entered synchronous orbit with the Earth.
Containing Miles became something of an artform, employing Merl units programmed by the memories of his friends, torturing him with simulations and using Mama's extensive familiarity with his thought processes and using Cream as a hostage to craft a perfect scenario that reliably led him to choose the rational "best choice" outcome, returning to Happy Days over and over again to try and "get a better ending" next time.
By the time of Miles' final escape the station's population was in the low double digits, its systems decayed and Mama had long since taken to using Cream clones to supply itself with processing power. It formed a link with the Daughter during the Happy Day simulation and the early parts of Bad Seed. This is why Mama referred to itself as "we" until Miles extracted the Daughter and why its personality experienced a dramatic shift towards the end of Bad Seed. This Mama/Daughter combination observed Miles for hundreds of years, leading to the Daughter's ultimate obsession with him. It was through her influence over the machine that he was ultimately led to find and release her via controlled hallucinations and discover the truth of Cream's sacrificial nature which led to his ultimate escape.
There is ample scope to tell stories within this specific Alpha loop, potentially featuring failed escape attempts by Miles, his successful rescue of some Happy Day residents before finally succumbing to despair and returning to the simulation himself, or simply focusing on other victims of the Happy Days facility. Doodle's escape from Mama during Miles' fugue state is another interesting potential tale.
Happy Days Omega
As Miles cannot amend things in his own timeline through time travel, his use of time travel to solve the Happy Days event effectively caused a time loop with highly specific and complex rules that needed to be met, ensuring all the events he experienced on Happy Days had to be experienced by the "next" Miles in the cycle, that he had to spend a certain amount of time in the facility, and so forth.
Miles' final solution to the Happy Days was to create the ultimate torture chamber, specifically for himself. Each point was carefully designed to craft the exact experience Alpha Miles went through while minimising the real world effects:
The victims were reduced solely to the skeletons Miles observed on his various escape attempts, and were harvested from clones created from the skeletons from the previous loop to prevent the loop from breaking thanks to an infinitely aging prop.
Cream's clones were better handled, lowering the attrition rate drastically from a yearly supply to living out their full lifespan within the simulation.
This one was thanks to Reason's optimisation, rather than anything intentional on Miles' part.
Miles' friends captured on Happy Days were cloned, with the originals being safely rescued after the operation.
The passage of time was dilated to ensure that Miles' full "sentence" on Happy Days could be completed within a reasonable timeframe relative to Earth, allowing the Cream clones of his friends to return home in future.
Thanks to the nature of a time loop, this solution can be said to have drastically reduced the death toll from billions of earth children, hundreds of Cream clones, all of his friends and ultimately 99.9% of human and mobian life on earth to a few tens of thousand cloned sacrifices (including the Doodleclones), a handful of victims who lived out lives of artificially perfect happiness before peacefully dying of old age, and Reason and Doodle.
Also thanks to the nature of the time loop this solution can be said to be the single greatest atrocity of all time, with Miles being responsible for all future deaths of the cycle, resolving in him killing and mutilating an infinite number of children of varying ages, an infinite number of Creams, all of his friends, and consigning an infinite number of Doodles and Reasons to their lonely life and inevitable death aboard the Happy Days facility.
This said, if he did not at any point in the chain choose to perpetuate this cycle then Happy Days Alpha would reoccur, meaning he has technically saved a larger infinite number of lives even if he himself cannot ever be certain of the existence of this alpha timeline. Time travel ethics are confusing .
Once Miles resolved to make changes via time travel and succeeded, these changes became retroactive, and therefore were already in place when he resolved to make these changes in the first place. As such, despite the story technically following the Alpha Miles' first run through the loop it could be the story of any Miles within the loop and it would be impossible to know for either the reader or Miles himself.
There were many other knock on consequences of this change, the most significant being the permanent temporal dilation on Little Planet itself.
The time dilation being set up on the Death Egg II when it was, and the 100 years:1 day speed factor that was put into place means several hundred thousand years have passed on board since the station was last entered during Sonic 4, with the Happy Days period being a tiny subsection of time on a tiny area of the total station and even Chronos State Miles only observing a limited area while setting up the artificial sky and self-sustaining systems on which Happy Days is built. Entire civilisations could have sprung up and gone extinct in the intervening time period, brand new species evolved within uncharted corridors, and could be there still, all without even Reason knowing. This is a good potential source for a future threat in the Happy Days loop.
Even sticking purely to the Happy Days period there are potential stories with Reason interacting with end-of-life Cream clones for company, talking to herself as she enacts a changeover with new Reasons to maintain Mama's systems, or dealing with oddities and disasters while she maintains Happy Days waiting for Miles to kill her.
Could Happy Days happen again?
Theoretically, yes, though the exact conditions that led to Happy Days becoming such a major event make it a rare divergence. The eighth time stone being recovered, a Robotnik clone being created, Miles being successfully captured… Happy Days was a perfect storm of factors, and there's no guarantee that the Time Stones are something that isn't a fixed point of time independent of the Eternal Tails loop, which would prevent at least one of these factors from occurring in other loops even if the Happy Day facility did appear in another loop.
The universe is convergent, so Doodle and her Doodleclones, Miles bonding with a time stone, interfering in the events of Sonic CD, and entering a Chronos State could all potentially happen through many alternative causes with or without a full Happy Days event occurring. Starline taking Tails' fur in IDW could easily lead to an Amoral Female Miles clone, for example.
Little Planet
During the Chronos Divide event, time dilation was:
Death Egg: 100 years : 1 day on Earth : 100 days on Little Planet.
Time dilation started the year after Amy Rose left Little Planet (after the events of Sonic 4, when the Death Egg II depowered and was abandoned).
As a result, 300 years have passed on the surface of Little Planet since the events of Sonic CD, with the aftereffects of Robotnik's invasion pushed towards the Good Future period thanks to Miles hacking Robotnik's invasion process, and with an army of robot hunting critterbots swarming its surface. Or locked in a bad future where the world has all but collapsed after Sonic's failure.
Ironically this makes it one of the safest places in the setting in either case.
Both futures are true, thanks to the temporal damage done to the region, but on the happy future Amy's sibling's descendants are indeed alive and prosperous, and Amy herself a local legend thanks to a certain immortal fox with all the time in the world.
Future adventures on Little Planet are very possible, the Meka Teirusu mecha is still around, as are the Time Stones, though thanks to its isolation and being encased in the Death Egg II any adventures in its future are likely to relate to some home grown menace.
Even outside of the Happy Days loop, Miles does show up on Little Planet in game!canon, making at least part of the events of Chronos Divide a reasonably common occurrence in other loops even if he's normally pursuing different objectives.
Thanks to convergence, most of Miles' actions on Little Planet ultimately changed nothing that did not already occur, at best becoming the reason for events previously unexplained in Sonic lore, such as Metal Sonic's return from the Little Planet's good future in Sonic 4 despite that theoretically not having happened yet, the reason for Metal Sonic's projector, the behaviour of the critters, and the future attrition of Eggman's forces, not to mention the absence of the Desert zone and eighth time stone or Eggman's intended final boss machine from CD.
There is a theoretical chance for Miles to accidentally cause Amy to grow up with an interest in gadgets and technology instead of Sonic and fashion thanks to his involvement in her past and becoming her hero before she met Sonic. This would have been a fun divergence story to write, but unfortunately impossible for HD Miles as a looper thanks to determinism.
Chaos Calamity
Madworld Mechanics and the Outsiders
The Outsiders of Chaos Calamity are entities beyond mortal comprehension, exist "beyond the curves", outside of time and space. They feed on entropy and chaos, and a world with sufficiently weakened boundaries can allow their influence to break through.
Over the years they have attached themselves to the Prowers' peculiar personal timeline, infesting an unknowably large number of worlds thanks to his unwittingly seeding them with false emerald technology.
Despite being theoretically infinite in number, these worlds actually represent a tiny subset of total Eternail Tails loops.
To become a Madworld a world must meet the following criteria:
1: Be seeded with F.C.E technology by Miles during a Chaos Break type event.
2: Find Miles' final messages in an intact state and successfully replicate the technology.
3: Continue mass producing F.C.E technology for a long enough period without developing an appropriate control mechanism equivalent to the Master Emerald.
Once seeded, the end of days scenario will occur, turning the world into a Madworld. During this process Chosen with an interest in power and a motivation to resist the Outsiders are selected, being granted contracts with varying levels of potency that at very least render them
It is through being a Chosen that the majority of game mechanics related to Terraria come into play, coins dropping as earned favour, and an instinctive knowledge of things to create with the resources they have on hand. This all encourages the Chosen to take risks, kill monsters and consume resources, all of which increase entropy to the Outsiders' benefit, and providing powerful items and benefits should the Chosen defeat reflections of the Outsiders, a process which ultimately allows more of their influence into the world.
The most obvious sign of Madworld is Dentropy - negative entropy.
Under dentropy each object experiences a constant force pushing it to remain as it is. A candle will burn forever, wounds and damage will gradually reverse to the first given state of the object when it entered a dentropic state, and when enough energy is imparted to change an object's state it occurs rapidly, typically binding with other nearby material of the same type in an increasingly dense mono-entity.
Physics is broken under dentropy. Gravity barely works, and works differently depending on the material in question, plants spring out of nowhere, felled trees simply shatter into mono-blocks of wood rather than remaining as logs, and liquids can either vanish entirely or replicate infinitely depending on arbitrary factors and locations.
Even without the more extreme aspects of the Outsider invasion, the effects of dentropy would have rendered most technology on Earth inoperable,
The Contracted are permanent thralls to the Outsiders, unable to die and dragged from world to world to guide and serve the Chosen, appearing when the conditions of their contract are met. They cannot assist those who aren't chosen such as Miles because outsiders cannot earn favour, though there are certain Contracted with some wiggle room on this, such as the Party Girl Cherry.
Had Miles been teamed up with a Chosen and had access to the abilities and resources they could provide or access through the Contracted he would have been able to resolve the Madworld corruption issue within his first week there and produced even more ridiculous inventions.
The primary known Outsiders of Chaos Calamity were:
Yog Sothoth: Affiliated with the purple corruption: Decay, Yog Sothoth's taint warps its victims and leaves them as mindless extensions of his own influence. Yog Sothoth is the driving force behind breaking the barriers between worlds and forming the demonic underworld where the final seals of reality can be unbound through dread ritual.
Cthulhu: The vanguard of the Madworld invasion, Cthulhu's giant eyes are the source of all smaller eyeball creatures that populate Madworld. It is the sibling of Hastur, the Moon Lord.
Shupnikkurat: Affiliated with the crimson corruption: Organism, as well as the natural jungle and forest regions of Madworld, Shupnikkurat is tied to life itself and competes with Yog Sothoth during the initial stage of the invasion to expand her influence. Thralls of Shupnikkurat feel great belonging and contentment, becoming part of something much greater than themselves, she is inherently much less hostile to living things than the other outsiders.
Most of the surviving Contracted on Madworld were affiliated with Shupnikkurat.
Mr Skin / Nyarlathotep: Affiliated with the dungeon catacombs and death itself, Nyarlathotep gains sway over an influential leader during the invasion and lures a great bulk of the populace into the place that will become the new dungeon. His influence across Madworld is practically everywhere, and is the source of the undead.
Azathoth: The primordial creator deity that spawned many of the other outsiders. Tied with the hallow, Azathoth is so immensely powerful that the Chosen must weaken the barrier further before it can enter, and its appetite for chaos so strong that it leaves rigid order in its feeding grounds.
Hastur: Affiliated with the moon, including the corruptive blood moon. While less powerful than Azathoth, Hastur's incarnation is the most "complete", normally brought about by a Chosen undertaking an extensive sacrificial ritual to finalise the world's tainted state. The bloody hearts scattered through the underworld contain the essence of Hastur, yet another lure for the Chosen to damn their world further in exchange for dramatically increasing their vitality beyond human norms.
These hearts combined with Dentropy were also responsible for Miles being able to withstand so much punishment in Chaos Calamity.
Due to their relationship with entropy, it's possible that Outsiders serve a role in the natural ecology of the cosmos, normally feeding on universes that have reached maximum entropy and refreshing them to begin a new cycle of existence.
Could it happen again?
Not only can it happen again, it will happen again and has most likely happened before. While Miles' action has put them out of commission for thousands of future loops, the Outsiders are eternal. They will eventually outlive the Twilight Cage and become free to feed on F.C.E worlds once more, random chance will eventually cause a scenario where Miles does not produce F.C.E worlds for a lengthy period of time leading them to Earth once again.
Happy Days canon cast:
The Cream Team
A team of thirteen rabbits imperfectly cloned from one of Cream's doubled up X chromosomes, each one a year apart from thirteen down to a newborn.
Due to degradation of the original genetic material due to time, part of their genetic makeup has been replaced by Miles DNA. This has resulted, at least externally, in a slightly different orange shading on their fur and white tails, hints that showed they were not the original Cream. While most had no default personality, three of their number believed themselves to be Sonic, Amy and Knuckles due to memory transfer, while one believes herself to be Cream with slightly more accuracy. One clone was installed with the memory seed of Reason to facilitate her escape from Happy Days.
As of the end of Chaos Calamity there are two survivors.
1: Cream #2. The same Cream, at least mentally, as the one that went through Happy Days with Miles. She spent a great deal of time hating Miles for killing her "Mama", but this was largely alleviated when she discovered the truth of the Happy Days loop, and when she met both Reason and Vanilla, the two mamas she had thought lost to her allowing the two to reconcile prior to Miles' "death".
Despite her antipathy towards him, Miles felt strongly towards Cream as a very important person in his life. His technical first kiss, the person he spent hundreds of years with in a cosy, if enforced, friendship, and a source of massive guilt for all she suffered in Happy Days.
By the time of Miles' return from the Twilight Cage, Cream had settled in with Vanilla as planned, changing her name to Caramel and starting a tentative new life. She's on good terms with her "sisters", Reason and Amy and, even if she sometimes suffers from post traumatic stress from her experiences, is happy and doing well.
With Miles' reset Cream has lost one of the two most significant people in her life, an event which hurt her deeply. She still feels an uneasy kinship with Miles, even if she doesn't quite know how to interact with him now their shared connection is gone beyond slowly reaching out and trying to get to know this new him.
The primary difference between Caramel Cream and Original Cream is age. While Caramel does have a slight influence on her personality from her altered genetics these are comparatively minor to the hundreds of years she has lived, leaving her detached, cold and at times despondent, all troubles Miles experienced. Fortunately she has a stable and loving home, many friends and a peaceful life in which to try and make sense of it all.
She has recently discovered Rainbow the Pony, her relationship with the original Cream has never been better.
2: Sept, the third youngest of the clones, a young rabbit just under three, who carried the seed of Reason, though her brain was nowhere near capable of holding a Miles-level intelligence. She is the rabbit who waved to Miles as they left Happy Days, unknown to Miles.
Despite being the most divergent Cream clone, Sept still ended up taken in by Vanilla. She had the most difficulty adapting to her new environment, preferring the company of Reason, but the patience and warmth of the Rabbit family has brought her out of her shell somewhat as she deals with the unfamiliar normalcy of her new life, and eager to find Miles a place in it on his return.
As a Doodleclone Sept is more inclined towards books, science, and Miles than her "siblings". Quiet and thoughtful, with a broad, if piecemeal, collection of knowledge from her memories as Reason. While she has largely recovered from her trauma and started showing a brighter personality, she is still shy of strangers, and of Miles, even as she is drawn to him.
While the Creams might duck out with Amy Rose for a spot of shopping, Sept is more likely to want to wander to the Prower laboratories and start quietly tinkering with the gadgets there - with limited success.
Doodle
Another XX chromosome clone, this one a human clone of Ivo Robotnik.
Her relationship with Miles is best described as dysfunctional, since whatever the case in the original timeline, post Chronos Divide she is effectively his offspring, created to help him during the events of Bad Seed and Chronos Divide, and has spent her entire life obsessed with Miles.
Doodle is defined by obsessive love and genius in equal amounts. Possibly even smarter, and more insane, than Eggman and Miles both, her out of the box thinking and single minded determination combine with a perfect understanding of Miles' psyche to form what could be his greatest enemy ever, but somehow hasn't quite done so yet.
Nothing quite seems real to her, so she tends to space out while talking, isn't very emotive, and tends to have a dreamy expression all the time. Doodle is completely amoral and apathetic to the existence of others outside of furthering her agenda with Miles.
Interactions with Miles should have an undertone of creepy because the girl is completely and utterly bonkers.
Also likes to violate Miles' personal space because he's fluffy, and wishes she was small and cute like a mobian.
Miles had strong feelings for her before his "death", even if one of those feelings is "disturbed and appalled". He does not share her romantic interest in the slightest, but held familial feelings after the events of Chronos Divide. If she ever comes back, it's probably to put the "dere" back in "yandere", but woe betide anyone that refuses to share Miles with her.
Because Doodle is the original "seed" of Happy Days, all of the clones in ET share her mitochondrial DNA, making her technically the true "mama". Her personality was networked with Mama for much of the events of Happy Days and Bad Seed, hence the "we" appellation that vanished once Doodle was removed from her tube.
While Doodle is dead as of Chronos Divide, she may well appear in other loops, either just as obsessed or as a more direct antagonist. If so, she's unlikely to be called Doodle, as this was a direct result of her means of communicating with Miles.
Reason
Yet another XX-clone, this one of Miles himself with Doodle's mind copied on top. Reason is the only survivor of an untold number of other Tails clones, and contender with Doodle for "most twisted relationship". Sanest of all the Doodleclones, though not saying much.
Reason is to Doodle as Miles is to Robotnik - slightly less brilliant, significantly more stable. She has broadly comparable intelligence, physical strength and speed to Miles, though she lacks Miles' biological immortality and neotenism (much as if she herself was a Newbie) and has had limited opportunity to learn Miles' repertoire of skills, especially combat.
Behaviour and personality are largely genetic, so Reason shares many of Miles' behavioural tics, like his tendency to tease and wax philosophical about things, rub the back of her head, daydream, and kick her feet when she sits. This combines with Doodle's dreamy expressions, placid nature, and love for Miles, though she is less yandere than Doodle.
Reason lacks Miles' trauma based personality quirks and masking behaviour, but does have extensive survivor's guilt over outliving her "sisters", and her personality has drastically shifted thanks to her time as Sept.
If Miles' central conflict is about control, Reason's central conflict is identity, finding herself as a unique person as her Doodle personality fades, similar yet different to Miles. Developing her own purpose in life and learning how to operate outside of the unique eusocial society of Miles/Doodle clones she grew up in. As of Chaos Calamity she has found some of this meaning through supporting and caring for her friends.
Like Miles, Reason is an exceptional liar, and far more casually manipulative as she employs a deep level of understanding of personalities and people she cared for in Happy Days. She still deeply loves Miles in her strange, complicated way, but also loves Amy, Cream, Sonic & Knuckles for their time spent as her children, though their deaths and her role as Mama has left her troubled how to interact with them, often employing her occasionally harsh rationality "for their own good", occasionally without the inefficiency of consulting them first.
Since Reason is actually capable of a noticeable blush response she actually has a worse poker face in the off chance that something embarrasses her, much like Cream is.
Reason's genetic similarity to Miles triggers greenbearding - feelings of kinship, caring and belonging in both the fox who has never experienced such things before and the fox who is completely used to such things but now only has one such person left in her life. Miles' feelings towards Reason are strong and positive, even if Miles isn't quite sure how he's supposed to feel about someone who's simultaneously his sister/mother/daughter/granddaughter/cousin/aunt. He enjoys having the company of someone who shares his intelligence, and his species, for a change, while her darker tendencies haven't really come into conflict with him due to her understanding and respect of his boundaries.
Doodle and Reason have encountered Miles at a high escalation, low mask state, and will happily assist Miles even in his most extreme actions. This is a mixed blessing. A "safe" person to display negative emotions to and approach for moral support can be extremely helpful to Miles' mental well-being and can help his long term health, but as enablers for his Unmasked phases they can also help push him into the full "villain spiral" behaviours he is afraid of.
His mask will still push him to behave positively with both clones and diminish "wrong" emotions, but uniquely allows him to do terrible things in their presence without worrying about their opinion. Since both have a deep insight into his behaviours, if not his thoughts, they aren't fooled by his masking behaviours regardless.
Reason herself as of Chaos Calamity is a genetic hybrid of Cream, Miles, and Doodle's DNA, giving her longer ears with no fur inside, deeper orange tips, and a slightly different configuration of fluff. If you're wondering about genetics you probably shouldn't, as Reason has at least three different mothers, no fathers, and has selectively replaced sections of her genetic makeup to remove instabilities inherent in Miles' original twinned X chromosome.
As of the end of Chaos Calamity, Reason has taken on many of Miles' previous sidekick duties for Sonic, and now is happily cohabiting with Miles teaching him the many things he has forgotten, including a good deal of the dark stuff from her idealised perspective and with the help of Caramel and Sept.
In the eventual future she will assist Miles in the artificial creation of the Reaching Higher loop using her advanced experience in cloning.
Doodle AI
The neural chip installed in Amy. As an AI it was incapable of adaptation beyond the "base" Doodle personality, and therefore prone to extreme behaviours while carrying out its function. It was removed from Amy's brain by Reason during Chaos Calamity, leaving her free of its influence.
Unbeknownst to anyone except Reason, the new location of this chip is in the Miles Electric, with Doodle's AI now harmlessly observing Miles from a place near and dear to his heart. This generally improves the function of the device since Doodle is a much, much better AI than the usual ones Miles writes.
Hopefully she won't be able to cause any more problems there in future.
Cosmo the Dryad
The last survivor of her race, and a bit of a tsundere. Thanks to Miles' successful villainy on her behalf she intervened to rescue him from the Twilight Cage, giving him the portal ring she had recovered from Madworld prior to the Outsiders' departure.
Cosmo's general behaviour is somewhat "alien". She always refers to people with their full appellation, doesn't have a full range of "human" expressions or reactions, and must maintain a weird moral code in keeping with her status as one of the Contracted.
Her feelings towards Miles have varied significantly over time - Miles was an object of admiration when he was the one who saved her people from the Mi-go, an object of loathing when her world fell to the Outsiders, and appear to have taken a turn for the better once more after his successful recovery of Madworld and Earth.
Cosmo is unlikely to show up in this particular form again until the Outsiders return from the Twilight Cage, but I know at least one reader who thinks she is best girl. Ride on you crazy rebel!
Reaching Higher Loop
Despite the comparatively exotic origins of the Reaching Higher Miles, the loop is actually not particularly unusual. Miles was "born" onto Cocoa Island significantly before the Kukku Invasion without a note, leaving him without prior memories, no information of his parentage and no clue as to his origin.
He derived his name from kukku combat messages relating to him, developed his linguistic skills learning flicky from the native birdos, his technological skills by reverse engineering kukku technology, and by the time he first met Sonic had barely picked up more than a few words of mobian dialect.
All of this is perfectly possible with a looping Miles with a sufficiently severe loss of memory and similar starting conditions. Noteless Miles is reasonably average for a Prower, if slightly more prone to mad science, and with more noticeable PTSD symptoms as he constantly restrains a feral and predatory nature from running amok.
What is divergent in this loop is that the events of Chasing the Wind escalated into a series of dates leading to an increasingly warm and familiar relationship with Amy Rose, a blossoming friendship with Cream the Rabbit, and an outstanding agreement with Blaze the Cat to make up to her the disastrous Christmas Party event, leaving him far more socially connected compared to most loops.
As of The Slap, Miles' personality changes have heavily reverted, but having shown a willingness to act outside of his masks once, he is likely to do so again in future, and has all sorts of room to get into trouble.
Could it Happen Again?
Definitely. There were no divergent properties that strongly changed Miles or Amy's behaviours in this loop, though there are many different final outcomes that could arise.
Writing a Loop
The key part of any time loop would be the rule of the loop.
Is it an exact copy, like the Happy Days loop, where everything must happen the same way it appeared to happen in the first place?
Is it a single necessary event that must occur, like the main Eternal Tails loop?
Or is it an event or series of events that must not occur, resulting in a time loop that persists until its cause is prevented?
The simplest loop to write is the exact copy loop. If you're writing stories about it then you're likely writing the behind the scenes actions of the loop, or the story is piecing together the puzzle of the time loop, which you reveal to be a loop at the end. No need to worry about anything except ensuring your loop is consistent.
If only a few things are required for a loop to occur/not occur, however, then you need to consider what can change between each loop, and how that can change the loop.
A common "escape the time loop" premise is the Groundhog Day loop, where the protagonist's circumstances, but not their memories, reset each loop. This naturally causes the loop to vary each run through as the protagonist changes until the loop is broken. But what if it wasn't memory that persisted, but a single item? A stepladder that trips the character in first loop is kicked out of the way and bypassed the second loop, which lets them get away, using the step ladder to block a doorway as they escape. The blocked doorway in the third loop forces them to go a different way, finding their way back to the room and using the step ladder to reach the exit they'd previously been unable to find in loop #4.
For long loops like the main ET loop, random chance can change things massively in any given loop. Sonic X's Metarex and florans, or comic canon characters showing up in an Eternal Tails loop would be a massive change, though likely one that resolves in very different ways thanks to the game canon cast being very different to their other canon selves. Or even tiny changes can have massive impact. A loop where only one thing has to happen is a loop where anything else can happen, so have fun with it.
Figuring out the cause and effect of each change is one of the most fun parts of writing Eternal Tails for me, even if it does need me to occasionally break out a spreadsheet…
Third, try and figure out if there are any loopholes. Can your protagonist use a clearly placed mannequin to save their doomed friend? Do they have to follow the events exactly, or, as Miles did, can they keep the same event but change the meaning of that event?
And finally, what comes next? If they end up breaking the time loop is that a victory, or do they discover in the aftermath that it was better to have kept looping after all?
Time travel is tricky to keep straight, but if you keep a clear view of these things when going in you can avoid a lot of headaches and retconning.