The last thing Marcus remembered was arguing on Reddit.
Which, in hindsight, was a deeply pathetic final act for a human life. But there he was—or rather, there he had been—sitting in his dimly lit apartment at 2:47 AM, fingers hammering away at his mechanical keyboard with the righteous fury of a man who had been personally wronged by a comic book series about cartoon hedgehogs. His screen had been filled with the carnage of a comment thread titled "IDW Sonic is the BEST Sonic media ever created and here's why," and Marcus had taken that as a personal declaration of war.
His final comment, the last string of words his mortal fingers would ever type, had been a masterwork of nerd rage. He'd spent forty-five minutes on it. It was comprehensive. It was scathing. It was a twelve-paragraph essay, complete with bullet points, on why IDW Sonic was a fundamentally broken interpretation of the franchise that misunderstood nearly every character it touched, wrapped in self-important "mature" storytelling that confused "dark" with "deep" and "edgy" with "interesting."
He'd hit "post."
He'd leaned back in his chair with a satisfied exhale.
And then something in his chest had gone wrong.
The doctors would later tell his mother it was a previously undetected cardiac event—a freak occurrence, really, nothing anyone could have predicted. A healthy twenty-six-year-old man, dead at his computer desk, one hand still resting on his mouse, the other clutching a half-empty can of Monster Energy Ultra.
His Reddit comment had received forty-seven downvotes and a single award posthumously.
Marcus did not see a light at the end of a tunnel.
He did not meet God, or a goddess, or a truck, or any of the usual isekai intermediaries. There was no ROB—no Random Omnipotent Being sitting in a folding chair offering him a character creation screen. There was no reincarnation roulette. No gacha pull on his next life.
There was simply... nothing.
And then, without any transition, warning, or even basic narrative courtesy—
There was everything.
Sensation hit him like a freight train. Not gradually, not gently, but all at once—every nerve ending he possessed firing simultaneously as though someone had plugged his consciousness into a live socket. He felt wind. He felt speed. Not the memory of speed, not the concept of speed, but genuine, tangible velocity thrumming through every fiber of his being like his bones were tuning forks struck by the hand of God.
He also felt absolutely, catastrophically ridiculous.
Because the very first thing Marcus became consciously aware of—before the rooftop beneath his feet, before the village sprawling below him, before the sky overhead or the chaos energy humming in his veins—was his pose.
He was standing on the edge of a rooftop.
One leg was planted forward, knee slightly bent, in a stance that was clearly meant to convey dramatic authority. His other leg was braced behind him at an angle that, biomechanically speaking, made absolutely zero sense for any creature that possessed a spine. His left arm was drawn back at an aggressive angle. And his right arm—
His right arm was extended straight forward, index finger outstretched, pointing.
He was pointing. Like a prosecutor in a courtroom drama. Like an anime rival mid-monologue. Like a man who had never once in his life done anything cool and was desperately trying to approximate what "cool" might look like based on a vague description someone had texted him.
And he was pointing at—
Marcus's eyes focused. Below the rooftop, in the quaint little village square, was a portly man in an apron. The man had a magnificent mustache. The man was smiling gently at a group of small children. The man was holding a wooden toy he had apparently just finished carving.
The man was Mr. Tinker.
Which meant—
Marcus's brain, still reeling from the whole "being dead and then suddenly not being dead" situation, began performing calculations at a speed that would have impressed even the body he now inhabited.
Mr. Tinker. The amnesiac version of Eggman. The one who lost his memories and became a kindly toymaker in a small village. The one who Shadow wanted to—
Oh no.
Oh no.
Marcus looked down at himself.
Black fur. Red streaks. White chest tuft. Hover shoes—actual, genuine hover shoes, sleek and angular and faintly humming with residual energy. Inhibitor rings on his wrists, heavy and gold and warm with contained power. Compact, athletic frame that radiated barely restrained destructive capability.
He was Shadow the Hedgehog.
And for exactly one-point-seven seconds, Marcus felt the most intense, euphoric, overwhelming joy he had ever experienced in either of his lives. Because Shadow the Hedgehog was, objectively and inarguably, the single coolest character in the entire Sonic franchise. Shadow was the Ultimate Lifeform. Shadow had fought gods. Shadow had a motorcycle, and guns (regrettable as the game was), and Chaos Control. Shadow had one of the greatest character arcs in gaming history—a tortured soul who lost everything, was manipulated by everyone, nearly destroyed the world, and then chose to save it anyway because a dead girl asked him to give humanity a chance and he loved her enough to listen.
Shadow the Hedgehog was incredible.
Shadow the Hedgehog was Marcus's favorite character in fiction.
Shadow the Hedgehog was—
Marcus's euphoria curdled into ash in his mouth as the full context of his situation crystallized.
He wasn't Game Shadow.
He wasn't Archie Shadow.
He was IDW Shadow.
He was standing on a rooftop doing a stupid pointing pose at a harmless amnesiac toymaker because this version of Shadow—this absolute butchery of the character he loved—had decided that the appropriate response to a man who couldn't remember being evil was to threaten to murder him in front of children.
This was the Shadow who, in a display of tactical brilliance that would have made the real Shadow cringe into a singularity, had later physically attacked the Zombot virus carriers in hand-to-hand combat despite knowing full well that the virus spread through physical contact. The Ultimate Lifeform, supposedly one of the most intelligent and strategically gifted beings on the planet, had punched the zombie plague. And had, predictably, inevitably, embarrassingly, gotten infected.
Game Shadow would never.
Game Shadow had fought the Bio-Lizard. Game Shadow had gone toe-to-toe with Solaris. Game Shadow had stalemated Mephiles the Dark, an entity of pure crystallized malice, and had done so while delivering one of the coldest lines in franchise history. Game Shadow understood tactics. Game Shadow understood restraint. Game Shadow had grown.
IDW Shadow was what happened when writers read Shadow's TV Tropes page but skipped every section after "Dark and Brooding."
And this—this—was the Shadow Marcus was now inhabiting. The one with no character development. The one whose entire personality had been sandpapered down to "edgy," "aggressive," and "points at things from rooftops." The one who existed in a continuity where—
Marcus's spiral of horror expanded outward like a shockwave as the broader implications of his situation began to register.
He wasn't just IDW Shadow. He was in the IDW Sonic universe.
The universe where Tangle the Lemur and Whisper the Wolf existed.
Marcus had opinions about Tangle and Whisper.
Strong opinions.
Extremely strong opinions that had contributed to at least three Reddit bans, two Discord server removals, and one very uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinner where he'd accidentally started ranting about self-insert original characters to his aunt, who did not know what any of those words meant.
Tangle and Whisper were, in Marcus's thoroughly considered and passionately defended estimation, the two most blatant Mary Sues to ever be inserted into an established franchise since—no, actually, they held the crown outright. Tangle was the "fun quirky adventurous girl" archetype cranked to eleven, who had zero flaws that actually functioned as flaws, who was immediately accepted by the entire cast as though she'd always been there, whose prehensile tail was exactly as powerful or as limited as any given scene required, and who existed primarily to be relatable and loveable in a way that felt manufactured. She was a DeviantArt OC who had somehow been given official status and a publication deal.
And Whisper—Whisper—was somehow even worse. The tragic, silent, mysterious sniper with the cool mask and the haunted past and the arsenal of interchangeable weapons and the dead teammates she brooded about? She was edgier than Shadow, more tragic than Shadow, more mysterious than Shadow, and yet somehow escaped all criticism because she was "well-written" and "complex" according to people whose standard for complexity was apparently "has a sad backstory."
They were self-inserts. Marcus would die on this hill. He had already died, technically, and he was still on this hill.
And it got worse.
Because IDW's problems ran so much deeper than two overpraised OCs. The entire universe was structurally broken in ways that made Marcus want to tear his (now black-and-red-furred) quills out.
Every single character in IDW had apparently suffered collective amnesia regarding every adventure, every battle, every lesson they had ever learned. Sonic and his friends had fought Eggman dozens of times across decades of games. They had saved the world from Dark Gaia, from the Time Eater, from Infinite and the Phantom Ruby, from Perfect Chaos, from Metal Overlord, from the Finalhazard, from literal armageddon on multiple occasions. They were seasoned, experienced heroes who had faced cosmic-level threats and triumphed through skill, teamwork, and determination.
And in IDW, they acted like rookies.
They made mistakes that no version of these characters—who had canonically saved the world at least a dozen times by this point—should have been making. They fell for traps they should have seen coming. They failed to coordinate in ways that contradicted decades of established teamwork. They were nerfed, dumbed down, and de-clawed so that IDW's original characters and original plot threads could feel important by comparison.
And Sonic—
Marcus felt his new body tense with frustration as he thought about how IDW had written Sonic.
IDW Sonic was insufferable. Not in the charming, cocky, lovable way that Game Sonic was insufferable—where his arrogance was tempered by genuine heroism and his quips were delivered with warmth underneath the swagger. No, IDW Sonic was insufferable in the way that a protagonist written by someone who thought "quirky" was a personality trait was insufferable. He was smug without the competence to back it up. He was carefree in situations where carefree felt less like confidence and more like clinical dissociation. He made jokes during crises that weren't funny enough to justify the tonal whiplash. He was a Joss Whedon protagonist in a franchise that didn't need one.
And then there was Surge.
Marcus's eye twitched.
Surge the Tenrec.
The entire Surge and Kit arc had been—and Marcus had used this exact phrase in the Reddit comment that had killed him—"Temu Sonic Adventure 2." Discount Shadow and Discount Tails, manufactured by a discount villain, going through a discount revenge arc that hit every single SA2 beat with the fidelity of a cover band performing at a county fair. Surge was Shadow if you ordered Shadow from Wish.com. Kit was Tails if Tails had been written by someone who thought "codependency" was a character trait rather than a therapy topic.
The arc had been Dark™. Capital D, trademark symbol, the kind of Dark™ that IDW specialized in—darkness that existed not to serve the story but to signal to readers that this was Serious Fiction For Mature Audiences, unlike those silly little video games where hedgehogs fought egg-shaped men. IDW wore its darkness like a badge of honor, a constant reassurance to its readership that what they were consuming was Important and Complex and definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent Not For Kids, even though it was a licensed comic book about Sonic the Hedgehog published under the same umbrella as My Little Pony.
And the fanboys—oh, the fanboys—would crucify you if you pointed any of this out. "You just don't appreciate mature storytelling!" they'd shriek, as though "mature storytelling" meant "things are sad and people get hurt" rather than "the narrative explores complex themes with nuance and earns its emotional moments through careful character work." The IDW defense force would descend upon any criticism like a swarm, armed with screenshots and panel references and the unshakeable conviction that anyone who didn't like IDW simply wasn't smart enough to understand it.
Marcus wasn't opposed to mature storytelling in Sonic. Sonic Adventure 2 was mature storytelling. Shadow the Hedgehog (the game, for all its flaws) grappled with identity and purpose in ways that were genuinely compelling. The Archie comics—particularly the later Penders-free era under Ian Flynn's pen—had managed to balance darkness with the heart and optimism that made Sonic Sonic.
IDW didn't feel like Sonic.
That was the core of it. The fundamental, irreducible truth at the center of all of Marcus's complaints. IDW Sonic did not feel like Sonic. It felt like a generic action-drama comic that happened to feature characters who looked like Sonic characters but didn't behave like them, existing in stories that sounded like Sonic stories but didn't move like them.
And now Marcus was in it.
He was living in the worst version of the Sonic universe, inhabiting the worst version of his favorite character, in the exact scene that had first made him realize IDW Shadow was an irredeemable bastardization.
The pointing pose felt like a physical manifestation of everything wrong with his situation.
So he stopped doing it.
Marcus—Shadow—he—lowered his arm. He straightened his spine. He unclenched the theatrical tension from his legs and settled into a natural, grounded stance. And then, with the deliberate gravity of a man performing a sacred ritual, he crossed his arms over his white chest tuft.
There.
That's what Shadow would do. Arms crossed. Weight centered. Expression neutral but alert—not brooding, not scowling, not doing whatever edgy grimace IDW kept pasting onto his face, but the calm, controlled, quietly intense expression of someone who had seen too much to be impressed by anything but chose to keep watching anyway.
He felt better immediately. The arms-crossed stance felt right in a way that the pointing pose had felt cosmically wrong. Like putting on a pair of shoes that actually fit after being forced to walk in clown shoes.
Okay, Marcus thought, his new brain processing at speeds his human neurons could never have achieved. Okay. I'm Shadow the Hedgehog. I'm in IDW. This is fine. This is manageable. I can work with this. I just need to—
"Shadow?"
The voice came from his right. Close. Very close.
Marcus turned his head.
Rouge the Bat was standing right next to him.
This was not, in itself, surprising. Rouge was Shadow's closest ally, his partner, one of the very few people in any continuity whom Shadow genuinely trusted and cared about. Rouge being near Shadow was as natural as Tails being near Sonic—it was simply the way of things.
What was surprising—what caused Marcus's newly enhanced Mobian brain to stutter and skip like a scratched CD—was that the Rouge standing next to him looked absolutely nothing like what he had been expecting.
Marcus knew what Rouge the Bat looked like. He had grown up with Rouge the Bat. He had seen her in Sonic Adventure 2, in Sonic Heroes, in Sonic '06, in countless games and shows and comics across two decades. Rouge was attractive—this was established canon, a fundamental pillar of her character design. She was sleek, confident, flirtatious, dangerous, and yes, she was designed to be appealing in a way that had been pushing the boundaries of what SEGA's rating guidelines allowed since 2001.
The Rouge standing next to Marcus was all of those things.
She was also thick.
Not "thick" in the casual, colloquial, tossed-off-in-a-tweet sense of the word. Not the polite, understated thickness of her game model, which was curvaceous in a way that was more suggested than displayed.
No.
This Rouge was thick.
Ridiculously thick.
Unreasonably thick.
Architecturally thick, in the sense that Marcus was genuinely unsure how the structural engineering of her skeleton was supporting the sheer volume of her. She looked like someone had taken her game model into a 3D sculpting program and just... kept going. Her hips were wide enough to have their own gravitational field. Her thighs—good God, her thighs—were each roughly the circumference of Shadow's entire torso, wrapped in those white boots that now seemed to be performing a feat of material science by containing them. Her chest, already ample in every previous incarnation, had been upgraded to a level that made her heart-shaped breastplate look less like armor and more like a structural necessity—a load-bearing garment, an engineering solution to a physics problem.
Her waist was still narrow. Her wings were still delicate. Her face was still angular and sharp and gorgeous, with those half-lidded teal eyes and that knowing smirk.
But below the waist—and frankly, above the waist as well—she was operating in a dimension of curvature that Marcus's human mind had no framework for processing.
What the—
She was also standing extremely close to him. Not "teammate standing nearby on the same rooftop" close. Not even "close friend sharing personal space" close. She was close enough that Marcus could feel the warmth radiating from her fur, close enough that her wing occasionally brushed against his back when the wind shifted, close enough that her hip was almost touching his, separated by maybe an inch of charged, electric air.
"You stopped pointing," Rouge observed, her voice a low, velvety purr that seemed to resonate somewhere in Marcus's sternum. She tilted her head, and one of her large ears swiveled toward him with an expression of casual curiosity that did absolutely nothing to disguise the amusement dancing in her eyes. "You were doing that dramatic finger thing. The one you always do. I was timing it this time—you held it for forty-seven seconds. New personal best."
"I—" Marcus started, and then stopped, because Shadow's voice came out of his mouth.
Deep. Smooth. Resonant. A voice like black velvet dragged over gravel, like a cello playing a minor chord in an empty cathedral. It was—and Marcus could not believe he was thinking this about his own voice—unreasonably attractive.
He cleared his throat. "It was unnecessary," he said, because that was a Shadow thing to say. Curt. Efficient. Dismissive without being rude.
Nailed it.
Rouge's smirk widened by approximately one millimeter, which on her face was the equivalent of a standing ovation. "Mmm. Unnecessary. Right." She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, and the motion caused a chain reaction of... movement... through her lower half that Marcus tracked with the horrified fascination of a man watching a slow-motion avalanche. "So you're not going to go down there and threaten the nice man who makes toys for orphans?"
Marcus blinked.
That was... actually the plot of this scene, wasn't it? IDW Shadow's grand plan. March down to the village, confront Mr. Tinker, and threaten to destroy him because he might turn back into Eggman. Because IDW Shadow didn't understand nuance, or mercy, or the basic concept that people could change, despite the fact that Shadow's entire character arc across the games was about exactly that.
"No," Marcus said flatly.
Rouge's other ear perked up. Both ears were now pointing directly at him, which he understood instinctively was the bat equivalent of staring with wide eyes. "No?"
"He's not a threat."
"He... you said he was."
"I was wrong."
The silence that followed was so profound that Marcus could hear the wind whistling through Rouge's enormous ears. She stared at him. He could feel her stare, teal eyes boring into the side of his head with an intensity that suggested she was trying to determine whether he had been replaced by an imposter, which, technically, he had been.
"Shadow," Rouge said slowly, "did you hit your head?"
"No."
"Did someone hit your head?"
"No."
"Did Sonic hit your head? Because if Sonic hit your head, I need to know so I can hit him back, and I want to be prepared because—"
"Rouge." Marcus turned to face her fully, and immediately regretted it, because facing her fully meant confronting the complete, unobstructed, high-definition panorama of IDW Rouge's proportions from the front, and his brain—his new, hyper-fast, Ultimate-Lifeform brain—needed a moment to recalibrate.
She was right there. Inches away. Looking up at him (she was slightly shorter without her heeled boots elevating her, and she was still in her heeled boots, so she was barely shorter at all) with those impossibly expressive eyes, her lips slightly parted, her head tilted at an angle that was either genuinely concerned or deliberately provocative—and knowing Rouge, it was both simultaneously, because Rouge did not experience those two states as separate phenomena.
"I've reassessed the situation," Marcus said, forcing his eyes to remain locked on hers and absolutely nowhere else. "Mr. Tinker is not Eggman. Threatening him would be pointless, cruel, and strategically counterproductive. We're leaving."
Rouge continued to stare at him for a long, loaded moment.
Then she smiled.
Not her usual smirk—her smile. The real one. The one she reserved for moments when Shadow did something that surprised her, something that reminded her why she stuck around, why she put up with his moods and his silences and his tendency to Chaos Blast first and ask questions never.
"Well," she said softly, and she leaned in—leaned in—close enough that Marcus could smell her perfume (since when did IDW Rouge wear perfume? Since when could he smell?), close enough that her breath ghosted across his cheek, close enough that the swell of her chest pressed lightly against his crossed arms and he felt his brain undergo a hard restart—
"That's the most reasonable thing you've said in months, handsome."
She pulled back. Casual. Effortless. As though she hadn't just short-circuited every neural pathway in his body.
Marcus stood very still. His arms remained crossed. His expression remained neutral. Internally, he was experiencing what could only be described as a system error.
Why is she so—
How is she so—
WHAT HAPPENED TO HER CHARACTER MODEL—
He needed to focus. He needed to get his bearings. He needed to figure out the rules of this world, the timeline, the threats, the opportunities. He was Shadow the Hedgehog now. He had access to Chaos energy, super speed, near-invulnerability, and a century of combat experience encoded into muscle memory. He could fix things. He could steer IDW away from its worst instincts. He could give Shadow the characterization he deserved. He could maybe—maybe—salvage this trainwreck of a continuity from the inside.
But first, he needed to understand something.
As Rouge turned and began walking toward the edge of the rooftop—a process that involved a degree of motion that defied several laws of physics and most guidelines of animation—Marcus's gaze drifted, entirely against his will, past her, toward the village below.
There were other people down there. Other Mobians. Villagers going about their day.
And—
Marcus blinked.
Was that—
A female rabbit was carrying a basket of produce across the village square. She was wearing a simple dress. She was absurdly bottom-heavy, her hips swaying with each step like a metronome set to a tempo that no metronome was designed to handle.
Near the village well, a female fox was drawing water. She was leaning over the well's edge, and the sheer topography of her silhouette from behind was enough to make Marcus question whether he had been reborn into IDW Sonic or into some kind of fever dream drawn by an artist who had strong feelings about the female form and a very forgiving editor.
A cat. Walking a dog. Same situation. Same proportions. Wide hips, narrow waist, curves that belonged in a geometry textbook's chapter on advanced parabolic functions.
Every. Single. Female. Character.
Every single one.
Marcus looked back at Rouge, who had reached the rooftop's edge and was stretching her wings in preparation for flight—a motion that involved arching her back and extending her arms above her head in a way that was technically functional and practically devastating—and then looked back down at the village of inexplicably voluptuous woodland creatures.
Why, he thought, with the desperate clarity of a man who has realized that the universe is playing a very specific joke on him. Why are ALL the female characters—
What KIND of IDW is this?!
Rouge glanced back over her shoulder. "Coming, Shadow?"
Her tail flicked. Her ears twitched. Her eyes sparkled with that trademark Rouge mischief that said she knew exactly what she looked like and was enjoying his reaction to it, even though he was certain he hadn't reacted visibly, because he was Shadow the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog did not react visibly to—
"Hmph," Marcus said.
He uncrossed his arms. He walked to the edge of the rooftop. He did not look down at the village of anatomically improbable women. He did not look at the way Rouge's wings caught the light, or the way her suit stretched across the terrain of her figure like a cartographer's nightmare.
He looked at the horizon.
I'm Shadow the Hedgehog, he told himself. The real Shadow. The one who remembers Maria. The one who chose to protect the world. The one who has depth, and nuance, and a character arc that actually means something.
I'm going to fix this stupid comic.
I'm going to give Shadow his dignity back.
I'm going to make IDW actually feel like Sonic.
And I'm going to do it while surrounded by inexplicably thicc animal women who seem to have no concept of personal space.
...God help me.
He activated his hover shoes and launched himself off the rooftop, Rouge falling into formation beside him—close, always close, her wing nearly brushing his shoulder, her presence warm and constant and distracting in ways he was absolutely not going to think about right now—and together they streaked across the sky, leaving the village of Mr. Tinker behind.
The wind roared around them. The world blurred. Chaos energy hummed through his veins like a second heartbeat.
And somewhere, in the cosmic background radiation of the universe, Marcus could swear he heard the faint sound of a Reddit notification.
Forty-eight downvotes now.
END OF CHAPTER 1