Okay, before I got into the real meat of the whole deal, I thought I'd take some time to talk about the real life history of TCM. I know this sort of thing can be a bit boring and stuffy, so I'll try to keep it short as possible.
Now, I wasn't one of the very first Sonic fans, unfortunately, but I was one of the earliest. It started with Sonic 2 for the Sega Genesis, then the SatAM cartoon show, and then the Archie comics, and so on and so on. It was about this time (1993-4, if I recall correctly) that I not only felt the first leanings towards being a writer, but got my first computer and internet connection as well. When I idly decided to check the 'net for signs of my fledgeling fan icon Sonic the Hedgehog, I was completely blown away. First by the fact that there was just so much stuff involving the blue blur out there, but also by the concept of fan fiction, something I may never have thought of to do on my own. So it was that shortly afterward, I put all three dispirate interests - Sonic, writing, and the 'net - together in one mental pot like so many others and began to brew up something special.
Well, something special, it wasn't. About the only claim to fame my first fanfic would have had was that I came up with Mecha-Knuckles quite a while before the Archie-Sonic super special Mecha Madness came out. While I was understandably proud of my first creation, I also well understood that it was crap, and it was never seen by any eyes other than my own. Nor will it ever be seen, as I have since found that the notebook it was in is now missing. Oh, well.
My second fanfic (which I do, in fact, still have) was better written, but horribly misinformed. The first one, at least, was generic enough that it could have fit in the SatAM or Archie storyline, but this was a strangled attempt to write an origin story for Sonic and the crew. About halfway through writing it, I finally garnered enough information via the cartoon, comic, and 'net to learn that almost everything I had written was wrong wrong wrong. I had Snively inventing the roboticizer. Kodos was a human. Sonic and crew were teenagers during Robotnik's takeover. Man, did I ever screw up. Undaunted, however, I finished the story and decided that it would make a halfway decent "what if?" kind of deal. But it still wasn't good enough and it still sits in my notebooks, untouched by the eyes of others.
The third time, however, proved to be the charm. I began a little story called Heroes of Legend wherein Sonic and Knuckles found an odd machine being cared for by even odder SWATbots. While they're checking the machine out, the contraption decides to send them several years into a dystopian future where they're given a chance to set things right. Not only do they defeat the Robotnik of that era, but they learn of an imminent attack on the Floating Island in their own year, the event that had originally sent their world into the death spiral they find in the future. Well, the story got a little long and I decided all of a sudden to make it into a Heroes Trilogy (which further included Heroes Fallen and Heroes Reborn). Strangely, the last of the three stories ended with just a quick "Oh, and they went back to the present and stopped the attack on the Floating Island, so everything was okay". Very sloppy that, but I eventually tried to fix it by writing Heroes of War, which - like its predecessors - began to run too long. I had to break it in half and rename part of it Heroes Returned, which made this badly named trilogy into the Heroes Saga . . . anyway.
At the time, however, the Heroes Trilogy was actually good enough to read, I thought, so I began submitting it here and there for posting on peoples' webpages. It was decently recieved, so I decided to write more. It was followed by a few one-shot items, such as The Screamers, Walkabout, Revolution, and a few others that never got finished.
Then one day, I bought a new notebook. I wasn't sure what I was going to use it for, but I figured more Sonic stories. I decided that I would actually name this notebook (I'm kind of weird that way), so sitting there in a Little Ceaser's I began to idly doodle a logo. I have no idea why, but the first thing that came to mind was The Chaotic Multiverse. The first story I wrote in that notebook was CHAOS! - Prolouge, which was where the character Jim Doe first appeared. Then I wrote CHAOS! - The Beginning of the End, and CHAOS! - Origins, and so on and so on. The most amazing thing to me, at the time, was that all the ideas seemed to spring forth from my head fully formed. These weren't things that I had been dreaming up for quite some time . . . they were just already there, and they appeared in a way that surprised and astonished me.
As I began drafting the last stories of the CHAOS! Series, I realized I could throw elements from my other stories into the mix. So it was that the characters and events in the Heroes Trilogy and Dagger of the Mind (one of my more popular stories) played a central part in CHAOS! - Future Imperfect. I also further realized that I could use all my old stories in this series. What had begun through pure chance suddenly became an expansive project that would keep me busy writing for several several years.
Then disaster struck. I was about halfway through rewriting CHAOS! - Infinity, the last full story in the CHAOS! series, for posting on the 'net, when my ISP decided to pull a little switcheroo on me. Almost all of the files on my account were deleted, including the rewrite, and idiot me hadn't made a copy on my own computer. So, I started it up again, feverish to get it done because I had actually gathered a fairly large fanbase and a few of them were clamboring for my blood if I didn't get the next installment out soon. What happened then, naturally? My other ISP (yes, I had two, and I dumped the one that had already screwed me over) decided they wanted to falsely accuse me of storing files I wasn't supposed to have on their servers and cut my service. Because I could never manage to get a meeting set up with their tech-heads, I never got my account back, and once again the only copy of the half-written story was beyond my read, sitting in an account that I couldn't get into anymore. Where's the justice?
To make matters worse, I couldn't get onto the internet anymore, period, for nearly three years or so. My fans probably moved on to other things, and I couldn't even get around to telling them what happened. To make a long story short (too late), I finally got back on the 'net and went back to re-read my old stories. My first thought, of course, was, "Great Walkers . . . I thought that crap was good??!"
Time had made me a better writer and had also expanded The Chaotic Multiverse out to something the original stories and writing simply could not handle. With a new list of 100 story ideas and a ton of story notes, I set about the daunting task of rewriting the entire series from the very first fic. Unfortunately, it turned out that the very first fic, Beginning of the End, was going to be the only one that I'd get done. I won't bore you with the entire series of events that led to this disappointing dead end . . . let's just say that in the end, everything breaks. Especially computers. It took me a long time to finally come to the hard decision, but it had to be made. I decided that, in the end, I would not be able to write The Chaotic Multiverse like it deserved to be written.
So, well, the rest I'm sure you know, since you're reading this, neh? I decided that instead of writing them all out, I'd store away all the information and notes about the series here, along with a synopsis for every single one of the hundred stories in TCM. But before we get to that, there's a great deal of background information that needs to be gone over. After all, though these stories take place in a multiverse, there's an entire Omniverse out there . . .
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