The first thing I noticed that clued me in to this not being a normal day was waking up in the middle of a forest with odd skinless fruits.

The second and more alarming part was that I was small, and my hands were blue.

Looking around and not seeing any immediate dangers, I am able to take stock of my situation.

I am in the body of a chao, a creature that appears in a few sonic shows and games. Plus side is that in the games chao can reincarnate endlessly as long as they die happy at the age of 5, although whether that is 5 years or 5 of some other method of timekeeping was never shown so it could be as little as 5 days or 5 weeks.

Downside is that chao are mostly weak and boring, I may have once spent the time in Sonic Adventure 2 in order to breed a chao with all S rank stats and draised them all to 99….. but even then the flight wasn’t enough to clear an entire jewel race and the run speed was nowhere near the playable characters.

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Speaking of stats….

Name: Chaorus

Age: 0

Swim C:

Fly E:

Run E:

Power C:

Stamina C:

I happen to have a convenient menu show up when I think of them, a shame it doesn’t come with op gamer exploits, a minimap, quests, or even a basic description of my location, but at least it gives me some information to work off of.

This suggests I am similar to the chao from the games, or that the anime chao have gamelike elements, or maybe I am unique and the local chao don’t have this, and actually I don’t have enough information to be drawing solid conclusions at this point.

Chao evolve once before they die/reincarnate which increases the rank of 1 of their stats, reincarnating removes all levels of trained stats, but does keep the same rank at time of death. To raise every stat to S rank would take 19 evolutions and deaths assuming I operate by the game logic.

I stop my ruminations for a bit to eat from one of the nearby fruits on the ground (they look like the ones from the standard chao garden). The forest seems peaceful, some crazy stuff can happen in a sonic world, and I could be in an unkown world with unkown risks.

The fruit is pretty bland, it isn’t juicy but I also don’t feel thirsty, do I need water to survive? Chao in the games couldn’t actually starve even if not feeding them made them unhappy, but I am not gonna test that theory as being wrong would kill me, same with the theory that I reincarnate if I die before reaching age 5.

I crawl around the woods a bit (I tried standing up but my baby chao legs are too weak), the prevalence of fruit bearing trees makes me not bother carrying extra food around (not that I could carry it anyways, stuff is heavy). And eventually, I spot another chao.