Tails' Analysis

This is Tails' analysis of everything that has happened to Shadow thus far, as well as general observations and predictions for the future.

(When you finish reading, I recommend backing out of the pop-up rather than pressing the button at the bottom so that you do not have to scroll through the chapter to find your place again.)

March 24th, 2025

12:05 p.m.

I'm so sorry that it's taken me this long to compile my data, guys. I've been working as fast as I can, but nothing felt right. I'm so afraid of posting something wrong and making you all panic over nothing, but.. I think I'm finally ready. Again, I'm so, so sorry! Especially to you Shadow– you should have been told about all this the moment I found out. I just couldn't get my thoughts straight.

Anyway.. Where to start… (＞＜)

I had my theories, but the thing that truly solidified them was the night you removed your inhibitor rings. I didn't know removing them would kill you then, but I do now, and I'm sorry I didn't realize it sooner.

To start, here's a list of all of the observations we've made on you since you first appeared in the void, starting with your real body. I'll point out observations on your existence within the void afterwards.

As for your real body…

It seems to glitch just as much as your body in the void, however.. there is no chromatic aberration. Your body just seems to flicker/phase in and out of itself in small segments at random intervals.
Your inhibitors get hotter and cooler as the glitches progress or lessen. When your pain is at its peak, the rings start to glow due to how hot they get.
Ever since your coma, your rings have frequently burnt your wrists. I've had to replace bandages countless times in order to stop it from burning through you. It's been a struggle to keep it from getting infected..
Your scleras are glitchy, white, and devoid of anything. Your pupils and irises simply do not exist. It looks like you are constantly experiencing REM but without the existence of your actual eyes, if that makes sense.
Your body seems to lose nutrition and grow fur at a normal rate like any mobian, but it doesn't seem to affect you in the void.

As for your body/existence in the void…

Anytime you appear on camera, you appear glitchy, and with chromatic aberration unlike your real body, though you said you don’t actually feel like you’re glitching.. does that still hold true, Shadow?
Your body seems to lose nutrition and grow fur at a normal rate, but I’ve managed to at least keep your body itself healthy via IV since I hooked you up to it shortly after your coma.
You appear more glitchy depending on your emotional state and pain levels. The more negative your emotions, the glitchier you are. As well as that, the more in pain you are in, the glitchier you appear.

4:02 p.m.

As for my observations on the void and your situation as a whole…

Only apps that were previously installed on your phone prior to your awakening to the void work. Any attempt to install anything new is futile.
Your clock is stuck on January 15th, 2025 at 07:38. Any attempt to change the time has been futile.
The void appears timeless; day nor night exist.
Somehow you’ve been able to communicate with us via Twitter and Discord, but nothing else seems to work– other than Strawpage, of course.
Your inhibitors get hotter the more pain you are in and as they struggle to regulate more chaos energy.
All of your contacts vanished. Any attempt to use the device’s call feature is futile.
Your phone’s battery does not deplete.
Hunger, thirst and exhaustion still affect you.
Nothing else exists in the void except for you and anything you may have had on your person prior to arrival, and in the state of their arrival.
According to you, the void sounds like a thousand people whispering all at once. The more calm you are, the quieter it is. The more distraught you are, the louder it is.
People can send you things via Strawpage. They attempted to send you food for a time, but you then realized that the food didn’t supply your body with nutrients despite you being able to taste it. That means the food was never real.
People once attempted to send you a bed with a gravity field, too. The bed is still intact but it seems the gravity field diminished over time.
Your arm has slowly been disappearing. While its progression is normally slow, it recently sped up before halting once more.
The shoulder connected to your disappearing arm burns and throbs, and that pain seems to increase when the disappearance progresses.
Removing your inhibitors nearly caused you to liquify, and for your inhibitors to start smoking due to the extreme heat. Their removal also caused the void to nearly collapse, and it put you into a 3 day coma.
Until you removed your inhibitors, any attempt to recall what had happened to you returned nothing but a foggy, jumbled mess. After their removal, you seemed to remember everything leading up to you waking up in the void.
Before you woke up in the void, your dimension and the people in it seemed to liquify before collapsing– all except for you, that is.
Any living creature that has been sent to the void other than you has been liquified.

March 25th, 2025

11:30 a.m.

With all that in mind, here’s my official analysis:

The void was created by you and for you as a defense mechanism in response to the collapse of your dimension. This is not to say that you yourself created it; rather, your chaos energy did. You were not aware of the void’s creation, nor what had caused it, yet you were sustaining it with your mere existence anyway.

Your inhibitor rings are not what caused the void, but they are what is stabilizing it. Without them, the void would have collapsed long ago due to how often the chaos energy within you fluctuates. As more chaos energy feeds into your body, your pain levels increase and your inhibitors become hotter in turn. This is because the purpose of your inhibitors has always been to regulate the chaos energy flowing within you. That said, nowadays they are not only regulating your chaos energy, but the void’s as well.

Think of the void not just as an extension of your chaos energy, but an extension of you. Just like your inhibitors, the condition of the void fluctuates as you do. When you are in immense pain, sorrow, grief or anger, the void becomes unstable and unsafe to be in. You can’t control your pain, nor the emotions that come to you, but it is important to note that they are very much related. Think about it– ever since you woke up from your coma, the void has been much more unstable as of late, and you’ve been in a lot more pain. Why do you think that is?

I can’t explain your memory loss, but it can be theorized. I actually believe that wasn’t the void’s doing, but your own. Due to the immense trauma you experienced leading up to your awakening in the void, I believe your mind erased all memories of the event and anything that may have reminded you of it in order to protect you. Your memory loss, in my opinion, was not caused by anything unnatural; I believe it was merely a trauma response.

That said, I believe the removal of your inhibitors reminded you of what you had lost not just because of the immense pain you were in, but how it related to everything. I’m sure you saw the way your own body started to liquify, right? That had to have been the thing that triggered the return of your memory. After all, before you appeared in the void, you watched everything in your world liquify, including the person you loved most. Your mind was working so hard to protect itself because it knew you would shut down upon remembering everything, and our body’s priority is always survival, so it was only doing what it had to in order to survive.

On the subject of liquefaction, I know for a fact that the only reason you didn’t liquify with the rest of your dimension was due to the anomalous properties of your body itself. No other living creature, other than those related to you, has chaos energy running through their veins. As I said earlier, it was your chaos energy that created the void in order to keep you safe from erasure, and it is your inhibitors that are stabilizing it. I believe those related to you may have persisted past your dimension’s collapse for a time within their own voids due to their own chaos energy, but none of them had the inhibitors that you do, so I believe they may have perished by now as well, whether it be due to bodily erasure or the collapse of their respective voids.

Knowing all this, I believe it’s time for a name change. While calling it ‘The Grey Matter’ may have been a fitting name for the void initially, I believe it should now be called ‘Chaos Space.’ It is a pocket dimension created and stabilized by chaos energy. Nothing and no one except for items and people imbued with chaos energy like you can exist within that space, and even that has its limits.

As for why items can be sent to you via Strawpage, I believe they are merely projections created by your own mind and/or the void. Yes, you said you weren’t able to will anything into existence yourself, but think about it; although you can feel the items, it has been proven by your own body’s lack of response to their consumption that they are not real. To me, it seems like the void is projecting these illusions, and in order to maintain some semblance of grounding, your mind has chosen to reinforce the existence of those items via hallucinating their texture, feeling, taste, etc, and imposing them on your senses based on your memory of those items. If all the items that have been sent to you disappear or grow unstable upon you reading this, this would confirm my theory. Please let me know if I hit the mark, Shadow.

As for the subject of time, I believe that while the void shows no sign of time progressing, it really is, and I believe that while you exist in another space, you are still in our timeline. Why else would your fur grow longer and your body lose nutrients if not for the passage of time? Yes, I know that time doesn’t pass on your phone, but that can be explained as well. As you said, you can’t install anything new on your phone, apps can’t update, and you can’t change the time. This is not due to time not existing, but due to the fact that everything on you is stuck in the state it was in upon your arrival. You’re not supposed to exist anymore, and the only reason that you do is due to the void’s preservation of you. Your items don’t have something to preserve them, so while they can exist due to them being inorganic, they must remain in the state they were in when they arrived. On that note, I would like to point out that your phone’s battery has not depleted because the void is made up of chaos energy, and chaos energy can act as an energy source for electrical devices, just as it provides you, an organic lifeform, with energy.

Regarding your erasure, the only reason that is happening is because the void is gradually failing at keeping you alive. As I said, Shadow, you’re not meant to exist. You truly were meant to perish with the rest of your dimension, but your chaos energy stopped that from happening. Based on the data provided, you entered the void on January 15th, 2025, but you didn’t come to until February 18th, 2025– a little over a month later. I believe your body hadn’t shown any signs of comatose because your body hadn’t stabilized yet; it was still in the process of rebuilding itself, and it took a month to do so. By the time you awakened, the void had already been doing a considerable amount of work to rebuild you and stabilize you, so it didn’t take long for the void to falter and fail at keeping reality from erasing you entirely, resulting in the start of your arm’s transparency on the the 21st of February, 2025– merely three days after your awakening.

So far it has taken a month for your arm to disappear, but unless it progresses further, I can’t say for certain how much longer you have left because it could go two ways:

The erasure spreads to your chest and heart next, causing your heart to fail and everything to come to an end.
The erasure jumps to another limb, going on a limb-by-limb basis before it finally spreads to your heart.

I hope it goes on a limb-by-limb basis rather than going for your heart directly, but I can’t tell where it’s going to go next just yet. I don’t want the erasure to spread, so I apologize if it comes off like I do… I just can’t say for certain what’s going to happen next. I just want you to know that yes, without your inhibitors, you will die. Just like the rest of your dimension, you’ll liquify before ceasing to exist for good. Keep your inhibitors on at all costs, Shadow; even if it hurts.

In order to keep itself alive, the void is feeding off of you, and the longer this drags on and your condition worsens, as does the void. It took a month for your arm’s erasure to get to the point that it is at now, and while I’d like to say that you’ll have a few months left based on that pattern, you may not. The spread of your transparency has been rather unpredictable as of late, I have no idea where it’s going to go next, and based on how much of your arm disappeared the other night, I believe it has hit a peak and that your erasure may only be downhill(quicker and/or more intense) from here.. Especially with how bad your pains and vision have been lately.

Lastly, still on the subject of you and your dimension's erasure.. I'm sorry, Shadow. There's no way to return what has been lost to you. I can hopefully reverse your arm's and your memory's gradual erasure because your body itself isn't gone, but I have no way to undo what has been done to the rest of your world. That said, I won't stop trying to figure out how to undo your erasure-- I just know for certain that I can't do it to anyone or anything else you've lost. You're the only thing I can fix, Shadow.

I’m sure none of this is something you wanted to hear, and I’m sorry I had to be the one to say it all, Shadow. I understand that you’ve been having difficulty functioning not just because of your pain, but because it has been hard to go on due to your grief. If you want me and Sonic to stop, please let us know. Don’t let us force you into existing.. but if you choose to go on and fight, please know that we’re here for you– Sonic, Amy, me, and all of your followers. I’m not here to sway your decision one way or another; it’s your choice alone to make. I just want you to know that we all care for you and we’re all here to fight alongside you. You’re not alone, and you never will be.

- Tails 💫

Return to Chapter