The Floating Island
Now Playing: "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna. Which means "The Beautiful Island" in Spanish, so...figure it out...
Ah, my favourite place in the Sonic universe. Where it all happens. Well, where most of the stuff that I care about most happens...
The Floating Island is a huge,
mysterious, beautiful but deadly place that has almost
everything you can think of--deserts, jungles, ice,
lava, swamps, tropical beaches, underwater complexes,
ruins, and lots of high tech stuff. It ALSO has a lot
of magic, in the form of the Chaos Emeralds. In
addition to normal Chaos Emeralds like Mobius has,
Floating Island is also home to the seven Super
Emeralds, which can make the person who has all seven
of them REALLY powerful, and beyond that, the Master
Emerald, which is basically what powers the island and
keeps it afloat.
The Island--which is so huge they might as well give up and call it "The Floating CONTINENT"--it's at LEAST as
big as Australia--was not always floating; it was
originally part of the ground on Mobius. But for some
reason, the Echidna-people felt that they were
threatened, so they gathered everybody into their
greatest city and then used the magic of the Master
Emerald to just RIP the city and large hunks of the
surrounding countryside straight out of the ground!
This made a huge crater down on Mobius and it was
quickly filled by the ocean, making a new sea.
Now the echidnas were safe from whatever it was that
had been threatening them on Mobius--but they had
different problems now. For one thing, the Island is
now DEPENDENT on the Master Emerald's magic--if it
should be stolen, or somehow destroyed, the Island
would fall into the sea and break apart. Also the
seismic stresses involved in tearing a huge chunk of
the ground out suddenly have turned one of their
biggest mountains into a dangerously active volcano and the underground area of the Island into a series of
deadly lava-tunnels. Last but not least, they have now been cut off from the outside world for so long that if it contacts them, they are TOTALLY naive and would have
NO idea how to deal with it...
Knuckles was raised in this cut-off society, after
they'd been floating for 300 years. As a result, he
knows NOTHING about the situation or people on Mobius
and so when he first met Dr. Robotnik, it's
understandable that he'd have no idea the Dr. was evil
and Sonic was the good guy--rather than the other way
around, as the Dr. tricked him into thinking! This
isolation also affects the way he talks--since he only
has Mobian/Echidna foreign-language dictionaries from
300 years ago, and he's never heard a native speaker
until just recently, his command of the Mobian language is halting, slow, painfully phonetic, and archaic.
(Note: This last bit is NOT said in the games--it's my own interpretation of things. Also note that I am NOT going with the Archie comic books interpretation of all this. So no "Echidnaopolis" (like THAT'S an original name! NOT!), no Haven, no Julie-Su, Lara-Le, Locke, Enerjak, Ancient Walkers, Dark Legion, cyborg echidnas, Archimedes, none o' that stuff. In my version, Knuckles wasn't just PRETENDED to be abandoned at a young age so that he could grow up to be a good Guardian, he actually WAS abandoned, although by accident, and there was NOTHING pretended about it!)
The Island, and therefore Knuckles' mystery, is a very
intriguing place. What makes it so intriguing are all
the ruins left behind. Beautiful, huge, elaborate
buildings built in an "ancient"-looking style--yet also all KINDS of very, very high technology that still for
the most part works! By "high-technology", I mean things like transporter beams--you know, "beam me up,
Scotty!"--computers, advanced water purification
systems, rocket-ship launch pads, and more. Good
stuff.
This makes the mystery even bigger--if these people
were so advanced, then why couldn't they hide
from/prevent/fight off whatever the disaster was that
made them disappear? And how come whatever it was only affected the people, not the machines or plants or
whatever?
HMMMN...
Click HERE to return to the Floating Island Tour Route.
Click HERE to return to the Chaotix Clubhouse.
Click HERE to return to Sandopolis.
curious tourists have wanted to tour the Floating Island since June 1, 1999. Of course, they all ended up falling off a vine in Angel Island, drowning in Hydrocity, freezing in the Ice Cap Zone, burning in Lava Reef, plummeting from the Sky Sanctuary and lots of other nasty fates, but hey...