A Month Before...

<div id="i4c-draggable-container" style="position: fixed; z-index: 1499; width: 0px; height: 0px;"><div data-reactroot="" class="resolved" style="all: initial;"></div></div>As you guys probably imagined, I didn't actually tell Sonic and the Chaotix what actually happened. Let's rewind several weeks to see what really happened during that time shall we?

While I started to meet goal number 1, the villagers spoke among themselves about what to do with me, unable to decide on something aside from 'imprisoning' again, which naturally was out of the question. I had already escaped once, what would had stopped me from doing so again? Even rationalizing that Sonic would stop me if I decided to turn bad/reveal my true colors/recover my memory, that still left an actually quite strong and (most importantly) incredibly intelligent man on their home. For my part, I was worried that they would tell others of my presence there. I didn't want to be discovered before I could show that I really wanted to change, especially if it ended with Sonic or any of his friends coming after me.

That night, the villagers (or more accurately Vanilla and Gemerl, who had his rockets out) and I managed to setttle on a mutual agreement: I would do not do anything remotely villanous, and in turn they wouldn't rat me out, at least not before I could demonstrate that I wanted to change.

After that, though, I decided to continue what I had started that morning: to get buff. After all, it was the easiest of my goals to accomplish, and I wanted to show Floral Forest that I really meant no harm by doing something that wouldn't hurt them (at least not deliberately, but their fault if they got too close to me if I was deep in my exercising).

I was tempted to just do the Saitama workout alone, only in a more extreme manner; say, instead of just doing a 100 push-ups, sit-ups and squats, and running 10 kilometers everyday, I'd done it five times more. Thing was, it would only help me lose weight and have wiry muscles, not the musclebound body I wanted. Fortunately I had memorized all of Darebee exercise tables, from the standing ones that didn't require machines to the more complex ones in my head. It wasn't something that came with the 'transplant' thing, I just simply remembered them from my previous life.

Just a week of doing nothing push-ups, using makeshift dumbbells, running circles around the village for an hour and various workout sessions later, added to no shaving, I went from an egg-shaped mad scientist to your average biker with a beer gut and a growing beard. A beer gut with a six pack over it. Yes, it's possible to have, it just won't be defined. However, that wasn't the best thing that happened to me.

A fixed scooter there, some very children asking me to build them a birdhouse there, and the kids ended up liking me. The real problem were the adults. Unlike their children, these people had lived several years of Eggman being a villain, and even though it had never affected them directly (not even during my ironfisted rule over the planet for five months), they still didn't trust me. Even Vanilla, who was the one who gave me a roof to sleep under and food, was wary of me at first despite me doing nothing that could be considered evil. Even doing small things like strengthening door hinges and fixing roofs without being asked too didn't change their opinion, even though they were appreciative of the acts.

If I wanted these people to like me, just being nice to their kids and fixing their homes wouldn't cut it. No, I had to to something more, let's just say, proactive: enhancing their lives. Sure, they lived in what was basically the woody counterpart of Hobbiton, and actually were kinda like furrier hobbits, preferring peace and quiet and seeing adventures as something inherently dangerous (especially Vanilla, although in her case she had every reason to keep her daughter at home), and loved to be in tune with nature, but I was certain that they would also love to be modernized like their peers, as long as their forest was respected, which I planned to do.

Unlike Saruman, who deliberately poisoned the land, cut the trees, enslaved the population and overall served as Tolkien's way to show his luddism. to get back at the hobbits and Gandalf for defeating Sauron and fucking his plans, I would do it out of sincere feeling of wanting to help and being accepted, and of course, without turning it into an industrial wasteland. I could have used my intelligence and engineering skills to build a reactor that would have both powered an entire city yet also completely safe, but in the end I settled for a simpler, cleaner source of power. All that was left was, which one would I choose?

Solar panels, while quite efficient, were also a bit fragile for my tastes, and they only absorbed direct sunlight. Nuclear energy, while the most powerful, was completely out of the question; not only would I need space to build a reactor, the villagers might not react well to having a nuclear factory in their home. Geothermal needed space, and wasn't that much reliable. And finally, there was no river or lake large enough for me to build a dam in, not if I wanted to remain hidden. So, I decided to use the simplest, oldest and overall most effective source of renewable energy I knew of.

The wind.

You see, wind power is not just a more readily accessible source of energy, it's also (from my point of view) the safest when compared to fission: doesn't require water nor constant and clear sunlight, the construction of a wind turbine doesn't end in deaths, and if it breaks down it neither explodes nor releases radiation, and is relatively cheap to produce and maintain unlike a panel. Granted, they're on average 60 feet tall and suppose a problem for birds, but mobian birds are sapient to a degree so I was pretty sure they wouldn't be stupid enough to not fly around an electric windmill (and a small part of me rationalized that even if they were hit by the rotor blades they would simply comically fall to the ground none the worse). It was perfect!

Of course, wind turbines have their own cons: as I just said, they're pretty damn big, I'd be able to build only one because cutting down trees for more space was out of the question, and just one of them wouldn't suffice for the entire village. Yes, their appliances were the power-hogging monsters from the larger cities, but they still required a substantial amount of energy to work, energy that one measly (as in, just one) turbine wouldn't provide. True, I could had made an awesomely powerful windmill that would create its own wind to rotate its blades, but I wanted to keep it all simple, so that other could maintain the thing and, eventually, know how to make more.

And then it hit me. Instead of building a single, giant-ass turbine for the entire village, I'd build many small ones for (and on) every house! Kinda like solar panels, except they would always work! And no, despite it being kinda funny, none of them would have to be miniature windmills.

Vertical axis wind turbines. I would love to go on detail, but to keep it short they're turbines whose rotor is set transverse to the wind vertically while the important parts, the generator and the gear box, sit at the base, easying their maintenance and repair in case of malfunction.

Most important of all, however, was that because of their more efficient design, they could be made in more numbers and smaller. After that, I could continue with more ambitious and advanced stuff that nonetheless would be clean: hovercars, smart homes, trash-removal devices, superior methods of warm-generation for winter, maybe even a small ship for space tourism... The possibilities were limitless!

Small turbines on each house = energy for everyone = more advanced village = everyone happy = people liking me = win! Genius!

Of course, to get to all that I had to build the wind turbines first. Constructing one was obviously easy for me, and while metal and plastic were preferable I could do with mere wood and a cable. The problem was that I required a 'volunteer', a house where it would be placed and connected to provide energy. Sounds easy right? Wrong! Even after one week of me just working out and doing small things they all refused to let put some thingamajig on their roof despite knowing what it was, for the simple fact that they had never vertical wind turbines.

All, except a certain naïve rabbit girl and her tranquility-loving mother, that's it.

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