Commentary for May 5, 2022:

Today in making more work for myself than I actually need to do, I ended up completely re-making Freedom HQ. Didn’t take quite as long as yesterday’s page, or maybe I just started working on it earlier in the day... Nah, I didn’t take as long working on that stuff, I’m pretty sure. I just needed to prepare a few more assets based on the stuff I’d already done, so that was easy enough.

Anyway, a note on Sonic lore here. Prior to the anime, Sonic X, there was no explanation for why the Chaos Emeralds always seemed to be scattered at the start of a new Sonic game. It was usually just a plot contrivance to make the characters go to next location or to justify the existence of a special stage. But I guess someone on the writing team for Sonic X did ask the question; why do these gems always end up scattered again after every adventure? And they came up with the explanation that the Chaos Emeralds disappear after their energy is released and then turn up again elsewhere. I don’t recall if Sonic X (a cartoon that is almost twenty years old at this point and I haven’t seen in many years now myself) ever explained the mechanics behind this, but it fits in nicely with the Chaos Emeralds’ relationship with Chaos Control and how I’ve imagined their properties for Eon’s World.

This tendency to disappear is the reason the Freedom Fighters were keeping the Chaos Emeralds in North Cave prior to Chapter 17. That was, of course, a call-back to early European Sonic lore (in particular, Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic), but also because the cold temperatures kept the emeralds stable and prevented them from disappearing like that.