Ch. 1: Just Pull the Switch!

Taylor Aiadon, or as he had recently decided he wished to be called, Tails, was carefully tweezing one of a multitude of wires into position on an incredibly complex circuit-board. Or so it appeared. Fact of the matter was, he had installed far more pieces of circuitry and other scientific junk than really necessary to make it look even more amazing when he presented it to the world.

Tails was a scientist on Earth who had recently been struck with a great plan for a greater idea - the creation of a perfect virtual reality environment. The entire design was far less complicated than most scientists in the world believed it would have to be, which was why Tails was the first to ever attempt such a thing, even though most of the technology required had existed for decades.

Why was he thinking so radically?

Tails was thirteen and a half years old.

Typing in a command on his laptop, which he was using to view the environment he was creating without actually having to go inside it, a screen opened. A small beach, with a rock cliff face behind it and what appeared to be a large gear set into the wall, came up. Panning across, he viewed a large, open gate that led to some stone docks. Two old-fashioned wooden ships were moored at the docks.

(This is, of course, the docks and beach area in the Castle of Light, which is what the Ruins were called now that they were no longer ruins)

The lighting was poor, as Tails had set day and night inside the environment and it was currently night, but the view was clear enough.

The environment he was creating was based off the three Skylanders games, which were the best games he had ever played and the technology employed in them was fascinating. He had literally built a program that scanned the three disks and used all of the information contained on each and every one of them to create a complete virtual Skylands.

Tails flipped an important-looking switch, and a whole host of machinery activated. A wrap popped up in front of him. "Oh, good," He took a bite out of the wrap, then went back to working on the virtuality portal.

He realised that his equipment could not yet transfer molecules from reality to virtuality, so he had devised an ingenious mechanism that, ironically, used the figures themselves for the virtuality. It was a design where you placed a Skylander on the Portal of Power, like in the game, then went into the virtuality in the form of that Skylander. If it worked.

Flipping another switch, a large, powerful fan activated. Tails was blown back towards the door to the small attic space he had hidden it in. "I gotta change that design," He activated a set of magnets on his shoes, and steadily made his way back to the technology. The fan was necessary to keep the equipment cool, but it was a real pain in the butt sometimes.

Tails carefully tweezed the last wire that was actually part of the machine into position, ran a quick check of everything necessary, then went back into his actual room and looked over his collection of Skylanders figures, considering which one to use first for the virtuality.

After a few minutes of deliberation, his gaze settled on S2 Spyro. He shrugged, and thought out loud, "Hey, he's already this famous face of an entire video game industry, why not use him first?" He picked S2 over Mega Ram because he figured, correctly, that the ram horns would be cumbersome to lug around.

Tails picked up the figurine and crawled back through to the attic space. There he realised he had forgotten where he put the Portal. Eventually locating it and dragging it over to the holographic virtuality portal, he placed the figurine on the Portal and reached for the switch that would turn it on. Then he paused.

"I have spent months building this, uncountable amounts of time making it perfect. And now it is time to finally activate it. And I'm making a speech to nobody at all. I thought only mad scientists did that,"

Tails took a deep breath, pulled the switch, and waited. Nothing happened. He rolled his eyes and kicked the machine. One by one, the lightbulbs around the rim of the portal lit up. For a bit of fun, there were sixteen bulbs, two coloured for each Skylander element. After a couple of minutes, all sixteen were lit up and a swirling vortex of energy appeared inside the frame. A hologram of Spyro, wearing the Trucker Hat (with Spyro's face on it) Tails had put on his Spyro, came up over the portal.

Tails took a deep breath, and stepped in.

I know what everyone's thinking is going to happen, and that's not it.

Numbah 94, I enjoyed your trilogy, I hope you enjoy mine. Please note this is nowhere near as done as Rise of the Dragon King is.

I am working from an IPad, so please excuse me if there are some glitches or something. It's the first time I've tried this, so please review. I have the basic outline for the entire first part of the trilogy planned, but if anyone has any ideas I will be glad to hear them.

Update: The glitches have been fixed, you can read through now.