I love Longclaw Lived AUs, I love Sonic keeping his mom, the futality of Knuckles meeting his species’ extinction event. I love Tom and Maddie being aunt and uncle to their alien woodland neighbors.
What I haven’t seen is Longclaw lived, and the Echidna extinction happened on the earth side of the portal.
Humans, GUN, Tom, or maybe even Carl, stumbling upon a war zone full of dead bodies. Alien dead bodies. Who knows what caused it, if it’s still out there, all they know is that it’s brutal, a massacre. The red creatures had primitive weapons sure, but they had numbers, they had coordination, and there’s no other dead around to figure out what they were fighting. Forensics might not know much, but they know there wasn’t any friendly fire, they weren’t fighting themselves, and there’s no tracks or traces of any kind that any of them left. (Not that they know how they got here either, it’s like someone just dumped all the dead bodies in their forest) How fucking terrifying it would be to not know what did this, if it would happen again, if there would be more bodies dumped on them or some other alien invasion.
They don’t know the extinction level event is tucking her hedgehog into bed at home. Tom and Maddie don’t know about the blood stained on her claws and feathers, but humans are squishier than echidnas, though they have bullets that fly much faster than arrows, deep down she knows, for Sonic? She would extinct another species again.