quick question about your Sonic Forces rewrite since im curious; what would be the phantom ruby's origins and how would inverted chaos energy work? :0

my idea is basically like this.....

the REAL phantom ruby is essentially an 8th chaos emerald. the master emerald helps keep the other seven emerald in harmony- essentially, the master emerald is the emerald of positive chaos. the phantom ruby, however, has is powers based in negative chaos energy. the two of them are necessary to actually keep the emeralds in balance, but the phantom ruby is so harmful to people not chaotic in nature that it gets lost through history and time and space after misuses gone wrong

eggman comes in contact with it after sonic generations but doesn't have much time to study it until later

he creates these fake copies of it using inverted neutral chaos energy to try to mimic negative chaos energy. it creates very powerfiul but unstable prototypes. effectively, it's very similar to the fake emeralds tails made in sa2 except with negative chaos energy.

that's what infinite has- he has a prototpe lodged in his chest. the unstable energies ahve also been altering his mind, unraveling him and his body. his mental and physical homestasis have been unbalanced and he's almost literally insane by the time he makes his first apperance, overcome with wrath and hate.

because the phantom ruby is made of chaos energy, sonic's able to use the energy better than any machine eggman can make or any other mobian he can swindle into being his science experiments. when sonic uses the energy against infinite during an encounter (basically, infinite came to torture him while he was captured but sonic fought back easily because infinite is physcially weak after exposure to the unstable energy and because sonic has... fought gods...) eggman immediately puts two and two together and decides to combine the real phantom ruby with sonic

and that has........ potentially disastrous results