ReCollection :: CrossActs & Laik the Wolf

 Before I start, I'm gonna preface this with: It's gonna be a long one.

To celebrate the one-year anniversary of CrossActs, I'm taking a deep dive into the past, present, and scratching the surface of what the future has in store for Laik and his friends

To kick things off, we're going into the past. No, not the weeks leading up to the birth of CrossActs, nor the two projects that predate it. No, this requires going 30+ years into the past.

To December 1995…

[ THE DISTANT PAST ]

I discovered RPGs pretty early in life, say around 1991/1992. 
It started with A Link to the Past, with my older brother mislabeling the game as an RPG. I loved the freedom it gave me to roam in every direction. Visiting villages, exploring dungeons, fighting gigantic monsters in arenas that didn't limit me to left and right. 
Sure, Zelda wasn't an actual RPG, but it set me up to appreciate something in gaming I hadn't known existed at that point in time.
Eventually, I learned to look for RPG on boxes when visiting rental stores. Characters played across the screen in line, with monsters taking up the left side of the screen. Action-RPG was another subgenre I quickly learned to differentiate after renting a few turn-based RPGs that really opened my eyes.

Fast forward to Christmas 1995. We had just come from (now defunct) mall and the pawn shop there within where I had traded in a few Super Nintendo games I didn't care to play anymore for something new. It was there I had claimed a title that, little did I know, would play a monumental role in my childhood and set the stage for things to come.

That game was Secret of Mana.

Read the full ReCollection for Secret of Mana!

 
Now, at this point in my career as a "Gamer Kid", I had played just about everything. Rented Chrono Trigger multiple times, fought my way through Beyond Oasis. Beaten Link to the Past multiple times and dabbled with stuff like Brain Lord and Tecmo Secret of the Stars (which I still unironically love). I had even played Breath of Fire II at its release, so to say I had a pretty good idea of what RPGs were by this point in time would be an understatement.
But Secret of Mana, man. That game opened my eyes wider than I could have imagined. The world was beautiful. Every single track on the soundtrack was amazing. Plenty of bosses to fight, villages to explore, and magic to use. I still remember getting home that cold, rainy winter day and firing it up on the old floor-based Zenith TV and loading up a pre-existing save file and just running around Todo Village before getting annihilated by the wolves outside.

Jump ahead a bit to say, maybe mid-January to late February 1996. I'm with my parents at the local Walmart. We entered the building via the garden center because it led us right to the toy section, which my parents always liked to get that part of the trip over with first.
That's when I saw them: little figurines hanging from a J-hook on an end cap just as you turn the corner to the action figure aisle. The cardboard backer read "Dragon Ball", and inside the little molded plastic bubble was a tiny figurine of a character who, while completely unknown to me and would remain that way for years to come yet, looked oddly familiar.
Was this dude with the tail and spiky hair not a Crono lookalike? Bulma definitely bore some similarities to Marle too. Oh, and the Pilaf dude, it's just the Blue Imps with more clothes! In my eight-year-old brain, unfamiliar with anime and only going by in-game graphics and cartridge labels, I saw these as RPG-inspired characters. 

And not just any RPG: Chrono Trigger! 

 
Using my monthly allowance, I bought four of the twelve available figures: Goku, Puar, Krillen and Ox-King, and would eventually get two more full sets of them by my birthday later that year (but only because I lost them frequently…)

The combined effects of my having unknowingly having got my eventual favorite game of all time on a mere whim, getting these Dragon Ball figures and the spring and summer of '96 that was still to come resulted in essentially the big bang event for my imagination, creativity and desire to tell stories.

For a deeper dive into my history here and Secret of Memoria, click [HERE]

Without going into much more of a deep dive into this part of my life, I would like to explain the existence of the "Dragon Ball Village RPG" story that I crafted. I had constructed a small village using VHS tapes atop my writing desk, in which the characters lived. 
I used this set to record movies I'd act out with my toy collection, the Dragon Ball figurines being the main cast.
Over the course of the summer of 1996, I'd chip away at Secret of Mana without the help of a guide, using characters named after Goku, Krillen and Bulma. By the time I reached the end, the game had firmly seated itself as my favorite of all time, creating one of the most memorable summers ever. Bolstered by the stories I'd create with my toys, both in my room and in the front and back yards.

[ THE NOT-SO DISTANT PAST ]

Fast forward eighteen years to 2014 to find adult me laying the groundwork for a story that, while hastily written, adapted a lot of the notions, stories, and settings I had created as a kid into a unique world all of its own.

That story was called Secret of Memoria. 
It starred Remy Niscent(Goku), a young boy with a magical, unbreakable wooden sword. Along with Holly, Bo, and a plethora of other characters based on the Dragon Ball cast, I had a fully populated setting right from the beginning.
They all lived together in a village called Memoria, which was surrounded by the sort of landscape that could only exist in an RPG. It was my playground as an adult for the longest time, somewhere I could escape to after a busy day at work.

It was something I toyed around for a better part of a decade, eventually dropping it around the 200k word mark as I had written myself into a corner and had far, far too much backlog to shift through to find the plot threads I'd need to keep the pace going. 
But I was happy with it. It served as my training wheels for the writing projects that were to come, on top of eternalizing a lot of elements and stories from my childhood.

[ THE PRESENT ]

In 2023, I rediscovered my fondness for the furry community and was having a stint with VivziePop productions, which had become somewhat of a gross influence on me, writing-wise. 
Creating a whole new cast of anthropomorphic characters, I began work on Last Tail. Set on an alternate version of our Earth where humans never became a thing and instead the animals became the dominant, intelligent species. Monsters and magic were commonplace, and everyone was perverted as all heck and swore like sailors.
Again, the bad Helluva Boss influence.
It served as my means of lashing out against the world for about a year. My disdain for political parties and politicians, racism, homo/transphobes. Anything I could attack, I did, and I did so in mean-spirited ways. 
It became a project I really wanted nothing to do with. I liked the characters I created for it, but the subject matter had become too real for something I was using to escape reality, so I did what I had to do.

One element from Last Tail however, stuck with me, and that was the crossover parts where I was using movie monsters to populate the creature population of the world, citing films like ALIEN and John Carpenter's The Thing as "based on true events".
This idea nagged at me and would soon grow into something larger the following spring.

[ MY RETURN TO THE SONIC UNIVERSE ]

I'd picked up Sonic Frontiers on a whim during the Steam Autumn 2024 sale, right as Hurricane Helene was rolling onto shore. We'd lost internet for days following that, so all I really had to do in that time was play a game I wasn't completely sold on in a series I'd long since fallen out of love with.
The last 3D Sonic game I played was Sonic Colors on the Wii. I was strictly a Classic Sonic kind of guy after that, only picking up Mania in 2017 and then nothing else.
Low and behold, Frontiers, even as an open-world game, completely and utterly hooked me from start to finish. And after 34 hours, I walked away from the game pleasantly surprised. Not sold on modern Sonic yet, but getting there.

And then Sonic 3 The Movie happened and really set the hook. It made me actually like Shadow as a character and reminded me why I loved this series so much as a kid and early teen.

Fast forward to, say, February, and I decide to read some IDW stuff after coming across some internet drama over a certain sheep. Well, needless to say, this was where the reel started cranking and pulling me in because I was all in on Sonic almost instantly, just like that. A feeling I hadn't felt since, oh, maybe 2009 with Sonic and the Black Knight? Prooobably even before that, during the GameCube era with Adventure 2 Battle and Heroes.
Regardless, I could feel myself becoming a Sonic fanboy again.

It was at this point I got the idea of having my fursona turned into a Sonic character. I found an artist willing to do so, and a few days later, Advrik Drahcir had become Rik the Wolf.

Art by Hallie.XD

It was more or less a straight conversion of one design into another, hence the deep brown hair, which I'm just not fond of. It would eventually change, but only after I did some prototyping.

I threw together a few one-off stories that had a few purposes: One, to help develop my new OC and add some personality and history to set him apart from his inspiration.
And two, to figure out how to write fanfiction and where and how this new guy will fit in overall. 

I eventually put him up against Whisper in a one-on-one, which I've alluded to a few times in CrossActs but haven't retold the tale yet. That, and a few origin stories that never got published.

Things really got rolling, however, with the announcement of Sonic CrossWorlds Racing. I was having some fun writing fanfiction for the first time in forever, but it missed that spark; that tiny flame that would make this project more than just a celebration of my rekindled love for Sonic and his world.
It needed to be a celebration of all of my interests. A culmination of past work. It needed CROSSOVERS.
Yes, it was seeing SpongeBob SquarePants racing alongside Sonic and a realistically designed character from the Yakuza games that reminded me not only of the crossover elements I was having fun with in Last Tail, but also of the one-off I wrote titled Cartringer that very year, which also featured a young, human version of Advrik traveling into various video game worlds to fight off virus monsters.

Now that I had my hook, I really needed to flesh out my OCs design, so I did some shopping around for other artists that worked in the Sonic style that could also potentially help in redesigning my little guy into something more fitting for the universe he was about to find himself in.

Art by Power

 

Thus, Rik the Wolf became Laik the Wolf, separating him entirely form Advrik. I then set off down the long, winding roads into the (then titled) world of the 'CrossWorlds Hero' universe! The plot, of which, was mentally drawn up during a long car ride out of town where I was envisioning events involving Laik to the music that was playing from my car stereo, with the biggest one being Laik in his super form fighting The Great Old One himself, Cthulhu!

 [ THE NOW & LATER ]

Today, April 15th, 2026, is the one-year anniversary of the CrossActs universe's inception. Spanning over 250,000 words across 100+ chapters with multiple one-offs and non-canon stories, plus dozens upon dozens of commissioned art, Laik and his growing group of friends have provided me with the same level of creativity levied by a sense of knowing and familiarity that I hadn't felt since I was playing with those little Dragon Ball figures on my bedroom floor three decades ago. Partnering them up with Power Rangers, Mega Man, and whatever childhood toy I had at my disposal.

I've made acquaintances with some interesting individuals and amazing artists as a result of my returning to the Sonic universe and the fandom as a whole.

With the first major saga about to wrap up initial production, what does the future have in store for Laik going forward? Well, if you took a peek at his new profile there on the left, you'd see that the concept is already there.

'The Adventures of Laik the Wolf' is going to be a slice-of-life styled project, depicting a young, "Classic Era" styled Laik and friends in a version of Memoria Village similar to that found in my Secret of Memoria project, all the while keeping it very Sonic the Hedgehog universe focused. Continuity will be loose and stories will be all over the place, as is the cast of characters, many of which being adaptions of the Last Tail and Secret of Memoria cast.

With this year marking the 30-year anniversary of the summer that truly defined my interests in gaming, animation, storytelling, I kinda wanna celebrate all the things that I held so much interest in that year, and with a fanfic that is literally built on the foundation of crossovers, what better way than that to celebrate, eh?

If you read this far, then thank you. A lot of what I do on the internet is mainly for myself and myself alone. If others find some value in it, then that's cool too.