>>140589534>what penders plans were for knuckles?Basically, Penders wanted to use Archie Sonic as a springboard for his Lost Ones comic, because publishers wouldn't even think of publishing it until he basically lied to them and told them it was a Sonic spin-off.
This included establishing his comic villain, Dr. Ian Droid from the Image crossover, as an alternate version of Dr. Robotnik.
Locke's vision was supposed to be of the Knuckles 20 Years Later special, where we'd see Knuckles face off against Dr. Droid and presumably act as a tie-in to Penders' comic. This was, incidentally, meant to be the same future Robo-Robotnik (who was meant to be Ian Droid, not Eggman) and Nicole came from.
But the special was cancelled, Penders' comic never went anywhere and all of this was mercifully scrapped. Penders gave his "canon future" storyline another shot later, but this was different from what he had set up earlier, such that Nicole and Eggman had to be retconned to being from a different timeline.
In fact, for a while, it wasn't clear whether Nicole and Eggman's worlds were the same until Ian declared them so for simplicity's sake.