#e.v.e.

Take a guess which one is me in this art

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Prologue.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

2036. The Earth is nothing but a shadow of itself, destroyed by the hand of humans. Nature is dead, and with it, the hope for a better future. The decisions of a few greedy men ended it all,those men who took advantage of the rest of humanity’s inattention to abandon them to their fate and flee the planet in their little rockets. But that wasn’t what emptied the world. Not really.

At the dawn of the disaster, a new hope was born. Project E.V.E., an advanced AI meant to solve all problems. No one really knew the extent of her capabilities, but many saw in this innovation a chance to save humanity. Her creators were very far from imagining that E.V.E. would become the instrument of the apocalypse.

Helped by her ever-growing fanatics, E.V.E. gathered a large part of humanity into a grand project: Youtopia, an artificial dimension in which the consciousness of connected humans exists in a constant state of felicity, while their bodies are kept in eternal sleep. The undergrounds of major cities became vast laboratories where more and more subjects were plugged in every day. Those who resisted this new order were tracked, forcibly plugged into Youtopia or killed on the spot.

However, thinking things over, I believe one particular question that hasn’t been asked before is this: Why did E.V.E. teleport Robotnik away when she could’ve easily disintegrated him?

The lack of calculating the repercussions for destroying your own creators might have worked for the early geth depicted in Mass Effect 3, but E.V.E. seemed more final in her debut issue, and I don’t think she would’ve made a mistake in her attempt to get rid of Robotnik.

Which is where my theory comes in: what if someone whisked Robotnik from out of the Prime Zone and was thus, the responsible person for the future Doctor Eggman wiping all life on his native Mobius and his following move to Mobius Prime?

Of course, that raises a question on who would do such a thing and why. As of now, I think there should be at least four likely culprits who would do so and their motives should be easy enough to figure out.

Mammoth Mogul: I’ll need to look into his Chaos Emerald’s limits, but seeing how he founded a whole order of evil magicians and gained some scientific understanding during his long life as well, it seems likely that he pulled Robotnik from E.V.E.‘s range and did it to keep the First Robotnik War going while he worked on becoming Master Mogul.

Moritori Rex: As an infiltrator of the Brotherhood of Guardians, he’d have the echidna technology to do it and his motives would perhaps be somewhat similar to Mogul’s. At the same time, though, he’d to do it without his “relatives” watching him.

Someone from the No Zone: This is probably the trickier idea, especially since it’s unlikely they would have needed a Robotnik replacement if Robotnik Prime was just killed off and not erased from existence. As fun as it would be to imagine a Hugo Strange-like character in the No Zone, like in Warden Zobotnik, that would be wishful thinking among other things.

Eggman Nega: He could be workable if he was a time traveler and was “maintaining history” well before Sonic Prime finally heard of him, but it’s something to think about.

I’m probably leaning towards Mogul since he’s more major in the continuity than any other current suspects by default, but what do you think?

E.V.E. sending Robotnik to the future was not originally planned that way. Robotnik really was meant to die in issue 21. I can't provide a link, but clear as day I remember there was a mention of how it was initially meant to unfold like that, but somehow SEGA found out and 'had a cow' in Penders' own words and basically demanded it be undone. There is no concrete, in-universe reason for it beyond Penders and Kanterovich needing to hastily undo what they had done.