#sth 127

Tossed in Space (Part Three): Evo-Solution

Writer: Benny Lee Pencils: Ron Lim Colors: Jason Jensen

Sonic has gotten himself a ride on the D'Novulan trading vessel that landed on Thoraxia, and now they're on their way to a trading hub where Captain Oe is certain Sonic can find a way back home. The crew provides him with an implant to translate all alien languages automatically, but Sonic barely has time to say "thanks" before an alarm starts going off.

Man, can Sonic ever catch a break? The asteroids strike the trading ship, and the crew all race for the escape pods. Each has enough room for just one person, and apparently there's exactly enough pods for the crew, because for whatever reason they never accounted for even one more person being on their vessel. Sonic, noble hero type that he is and seemingly unfazed by this incredible lack of foresight on the part of the ship's designers, insists that Captain Oe take the final one. However, Captain Oe is a bit of a noble hero type himself, and stings Sonic with the barb on his tail to paralyze him before pushing him into the final escape pod alone, wishing him a safe and successful journey home.

You know, for a character who appears on only six pages out of a comic series spanning nearly four hundred issues, somehow his sacrifice ended up having much more weight to it than, say, Tommy's. Sonic's pod falls into the atmosphere of a planet swirling with toxic particles and rainstorms, and, unable to even exit the pod due to the harsh conditions outside, eats some rations and takes a nap, hoping someone will eventually find him. When he wakes up, the pod's onboard systems tell him that the planet's atmosphere is now suddenly breathable, so he exits to explore his surroundings. The planet quickly proves itself to be a strange one, as pink water dominates the landscape, and plants suddenly begin to sprout from the soil at a rapid pace.

When primitive life forms begin to emerge from the waters, Sonic races back to his pod, realizing that time must move much faster on this planet, and thus he's seeing millions of years of evolution take place in the blink of an eye. With nothing to do, and knowing it's too dangerous to exit again, Sonic stays inside and takes another nap while the planet grows and changes around him. When he wakes up once again, one of the planet's many new species has developed into a stone age civilization. And within seconds…

Time suddenly slows down to a more reasonable pace, and he steps out to be greeted by the planet's dominant alien life forms, the Azurites, who have created a time decelerator to be able to speak to him. He's baffled as to why there's hedgehog-shaped decals all over every building, and so the Azurites explain their race's history from their own perspective.

Honestly, the concept of this is downright fascinating to me and probably my favorite thing to come out of this whole Tossed in Space thing. As the Azurites developed higher technology, they were able to prove that Sonic was in fact a living being running on a much slower timescale than themselves, and thus invented the decelerator to be able to speak to him at last. However, they still think of him as a god and their own creator, bringing him out in front of a crowd to make a speech. Sonic awkwardly informs them that he's not a god, and is just looking for a way back home. They take this surprisingly well considering it invalidates millennia of established religious belief across their entire history, and offer to build him a spaceship instantaneously by turning off the decelerator and going to town.