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hishighnesstheprincess · 1 year

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Hi! This is gonna be a masterpost about how the metal virus in Sonic IDW functions, complete with screenshots and a whole ton of rambling!

So first off, this is gonna be divided into four sections: How It Infects, How Zombots Behave, The Cure(s), and Miscellaneous.

Obviously let's begin with section 1: How It Infects

We find out from some scenes of Dr Starline and Eggman the very basics of how the virus infects things: it starts with the liquid ooze that Eggman creates, but anything that is infected can be a transmitter. It can infect anything organic, but inorganic/processed materials, at least in these early scenes, cannot be infected.

The rabbit and the flower are both infected and converted by the initial liquid, and the rabbit goes on to infect the pig by just touching it, and the flower infects the squirrel in the same way.

Some other details from analysis of these scenes: once something is infected, it can transmit the infection to other parts of its body just by tapping them (the last shot of the squirrel transferring their infection from their hand to their head). And while completely covering the victim in liquid converts them to a zombot within seconds (as also seen below with Rough and Tumble), merely tapping them doesn't spread it nearly as quickly.

However, repeated exposure to the virus is shown to speed up the process significantly (as seen below).

Lastly for this section, how the virus works while it is on organic material. It actually appears to have two different rates of infections for plants and for living beings, as shown in the panels below.

In the first one, we see that it takes at least ~8 hours minimum for the virus to creep a couple inches up the side of a tree and to infect a flicky sleeping in it. In the last two, we see that it doesn't take long for a small spot of infection on a Mobian to progress into a full blown zombot conversion (we know not much time passes, maybe an hour or so, because the sky doesn't progress much from what looks like the middle of a sunset to the end of a sunset). While due to the power of exponential growth it's likely that more of the natural plant life on Mobius would get infected at an increasingly faster rate as the virus went on, it does seem that the initial infection rate is very different. For whatever reason, I don't know and don't particularly care, it's useful.

One last note on this section before I end this bit (cus I've hit the image limit already yay Tumblr): how the virus interacts with clothing. We can see clearly from Charmy's case that not only can the virus get on clothing, it can infect from there, and in many other cases down the line we see that it can get all over clothing. Additionally, from Rough and Tumble we can see that their gloves and shoes get transformed along with them. Either this means the virus can infect inorganic/processed material, or every Mobian we see infected is all wearing organic material somehow. I'm going with the secret third option: it's for plot convenience, and in my AU of the metal virus I'm just going to bullshit something about the clothing being skintight or something.

Anyway, this is the end of part 1, other parts on their way shortly.

#im on mobile rn so theres no readmore for yall #sth #ivo robotnik #dr starline #sonic the hedgehog #amy rose #rough the skunk #tumble the skunk #charmy bee #vector the crocodile #espio the chameleon #when i said i was doing research on this i was NOT joking #prin posts #sonic posting #long post #metal virus

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