Dr. Julian Roboninski and his assistant Snively awoke to find that the ship they had rented to fly to Pluto is in complete disrepair. Once Snively got the power working again, they also found that they were sunk somewhere underground . . . specifically, underground someplace that definitely wasn't Pluto. Checking the ship's logs, they found that something went wrong with one of the ship's hydrogen cells, a structural failure that sent the ship spiralling into deep space and, apparently, through some sort of uncharted space anomaly.
Unable to get any more information from the ship's computer, Julian and Snively dug their way to the surface of this new world and discovered that their ship had crashlanded in the middle of a giant forest that their scanners insisted shared several common traits with the Black Forest in Germany on their home planet Terra. While they speculated on the idea of having crashlanding on Terra of the future or another planet with convergent evolution, the two stranded men began to search for civilization and help.
They found both in a forest clearing a short way from their crashsite when an anthropomorphic dog soldier took them prisoner and led them to his platoon's campsite. There they met Warlord Ferris Kodos - another anthropomorphic animal, this time a lion - who told them that they could stay in the camp until he figures out what to do with them, as there was a war going on and the woods weren't safe. The two humans got the five mobium tour of the camp, led by an extremely eccentric deer soldier named Jim North, and finally ended up in the mess tent where they met a meercat by the name of "Sparky" McPlug.
Sparky, as it turned out, was something of a storyteller and historian, so he took it upon himself to teach the two humans about their new home, the planet Mobius He eventually got around to telling them about the Great War . . . though no one is sure why, apparently some sort of virus started to affect people on the Lesser Mobian Continent, causing them to become near-mindless zombies who's only purpose was to attack and infect other Mobians. Strangely, the virus also caused their bodies to be completely resistant to any sort of physical attack other than hand-to-hand combat. This was exceedingly unfortunate because any sort of physical contact meant a high risk of infection. This unusual quality of the virus caused many of the Acorn Kingdom's top scientists to theorize that the virus was a deliberate creation, a theory that was borne out when a low-level functionary in the Kingdom's government, Max Ocelot, stepped forward and claimed responsibility. He planned to use his ever-growing army to destroy the world-spanning Acorn Kingdom and set his own government into place.
Since then, Sparky told Julian and Snively, the war hadn't been going very well. The greatest minds in the kingdom had been set to the task of finding a cure for the virus, but to no avail, and every battle with the zombie army generally ended with more and more people being infected. It was all the armed forces could do to keep them out of the major cities.
Struck with a brilliant idea, Julian went to Kodos the next morning and detailed a plan to build an army of robots to take the place of Mobian soldiers on the battlefield. Kodos was skeptical at first . . . he explained that Mobians have never had much use for robots, but in the end decided to take the two humans to meet King Acorn. After leaving the troops in Centropolis, Kodos took Julian and Snively to Mobotropolis where they met the King and his Royal Council. Julian once again explained his plans, and the King happily agreeed to give him all the help, equipment, and other resources he needed.
As Julian designed the hardware for his proposed SWATbots, Snively worked with Kodos and several other Mobian military strategists to develop the necessary programming. As time went by, Snively began to develop a sort of facination with Mobian culture. Julian, concerned that this facination might interfere with his new plans, decided to pay a private visit on his assistant. When Sinvely began to talk about the wonderful advances Mobians had made in their social system, Julian backhanded him roughly.
Snively, understandably shocked, asked why he had done such a thing, and Julian explained very carefully as he used a dermal regenerator to make sure the smaller man's eye didn't bruise . . . the Mobians were animals, no more and no less. Though they walked upright and had their precious culture, they were still nothing more than animals. He couldn't see how they possibly could have evolved on their own, so they were nothing more than a pitiful fake race that didn't deserve the status they currently enjoyed. Because of this, Julian said, they were completely expendable . . . but from what he had learned about their biology, they were perfectly suited for other needs.
Underneath the animal exterior, they were just human enough to be used as test subjects for Julian's previous experiments with full-conversion cyborg life-forms. Julian wanted to continue those experiments, but on a much grander scale than before. He wanted to take over the entire world of Mobius and use it as a planet-sized laboratory. It would be easy for him to do . . . the Great War had already made the current world government weak, and with a special program that Snively was to implant into the SWATbots' brains . . .
Snively wanted no part of it, but Julian reminded him that they were the only two humans on the planet, and that they were the only ones who knew anything about Terran culture. If Snively did not go along with the plans, or if he tried to tell any of the Mobians about it, then Julian would break him - maybe even kill him - and then later claim that it had simply been in accordance with a Terran honor code. He felt certain that the Mobians would respect his beliefs . . . Snively, who had spent some time studying their culture, knew they would. He suddenly realized that he was trapped on the planet with a complete madman . . . but there was nothing he could do about it.
Julian's plans became even more insidious when he learned of Charles Hedgehog's work into a process called "cybervitilization" in which weak or wounded body parts could be replaced by cybernetic systems through molecular reconstruction. If the process was successful, it would be possible to place a subject into the machine, target the problem area, and flip a switch, changing weak bone and flesh into hardened titanium and wires in a matter of seconds. Julian managed to steal all the information he could about the cybervitalizer and, with the help of Snively, found a way to alter the machine so that it changed the subject's entire body along the lines of their previous experiments. All the simulations worked, but they had to wait until Charles managed to finished the full design until they could actually build a working model and test it.
In the meantime, Julian had found that he was not the only one with eyes on the throne . . .
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