The Time Accelerator, otherwise known as the "Time Thingy", is an Irken-made device which features in Issue 28 of the comic series.
Summary[]
The Time Accelerator - referred to by the Almighty Tallest and Zim as the "Time Thingy" - is as its name suggests a device capable of speeding up time within its area of effect. It was created and studied by a science team led by Commander Theen at Remote Lunar Research Base 327, on a moon believed to be uninhabited. However, it turned out that the moon was actually home to a race of subterranean Scavenger Worms, who attacked the research base and dragged everything into their underground tunnels, except for Theen, who managed to escape back to the Massive.
Once underground, the Worms dragged all the Irkens' equipment, including the Accelerator, into their hive and left the Irkens - led in Theen's absence by his second in command, Scientist Floog - to fend for themselves. With the Accelerator greatly speeding up their time compared to the outside world and therefore rendering distress calls impossible to make, the Irkens fended for themselves, carefully cultivating a slow growing cave mold as food and building material, while waiting for help to come.
That "help" eventually arrives in the form of Zim, who is dispatched to retrieve the Accelerator by the Tallest after Theen tells them what happened. Due to him looking similar to Theen and it being (from their perspective) so many years since they last saw him, Floog and the others assume that Zim is their long-lost Commander having come back for them. Zim is quick to take advantage of this, taking over the group and making them carry out numerous attempts to retrieve the Accelerator, which all fail, until they finally succeed by means of a convincing Worm disguise.
Having retrieved the Accelerator, Zim abandons the now old and infirm scientists and returns to the moon's surface, where the Tallest take the Accelerator from him. Or rather, Tallest Purple takes back its chronal dampening tube (which he thinks is and treats as a bendy straw), and they let Zim keep the Accelerator itself - which proceeds to explode without the dampener, aging Zim into an extremely elderly state in the process.
Facts of Doom[]
- The Accelerator appears to be composed of a main spherical body, and the coronal dampening tube which serves as its core and sticks out of the body.
- Interestingly, despite blowing up in Zim's presence, for once it isn't actually his fault that the Accelerator is destroyed.