#second vehicon apocalypse

[askvectorprime]

Dear Vector Prime, what would have happened if Dinobot 2 had survived and joined the Maximals on their journey back to Cybertron?

Dear Sempiternal Saurian,

In one reality, Optimus Primal was able to successfully rescue the cloned Dinobot from the Nemesis and carry him to safety, moments before Rhinox’s shuttle obliterated the ship’s bridge and foiled Megatron’s final gambit to win the Beast Wars. Initially, the jubilant Maximals believed that their old friend had somehow returned to life, but were dismayed to find that this was not quite the case. While this “new” Dinobot had indeed inherited some jumbled memories of his genetic template, he also bore the scars—both literal and metaphorical—of serving Megatron throughout the last third of the Beast Wars. Worse yet, he still carried the spark of Protoform X, itself a failed attempt to mimic Starscream’s immortal spark. Suffice it to say, the second Dinobot was a traumatized, empty shell—a living weapon bereft of purpose, forced to work alongside the same ‘bots he’d been conditioned to hate, and perpetually at war with himself as competing instincts vied for dominance. The Maximals quickly learned to give their nominal ally a wide berth, and none of them were particularly enthused when he declared that he would join them on their voyage home, in the hopes that he could find some kind of new purpose on Cybertron.

As in many of the timelines you know, Megatron slipped his bonds during their voyage back to Cybertron, conquered the planet with an army of mass-produced Vehicon warriors, and infected his captors with a paralyzing transformation virus. Thanks to his Transmetal 2 body, Dinobot resisted the virus, but was forcibly devolved back into a simulacrum of his genetic predecessor. Soon enough, Optimus Primal found him, Rattrap, Blackarachnia, and Cheetor; guided by Primal’s supernatural visions, the five ‘bots fled into the depths of Cybertron, and eventually encountered the mysterious Oracle. Dinobot emerged from the computer with a new, technorganic beast mode: a crimson Guanlong with steel-grey plumage, his teeth and claws could easily penetrate Vehicon armor. As he had never truly “known” Cybertron before the Vehicon apocalypse, Dinobot fought not for any kind of higher ideal, or to rescue the populace of Cybertron, but merely to survive; when the Maximals learned that Megatron had engineered the entire disaster and taken control of the planet, Dinobot decided that he hated Megatron more than he hated the Maximals and grudgingly stuck by their fledgling resistance movement, defiantly wearing a modified Predacon insignia for no other reason than to incense his creator.

Already torn between so many states of being, it should come as no surprise that Dinobot struggled to master the art of transformation. Because of this setback, however, the Rattrap of this timeline—who’d already taken a very real dislike to the “cut-rate knockoff”, and could now look down his nose at someone even worse at transformation than himself—never faced the same kind of crisis of conscience that many of his alternate selves struggled with, and learned how to transform by himself. When Dinobot found that “emotional still point” and unlocked his robot mode, he was a mighty warrior indeed: not only could his optics project a wall of telekinetic force to cover his allies and send enemies flying, but his mighty two-handed claymore could also open tectonic fissures and create localized earthquakes. Tormented by his own demons as he was, however, those moments of emotional lucidity were fleeting at best, and Dinobot spent most of his time trapped in beast mode: in his worst moments, the other Maximals had to physically restrain him as his old Transmetal instincts overwhelmed him and he reverted to a feral state of being. Even while trapped in beast mode, Dinobot proved an ambitious and cunning warrior, and he and Cheetor repeatedly butted heads over the position of leader while the Maximal leader was indisposed.

In this timeline, Dinobot’s warrior instincts and animalistic thirst for vengeance helped push Optimus Primal, already convinced that his mission was to revert Cybertron to its primordial organic state, further and further down the road of extremism. Thanks to his influence, by the time that Tankor’s true consciousness reasserted itself and made a play for power, Optimus had already discovered the Plasma Energy Chamber and used it to send an ultimatum to Megatron: leave the planet now, or perish. This time around, it was Megatron who had to go on the defensive; despite these minor changes in the timeline, the end result was largely the same—the clash between the Key to Vector Sigma and the Plasma Energy Chamber resulted in near-deaths for both Optimus Primal and Megatron. The other Maximals realized that their comrade had played a major role in Primal’s death and turned their back on him. While the other Maximals eventually revived Optimus and dealt with the strange Savage/Noble creature, a grief-stricken Dinobot, convinced that he had permanently killed the first being who had ever treated him kindly, buried his higher functions beneath his animal instincts and turned feral, indiscriminately roaming the empty tunnels and savaging any wayward Vehicons who deviated from their patrol routes.

Finally, after many cycles of exile, Optimus Primal—who had dedicated all his time to meditating in front of the Oracle and casting his own sensory net across the planet in the hopes of finding their most troubled comrade—finally reached Dinobot’s sleeping mind and pierced his layers of mental armor. In this shared dreamscape, a jumbled nightmare world of Transmetallized bones and a burning valley—Dinobot admitted that he had no idea who he was. Was he a warrior or a monster? A beast or a robot? A Maximal, a Predacon, a Decepticon? Would he forever toil in the shadow of his progenitor, desperately trying to live a life he’d never known? Or was he nothing but a freak of nature who concealed his monstrous nature beneath the veneer of an honorable warrior?

Inspired by his own recent voyage through the Matrix, Optimus offered his own opinion: just as the Matrix had chosen them to bring nature and technology together into a single, harmonious whole, so too was Dinobot more than the sum total of his origins. He was not the original Dinobot, nor was he Rampage; he was himself, a loyal ally and just as much a part of the Oracle’s grand plan as the rest of the Maximals.

It would take time before the Predacon warrior learned to channel Primal’s sense of balance into his own fighting style as he rigorously trained in private—aided by Primal’s occasional remote coaching sessions—and longer still before he worked up the courage to rejoin the Maximals. When he did, however, he returned not as Dinobot, but as his own ‘bot—he was now Preditron, a courageous and honorable warrior who combined his bestial instincts with the experience of two lifetimes lived. Preditron fought bravely alongside the Maximals in subsequent campaigns, stood by as they welcomed Botanica and Silverbolt into the fold, and made a courageous stand in the final battle against the Vehicon hordes.

Many centuries in the future, long after the Great Transformation that saw Cybertron reformatted into a technorganic utopia, young technorganic Cybertronians still whisper tales of the reclusive Last Predacon, whose immortal spark burns forever. When all else fails, it is said that the Last Predacon will emerge from his secluded jungle home to take young Cybertronians who struggle to master transformation under his wing, and teach them to find the balance within, as he once did himself.

[solarzilla]

Any characters we did not see in Beast Wars Uprising that you would have liked to see? I would have liked to see Stampy and BWII Starscream personally.

Some bots that come to mind are Dinobot who's honor bond nature would've made it hard for him to work with the resistance. Was pretty disappointed that Primal was basically offed by Blackarachnia and Nightscream since I feel if if he was still alive, they could've used his Beast Machines characterization where he almost became Lio Convoy but Cheetor was able to pull him back. Honestly much of the original BW cast being alive during the current events of Uprising would've been interesting but ya know, they're kinda dead. Maybe Nightscream as well with seeing the revolution through a young bot's eyes along with a reincarnation of his original show experience with the second Vehicon Apocalypse

[the-lost-lights]

Beast Wars: More than Meets the Eye AU Special: Megatron Origins

A little world-building stuff for Beast Wars: More than Meets the Eye I’ve made during a little chat with yes-i-write-fanfiction.

Premise: since I wasn’t unsure of which Megatron use for this AU, I decided to use 3 different Megatrons (technically one of them isn’t a Megatron but his original toy was a Megatron toy so he technically counts) and then I spent 2 days to make a decent backstory to everyone of them. By the way, I took some ideas from another AU of mine that one day will post for making the backstory of the last one and part of the second.

1)RiD2001 Megatron: the one closer to the IDW phase 2 version. Originally a low level factory worker called Gigatron of the Predacon faction, he found a book written by the infamous pro-decepticon sustainer Raksha that talked about Megatron and how he wanted to make a better society by deposing the “evil” Autobots. He was so inspired that he founded a group called the “Predacon Rights Movement” and began to manifest in a pacific way, with good success. Soon, the group began famous and grow quickly, causing the Maximal Council to become worried. So they decided to make the mistake of repressing them with violence, disperding the manifestations with violence and arresting the bots who participated at them. He then decided to train the members of the Predacon Rights Movement in order to make sure that they could defend themselves and, as a sign of rebellion against the Maximal, freed the prisoners of Garrus-1, many of which were members of his group. This caused most of the Predacons, and even some Maximals, to side with Megatron, starting the Maximal-Predacon War. The Predacons, less skilled at fighting and poorly armed, were losing fast, until the Battle of Kaon: the Wrecker leader Big Convoy and Megatron fought for the fate of the city and the Predacons rebels. The battle finished with Megatron winning and forcing the Wreckers to escape with heavy losses, but this victory was a pyrrhic one: many Predacons died, the city was destroyed and Megatron fell in coma due to the injuries, beginning the fall of the Predacons. Some millennia later, during the Blendtrons attack of Cybertron, a group of Predacons and Maximal sent by Terrorsaur found the place where he was hidden and, thanks to some experimental technology, he was resurrected, although he became mostly white. Confused by the long coma, not informed of what happened after the Battle of Kaon but still determined to defend his planet, he fought against the menace and helped Lio Prime to obtain victory. Then he discovered what happened to his movement after his coma and was arrested for having started the war that ravaged Cybertron and the universe. Even if he begged to be killed for what his action caused, Lio Prime decided to give him another chance letting him board the Lost Light as a crew member. Now going by his old name Gigatron, he reluctantly helps Cheetor in his quest for the Knights of Cybertron. He knows that almost everyone hates him for being the responsible of the war, and he tried to kill himself more than once, but his loyal follower Inferno still defends him and tries to help him to cope with his depression.

2)BW Megatron: once known as Gnashteeth. A mix of Beast Wars Uprising Megatron, the main Beast Wars Megatron and IDW Shockwave. Megatron the 2nd is violent, aggressive, lacks empathy and considers all his soldiers as expendables. Deep down however, he’s just a scared and abused mech who was stuck to a low job as a worker in an energon plant and when tried to change his life selling some of it in the black market he was beaten by the criminal leader Cryotek and his goons, who then told him that he will always be a nobody. This caused everything to go wrong for him and the whole universe. He started to hate everyone and decided that, in order to become someone, he needed to sacrifice everyone else. So he started to manipulate various bots, becoming in a short time not only the ruler of the cybertronian underworld, killing the leaders of the various mobs and taking control of them (including the one of Cryotek), but also the principal financer of the Predacon Rights Movement. When Megatron went into coma, he took the leadership and the name of the previous leader, becoming Megatron the 2nd. He then forced the Predacons to commit more and more acts of violence with the objective of ruling Cybertron. His tyrannical rule and the internal fractures of his faction caused him to lose progressively the control of the Predacons, until a Starscream-possessed Terrorsaur managed to defeat him and take the leadership of the group, exiling him on an uninhabited planet with the company of a diagnostic drone. Unfortunately, the planet wasn’t uninhabited as everyone believed, but instead was home of Destructons, Transformers-like machines that hated all the living beings and were planning on unleashing an artificial virus on the galaxy. Megatron was exposed to one of these viruses, the Vehicon Virus, that should have turned him into a zombie-like creature that mindlessly obeyed their order, but managed to maintain his mind and escape, decided to use the virus to finally rule all the universe. He first infected all the remaining bots on Cybertron and then sent them to some planets, beginning the Vehicon Apocalypse. As his Vehicon Empire expanded and became stronger, he slowly started to lose his mind due to the effects of the virus and his isolation (being the only sentient being on a planet of drones isn’t a good thing for a broken and unstable mind), and this got worse when the Oracle started assisting his enemies in order to bring him down. He made some generals for his army but they either betrayed him of died fighting Galvatron, who decided to kill him and take control of his army in order to destroy the galaxy. Megatron managed to win against Galvatron, but this caused his empire to fall: without a commander, the army of Galvatron collapsed and the Maximal and most of the Predacons united their forces in order to defeat the Vehicons. Desperate, he merged his body mutated with the virus with a copy of Fortress Maximus body and personally tried to destroy the enemy army. The war finished when Optimus Primal dropped himself inside the core of Cybertron with him, reformatting the planet into a techno-organic paradise and eliminating all the Vehicons. while he was falling, the Oracle showed at him his entire life, forcing him to realize the gravity of his actions. And for the first time of his life, he regretted what he did. Because of this, the Oracle offered at him the chance of starting again, albeit with no memory of his past and thus the risk of making the same mistakes. He accepted and, after his death, his spark was saved and he was reborn as the hot headed T-Wrecks, living with his mentor, the renegade Fuzor Noble Savage, and the enigmatic Optimus Minor. He now lives a happy life, but he has occasionally visions of an event called the “Omega Point”...

3)BW2 Megastorm: younger brother of Galvatron, he was the second in command of the unfortunate expedition that ended with everyone getting infected by the Angolmois and becoming Heralds of Unicron. He tried to usurp the leadership of the Heralds from his brother, but not only he failed, his brother destroyed his spark, downloaded his consciousness inside the starship Dinosaur and forced Megastorm to obey him until the day he would die. Some time later Galvatron died, and he, freed from the control of his brother, escaped to the planet Methuselah, where he convinced a scientist called Primacron to give him a body. The scientist instead turned the ship into his new body, with many smaller drones that were linked to him and he could use to do everything his new, giant body couldn’t do. Not exactly happy of this, but at the same time able again to interact with the world around him, he renamed himself Megatron and reunited many of the rebel Predacons that didn’t accept the peace with the Maximals. Even if now he hasn’t done nothing of too big, he managed to ally himself with two of the most mysterious and dangerous forces of the universe: the organic-haters Destructons and the mysterious Heralds of Shockaract. Now he will be finally able to satisfy his ambition of conquest and finally become superior to his brother. He is IDW Galvatron with a side of IDW Starscream.

[askvectorprime]

Dear Galvatron, can you tell us your plans regarding the Second Vehicon Apocalypse? I'm still not sure what you intended to use Jetstorm, Tankor, and Thrustor for.

The Second...ah. You're confusing me with another Galvatron. Why concern yourself with such a failed cause? This lesser Galvatron did lead an army of Vehicons, yes, but even this siege failed to stop the Cybertronian Parliament.

But everyone was wrong about the true goal of the Second Vehicon Apocalypse. It was not to conquer Cybertron, but to create a new history altogether. The very word you use, "apocalypse", is the revelation of secret knowledge. Jetstorm, Tankor, and Thrustor had a secret objective: to spread a new, mental pathogen—the "G-virus Mark 2", or "G2-Virus"—to all Cybertronians. The Vehicon army was merely a distraction for this effort. I can sense that he… that… he… maintained a mental link to these "G2 Vehicons", whose forms were unaltered, but whose biases and thoughts were changed over millennia. Eventually, historians would tell the truth—my revealed truth—about Lio Convoy and the Uprising, while I continued to work in the shadows, my G2-Virus became so advanced that it could even snare the minds of unwitting observers like-

Raaaaagh! Begone! Not all Galvatrons can be so easily overpowered! This so-called "G2-Virus" is just one of your petty head games! They can do nothing, nothing, to me! Nothing will sway me from my inexorable march towards unity through tyranny!

[askvectorprime]

Does spark-splicing actually exist anywhere in the multiverse?

Dear Searching Spark,

It does indeed. The Builders of Cybertron would carefully graft together the sparks of promising Maximals and Predacons together to create new ones, as a way of trying to bypass relying on the Terran Energon Matrix. The Maximal Windrazor, for instance, had his spark created through grafting fragments of the spark belonging to Dive Bomb, a veteran of the games, together with that of Phantomjaw, a member of the Predacon Secret Police. However, the practice never really caught on, as it required an enormous amount of energon.

After the Grand Uprising, it found new uses—first to create new Maximal and Predacon protoforms, and then in the development of Commandron and Maladroid mind-engrams. In the former case, two members of the Maximal High Council, long having been in love, decided to use spark splicing to help bring it into a newly manifest form. Two members of the Maximal High Council, long having been in love, decided to use spark splicing to help bring it into a newly manifest form. The resultant protoform, Tigerhawk, was the first protoform created on post-Uprising Cybertron, and was seen as a symbol of the newfound unity.

Unfortunately, even this peace couldn't last, and during the Second Vehicon Apocalypse, Tigerhawk found himself pressed into battle. He became a hero, and mourned the loss of his father.

[askvectorprime]

Dearest Vector. What were Nyx and Skold up to during the Grand Uprising? Did either of them ever compete in the Games? Did they join Lio Convoy’s rebellion? Did they survive the conflict or were the among the countless victims of the (First) Vehicon Apocalypse? And perhaps most importantly: what were their alt-modes pre-Beast-Upgrade?

Dear Builder Breaker,

Skold had been a crowd-pleaser during the Games, thanks to her signature unwavering strategy. In her heavy double-tracked tank form, she would absorb blow after blow, waiting for her opponent to become exhausted and energy-drained before finishing them off with a single shell. She only lost once: to a turbine-powered Maximal jet named Nyx, who tricked Skold into firing a shell at her own reflection, immediately knocking herself out. Nyx used a sharp metal fragment as a lance and delivered the killing blow, whereupon she was immediately hailed as a champion and promoted to the Maximal Flying Corps. However, as Skold was taken to be recycled, it turned out that she had survived Nyx's attack and was merely unconscious. She fled and eventually found herself working for Megatron's Darksyders, becoming an enforcer for those poor bots who bought Beast Upgrades but failed to pay interest on those upgrades. About five decades after Unity Day, she served as a bouncer for Megatron while he presided over the Cybertronian Parliament.

One day, she was sent to extract funds from a delinquent payer and "teach them a lesson", but she discovered the payer was none other than Galvatron and his three Generals. Galvatron offered her a key role in the Grand Galvatron Uprising, to wreak havoc against the Cybertron Parliament for its decades of stagnation. She quietly accepted, keeping her new role as a Vehicon General a secret from everyone, even Megatron.

As for Nyx—she had once enjoyed the prestige of belonging to the Maximal Flying Corps, but as the Resistance became dominant, she grew disillusioned by both factions, becoming a recluse. Once, when exploring tunnels underneath the surface, she came across a strange message scribbled on a wall: "Nyx Quest". Disturbed yet intrigued, she followed a trail of game-like hints through the tunnels until she came to a dead end, where a display appeared. Nyx saw the face of a strange reddish bot with antennae. It spoke just as she began to wonder: "GG, scrub. Saw your Let's-Play and knew you'd be up for a challenge, seems you've legit got some skills—so I can trust you with this choice loot." A strange golden disc appeared before her. "Turns out there's an exploit that lets you rewind the game clock. I made a guide to all the future DLC patches, every release note and bug fix, and was gonna give it my noob self, but now I'm getting into game design so IDGAF (leave a review if you liked my mod BTW, I'm about to check). Should let you get ahead of the meta, if you're not a cheat-hating tryhard. GLHF." Nyx took the disc, not understanding the strange words, and played its contents. She saw records of a future Cybertron, full of wonders—and terrors! She saw that the Second Vehicon Apocalypse was underway! She rushed to Cybertron Parliament to tell them the terrifying news.

Skold was already there, psyching herself up for attack. When she saw Nyx, she knew she had the perfect opportunity to kill her old enemy and get payback for the shame of her earlier defeat—but this threw her into doubt. If she were to attack then, would she really be doing so out of belief in Galvatron, or simply to settle a grudge? She realised that her loyalty was to Megatron after all, and in sparing him, spared Nyx too.

However, this caused the future on Nyx's Golden Disc to change! The Second Vehicon Apocalypse that was to begin with the destruction of the Cybertron Parliament did not occur, nor did Galvatron's uprising. Nyx did not understand what happened; had the awful future been averted, or merely delayed? She gave the Golden Disc to Megatron for safekeeping, and he promised to help her investigate these questions...