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Ok so, there’s this place called Cybertron.
It’s like one of the oldest places around. A planet made of metal and like I said, one of the oldest civilizations around, according to ‘em at least. They have a bit of an ego about that, anyway, for a while Cybertron was a pretty cool place to live, arts, sciences, you name it.
And its people…living machines, giant robots that could change shape into cars, planes, boats, animals you name it.
Now who made them you might ask yourself?
That’s a good question with tons of answers and really it depends on who you ask. Point is, they aren’t made in a factory or by anyone, they’re…born, forged in like these huge and I mean huge places where molten alloys fall into the ground like waterfalls and flow into crevices where sparks, their souls basically, and envelope it and the fusion of these two it gives them not only life…it lets them grow and learn. It’s life in ways familiar but way way different from you and me.
And then there’s the Primes. Ancient defenders of Cybertron and its inhabitants and beyond, tasked with protecting the cosmos by their ancestors. They were their leaders, socially, spiritually, military, their word was the law.
Which wasn’t a good idea when one of them turned out to be an insane prick. Said prick being Nova Prime or what he ended up being called, Nemesis Prime.
He was ok at first, defending Cybertron from the Quintessons, evil alien squids with like five faces, none of them pleasant, anyway they wanted Cybertron with all its resources and secrets and Nova was not gonna let that happen.
He raised a massive army and fought the Quintessons all the way back to their home planet which “mysteriously blew up”...yeah war can change people…anyway Nova gets the idea to kick off a new wave of Cybertronian colonization now that the way was cleared.
Things were going good until colonies started to vanish. People at first thought the Quintessons were back for payback but it was, well…a lot stranger than that…
An area of space called the Benenzuli expanse began to expand…in hindsight naming it that was maybe setting themselves up for it. The thing is that nothing could survive in it.
It was like a veil that once it covered something it was gone.
Imagine a big spot of nothing in space.
Full dark, no stars.
So Nova being a war hero and the Prime had to look into it and he set off to space never to return again…
So with the Prime gone, who was calling the shots now?
Well Nova was a smart guy, he set up a hand picked committee of “prepared” and “well connected” bots in charge while he was off in space, nothing new for him. But him being smart was not the same as him being clever, the bots he chose well…they had more ambition than brains.
They formed a senate. With each “elected” representative basically being industrialists and generals who Nova trusted but without him around to keep them in line well, the ambition won and it won fast.
So when he’s eventually declared dead in absentia, the senate broke with tradition and chose their own Prime, a figurehead to legitimize their regime and pass laws under basically a divine mandate.
I forgot, the Primes have this thing called the Matrix of Leadership, an ancient relic going all the way back to their legends, think something like excalibur or the holy grail and you’re on the right track. There was this old dude called Alpha Trion who was the keeper of the matrix and in a moment of incredible foresight took it from Nova before he left on his lil suicide mission and refused to hand it over to the senate’s prime.
Anyway, back on track. The senate then proceeded to ruin everything. They instituted a lot of oppressive laws which made a lot of people unhappy. Like it wasn’t as bad in some cities but when it got bad, hoh boy it got bad.
Want to be a doctor? Too bad the senate says this is your work. Oh you’re not happy with that? Hope you enjoy jail. Oh you want to switch up your alternate mode? Na ah, this is what you were forged with so you’re stuck with it now back to the work we arbitrarily assigned based on what you transform to.
And stuff was bad, some city states were way too happy to enforce this BS. Cracking down hard to make sure people went along these laws and whoever dared threaten them. Some cities were just having them like ok yeah you can choose your own job but don’t you dare talk bad about the senate or well toss you in the fucking gulag now! While a few just downright ignored them. Add socioeconomic inequality in a massive scale all thanks to the senate just wanting more power and control. They nationalized industries only to hand them over to their friends or kept sending the army on doomed expeditions to colonize planets with the people they trusted leading them from a desk in Iacon, their capital, while the rank and file were getting eaten by acid spewing monsters.
It got so bad people were going to see gladiatorial matches just to get their minds off stuff, like imagine just going “oh man thank god I can go unwind seeing someone cave a dude’s head in with a club after toiling away at a factory making circuits for some stuck up jackass in a yacht, really takes the edge off.”
Point it, it was a powder keg only waiting for someone to light the match, and well they didn’t just lit it they poured gasoline on it and tossed a grenade at it.
Megatron.
Or as he was known back then, D-16. Yeah, he didn’t even had a name, that's how bad things were.
He was a miner, a regular guy from the city of Kaon going from his 9 to 12 in an asteroid, risking death turning rocks into little rocks all the while thinking “Hey know what, this kinda sucks!” So he starts writing stuff, putting his words into paper as it were, and publishes it, anonymously of course, gets the attention of a guy in another, slightly nicer city Rodion, nicer in that there was actually a due process before getting your teeth kicked in by the cops, you know, give you a chance to only get slapped around. Anyway this guy Orion Pax, stand up guy, used to be the one good cop in probably all the freaking planet, quitting out of frustration and becoming an archivist in the planet’s capital of Iacon.
Trailing off again, sorry.
Well they get in touch with each other and become friends, with the mutual ground of “man this sucks” and they form a movement called the Ascenticons.
Pax wanted a radical change, he wanted protests, riots. He knew it was the only way people would listen, he wanted the senate gone, and he was willing to move heaven and hell to see people free. He had seen both sides of Cybertron, from the shining cities of Iacon and Curystal, from the slums of Kaon and Tarn, to the odd melting pot that was his hometown of Rodion.
D-16, on the other hand, wanted to reach the people first. He thought that the senate would have no way of ignoring them if all of them, all of the people they were screwing, banded together and asked for change, they’d have to give in.
At least until a certain day, his mine was being shut down, automatization if you can believe it and thus the people rioted and understandably so. Not understandable was the senate's response, they slaughtered the miners right on the spot. D-16 barely made it out alive and was forced into hiding, turning to the gladiatorial matches to make ends meet and there, he had a revelation.
He saw people chanting his name, listening to his every word and cheering him as his enemies fell before him. He saw people bow to him in awe and fear. And he saw Pax’s point and went even further, his thoughts of unifying the people and his friend’s calling for a revolution. Soon his fans at the underground arenas became his followers, spreading his word from the alleyways amongst the forgotten and hollow, to the workers toiling in mines and factories, to the overworked bureaucrats in offices, working for a room of investors selling useless commodities, to soldiers fighting for nothing in far off worlds for colonies that wouldn’t take off, academics, shopkeepers, vagrants. All of them listened to his words.
People flocked to D-16 , and the Ascenticons became the Decepticons.
As for him? He took on a new name. One from their legends, belonging to the first of their kind to fight against the status quo.
Megatron.
It was subtle at first, government officials dying off, industrial sabotage, unrest through the streets too much for the city guards to deal with. Then, well, bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, they were taunting the senate, and they moved their puppet prime, Sentinel, to bring them down, and to everyone’s shock, he does it!
Megatron’s been captured, the senate even takes their big fancy ship to put it over Kaon to remind everyone who’s boss and to see this Megatron fellow.
If you figured out where this is going, congratulations. You’re smarter than the Cybertronian senate.
He slaughtered them. The lucky ones died that day, the ones that didn’t. Let’s say they got a taste of what life as a gladiator was like.
And so the city of Kaon was the first of many to fall to the Cons. I guess at the time it looked like a good change at first, the senate was gone and now if you wanted to truly move up, you could through your own wits and strength, what remained of the senate, the ones smart enough to not go to the lions den, or the decent enough to not be dictatorial assholes even legitimized Megatron’s regime in Kaon.
It wasn’t enough for Megatron though. Overtime his regime in Kaon turned into the same dictatorships he rose against, dissent crushed through violence as fear silenced any sort of voice that dared speak up against him and those who did were forced to grueling labor, to fight for their freedom in the pits or just vanished yet soon the city of Kaon found prosperity.
If you can call it that.
But it still wasn’t enough. Megatron saw with jealous eyes how Cybertron was plunging into chaos, how without their oppressors, without their leaders, the people were falling into anarchy, into fear, into chaos. War was brewing in Cybertron and he saw the solution in his new “utopia”.
Peace through tyranny.
Tarn, Vos, Helex and Tesarus were the first to fall, brought down from within, the Decepticons' ideas having gone far beyond the walls of Kaon.
With Megatron at the front, city after city fell. Those who survived the conquest fled their homes, scarred by Megatron’s “peace”. All these refugees and soldiers without armies, soon began to band together and strike at Megatron where they could. But they were disorganized,outgunned and outmatched. They were easy pickings for the Decepticons and soon the last true bastion against Megatron’s armies was the shining capital city of Cybertron, Iacon.
Helping them was a voice in the radio, somewhere in Cybertron some brave or foolish bot was broadcasting anti Con propaganda, helping organize strikes and evacuations and the Cons freaking hated that guy, they looked everywhere for them to no avail even going as far as offering insane rewards and bounties for whoever got rid of them.
Then again, he wasn’t staying in one place for long, moving between cities and hideouts, they didn’t knew who he was. Well turns out our old pal Orion Pax was the voice. He was the closest thing the resistance had to a “leader”, even if he didn’t knew it. People looked up to him, clinged to his words for guidance and most important of all, hope.
Meanwhile in Iacon, this guy Zeta, he was appointed Prime by whatever senators thought they still had any sort of power, and man they were bad at appointing puppets.
Zeta was a patriot, which usually means psycho that likes to justify their crimes with a flag, and dude was willing to do anything to defend Cybertron, which in his mind was kill all Cons no matter the cost. Iacon was turning a refuge to all the awful stuff from before the war condensed in one city, so some of his army…ok all of his army that wasn’t his honor guard and some civilian leaders said screw it and under the guidance of the old guy, Alpha Trion, chief archivist of Iacon and de facto advisor to the former Primes assembled a team to go fetch Orion.
See it’s all coming together.
He had met several Primes before, having the sacred duty of passing down the Matrix to the Primes, and he hid it after Nova went missing, and he knew what made a good Prime, and Orion was it. Even if Orion didn’t think so himself.
Things were bad. The Cons were approaching Iacon, Zeta had taken over the archives looking for the Matrix and finding an ancient weapon that would win him the war, bad news, it was powered by sparks, so imagine a nuke powered by souls.
Alpha Trion acted first, sending a team to get Orion back to Iacon, a bit against his will but not like there were plenty of choices back then and was given a deal. Lead the remaining free cities of Cybertron, reclaim the matrix and lead Cybertron back into the light.
He wasn’t thrilled, but agreed to help in any way he could, at least to keep the matrix out of Zeta’s or Megatron’s hands. He insisted he was no leader, that the era of the primes was over.
Then Megatron and his army came knocking at the city gates, all while Zeta was ready to sacrifice every spark in Iacon to power a device he found in the archives, it was chaos.
Megatron and an elite squad got into the city, Zeta killed his own entourage to power himself to fight him and was ready to pull that on a city wide scale, and then, when everything seems lost.
Orion Pax found the matrix, and activated it, blinding light showered over him.
Optimus Prime had arisen.
And with him, the city of Iacon came to life, literally. Its center was the Titan Metroplex, a massive being awoken from ancient slumber to defend the city, laying waste to the besieging army.
Zeta fell in combat while Megatron uttered words that couldn’t have been imagined before.
“Decepticons, retreat.”
Orion Pax claimed he was no leader, but his actions as Optimus Prime proved otherwise.
Soon the cities and provinces that had fallen prey to the Decepticon tyranny were freed and scattered pockets of resistance began growing and joining Optimus' cause, and soon the Autobots were born.
But Optimus kept his word, the era of the Primes was over, the Autobots were not to be led by a single figure atop a throne in a tower above those that served him. The Primes were the protectors of Cybertron and he would serve his people, he looked far and wide and assembled a war council of the brightest, bravest and boldest soldiers in his army.
Elita 1, a fearless soldier and commander. Obsidian, a peerless captain whose ship had never been beaten and his, let’s say wife to not complicate things, Strika, a powerful and feared general, would lead and shape their people to fight against the Decepticons. Ultra Magnus, the eternal lawman, a title passed on from bot to bot, would be his right hand man and Star Saber,formerly a knight of a mysterious order (put a pin on that by the way) and Prowl, a genius tactician would be his advisors.
He found in Perceptor and Wheeljack, two famous yet outcast scientists, a wealth of brilliant ideas while the former Decepticon Jetfire would help find practical uses to them.
Elite units formed to help fight the Cons on their grounds. The Wreckers, a legendary commando team with the worst survival rate of any army, took dangerous missions to destabilize the enemy, and those who returned, became living legends. And then the Dinobots, loners led by Grimlock and experimented on by Shockwave, one of Megatron’s top guys, while believers of the Autobots cause, let’s say they interpreted a lot of Prime’s ideas in their own unique way, but you had a big Decepticon robot that needed to be taken down or a gestalt needed to be put in place. Look no further than them.
However with many wars inevitably comes escalation. Elite troops deployed to counter specific units, one side managed to create a combiner, several beings joined as one and able to split and merge at will, the other had to make their own, bigger guns and bombs and ships kept coming forth until a stalemate was reached.
So Megatron came with an idea, Cybertron would be his eventually, but right now, the Transformers race had spread across the stars, resources and troops were there for the taking, whether they'd be his willingly or not.
And problem solved right? The Cons leave and the Autobots can swoop in and liberate the planet right?
Optimus would not have it, he wasn’t gonna sit there and let Megatron spread his tyranny to other worlds, to the colonies, to innocent races who hadn’t even been born when the war began so he took a decision.
He amassed a fleet, not warships like what the Cons had, civilian ships hastily converted to fight, untested prototypes and whatever they could take from the Decepticon armada and took to the stars.
Soon, the entire galaxy became engulfed in their war much to Optimus’ horror, and I assume, Megatron’s delight.
Planets burned, entire civilizations gone with the pull of a trigger, fleets numbering in the hundreds lost never to be heard from again. Senseless death, colonies being dragged into the meat grinder, falling to the Decepticon’s lies, if they were lucky, if not, well, Megatron had a way if his words failed, meanwhile the ‘Bots fighting everywhere to liberate these planets, to safeguard those who couldn’t, some colonies joined him, either in fear of the Decepticons or moved by his words, but still, that couldn’t ease all the death and destruction they had brought into the galaxy.
It was hell.
And hell is where everything changed.
Hell’s Point to be precise.