Writings of the TOTGA-verse

Chromeharpoon · July 13, 2020, 6:02pm

Thanks! This story’s the first part of a series; I want to shed some more light on a little-explored area of the TOTGA-verse’s mythos, and show a little more of what humanity’s like here as well (they’ll show up a bit later on).

Chromeharpoon · August 10, 2020, 1:49am

Judgement, Part II

Liege Maximo stumbled through the door to the Chronon’s bridge, its irises and spherical locks peeling apart as the green-armored cybertronian nearly tripped and fell onto his face. He looked around the half-circle-shaped chamber to check if anyone had seen him, and sighed resignedly as he saw Vector Prime with a bemused smile on his face.

“You would do well to domesticate this ship’s Intelligence, Vector.” Liege straightened his posture and folded his arms below his chest. “How can your crew find anything when it’s constantly changing the interior?”

Vector shrugged. “The Chronon is not entirely under my control,” he admitted. “The crew and I have learned to work around its eccentricities.”

“Then install a holo-map for the rest of us,” Liege implored, rolling his crimson eyes. “Please?”

“You weren’t summoned here to renovate this ship, Maximo.”

Liege recognized the deep, commanding voice of Megatronus immediately, coming from a dark corner of the bridge where the light from the Benzuli Expanse didn’t reach. The red lines and cyberglyphs glowing between segments of the Dark Warrior’s armor shone dimly, roughly outlining his imposing silhouette.

“So nice to see you again, too,” Liege deadpanned to Megatronus. The latter quietly scoffed and stepped into the light, allowing it to snag on the sharp edges of his black armor, which rose in great spikes on his shoulders and the sides of his head. He towered above Liege Maximo and Vector, who themselves weren’t short for their species, either. Liege was slightly built, with a black cape hanging from his shoulders and two grey horns that rose out from the top of his head and curved sharply backwards; Vector was broader in the shoulders, with dull gold armor and clockwork mechanisms in his chest and abdomen that were dotted with points of blue light. He, too, wore a cape, his being a deep red in color.

“He is right, I’m afraid,” he says of Megatronus. “You can take up your issues with the Chronon after you help us with the more pressing matter at hand.”

Liege always hated this about these two: so duty-bound, and no time for idle conversation. He had hardly seen them in the last century, playing politics with Prima as their new civilization began to spread out into the galaxy. His gift of persuasion and sliver tongue (which wasn’t just a mere metaphor), made him useful in negotiating with the governments of other species, securing star systems for colonization and hashing out trade agreements (in some cases, Prima’s swordsmanship came in handy there, too).

And now he wants me to be his mouthpiece yet again, he thought, frowning. He knew this wasn’t what Primus had created him for.

Still, it was either first contact with a mysterious extra-dimensional visitor or another round of drafting treaties. Between the two, Liege saw a clear choice in the former. With a sigh, he took a step closer to the front of the bridge, a trapezoidal gap between the floor and the ceiling trimmed with grey metal, with nothing but an invisible shield between he and the other robots on the deck and hard vacuum. He peers up at the jagged column of black metal some tens of kilometres away, dotted with points of red light that shone like electronic eyes in the darkness of the shadow the spire cast upon the Chronon.

Liege suddenly understood why the other Primes were so apprehensive; whatever this thing was, it certainly looked threatening.

“Looks quite inviting to me.” he says, however. His dry sarcasm wasn’t lost on the other transformers in the room.

“Yes, I have prepared quite the welcoming party,” Megatronus said, playing along. “My finest cruisers are on standby in the neighboring system; at my signal, their crews will send to this invader my most cordial greetings.”

Liege smiled; so the Dark Warrior wasn’t completely without a sense of humor, grim through it was.

“Please, Megatronus, leave the first impressions to me,” Liege chuckled. “I know it’s the only reason you’ve kept me around this long…”

The green Prime hoped the other two hadn’t picked up too much of the bitterness within his last sentence as he drifted over to the communications array, where a blue-armored insecticon trained her compound eyes on a wide array of holographic screens and the complex interfaces beneath them. With a nod, she steps away from them, making room for Liege to take the controls. The silver obelisks supporting the controls rose, adjusting themselves to the Prime’s height, and he rested his long fingers over their circular pads and shallow indents.

An electric sensation ran up Liege Maximo’s arms as his neural network interfaced with the Chronon’s systems, connecting to the ship’s transceivers and translation programs. With but a thought and a twitch of a finger, he opened a channel across a broad array of frequencies, staring up at the ominous spire. Behind him, Vector and Megatronus waited with baited breath.

“Alien vessel, this is Liege Maximo, Prime of Cybertron,” he began. The Chronon’s AI translated his message into several common interstellar languages, and broadcast them alongside the original with only a second’s delay.

“We come in peace; provided you do, as well,” Liege continued, a smirk creeping across his face as he tapped into his wealth of charisma. Perhaps all that needed to be done was lighten the mood; clear the tension that two starships staring silently at each other in front of a physics-defying dimensional anomaly for a week straight would create.

"Truly, we love visitors; the more interesting, the better- and you, my friend, are just the talk of the town. We’re all positively abuzz at the prospect of making a more proper acquaintance with you."

Liege looked over his shoulder at his comrades, to see that Megatronus was resting his forehead in his hand, and that Vector was largely unimpressed.

“What?” he snorts. “There’s no protocol for this, now is there?”

Five seconds. Ten. Thirty seconds passed, and no response from the black spire came. The obelisk continued to drift between the Chronon and the expanse, its red lights staring untellingly down at them.

Making a show of clearing his throat, Liege re-opened the channel and tried again:

“Are you, perhaps, in need of assistance?” he asked, cursing his comrades now for not summoning him sooner. In their trepidation, they may very well have let any injured castaways within this spire suffocate from a hull breach, or freeze to death from a climate control failure. The paranoid fools could be fretting over a mass grave, for all any of them knew.

“We are able to render aid, if such is your case,” Liege said. “Please, respond. Say something, or… blink some of those lights on and off; I’m not-”

The green Prime ripped his hands from the controls as a horrible, electronic screech pierced his brain module, and instinctively he rushed to cover the sides of his head as he fell backward. Megatronus started, clenching his hands into fists as his lights flared. Vector rushed to Liege’s side.

“What is it?” he knelt by Maximo’s side, placing a gold hand on his shoulder. Liege’s head continued to ring, the awful sound lingering within his cranium for a moment before subsiding, allowing him to compose himself.

“Ugh…” he groaned. “Our visitor’s voice is not pleasing to the ears…”

“We have no need for aid, nor hospitality.”

A voice unlike any the three Primes had heard, even when facing Unicron and his demonic heralds, rumbled throughout the bridge. It was deep and reverberating, its words seeming to coalesce in their minds rather than being spoken aloud. The transformers manning the bridge’s stations jump up, now on full alert.

“All we require from you is your compliance,” the voice continued.

Megatronus scowled, his mouth opening to speak. Liege leapt up to stop him, but he was too late.

“Compliance?” the Dark Warrior repeated tersely. “You seek to make demands of us, then?”

“We demand nothing,” the voice answered, rising to the challenge in Megatronus’s tone.

“We have come to carry out our duty,” another voice says, lighter and almost feminine. "Any resistance to our presence is futile, and would only serve to inconvenience its perpetrators."

“Or at its worst, inflict upon them dire consequences!” a third voice, now, angry and snarling.

“You threaten Megatronus and his allies!” the warrior Prime roared. “Know that we have challenged Unicron and vanquished him, laying waste to his legions! To threaten the Thirteen is to court that same fate.”

“Um, Megatronus, friend?” whispered Liege. “Now is usually the time when I would attempt to de-escalate the situation; perhaps try to probe the other party’s intentions further before threatening oblivion.”

“They have revealed all we need to know of their intent,” Megatronus growled. “Let me call my fleet to this system, so that I may return these invaders to their homeland- piece by charred piece.”

Liege and Megatronus glare at each other, before a peal of hideous, high-pitched laughter fills the bridge.

“I’m glad one of us finds this amusing,” Vector deadpanned, frowning as he rested a hand on Rhisling’s pommel.

"Oh, yes indeed!" a shrill, fourth voice cackled. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had this little conversation, and it still tickles us!”

Liege and Megatronus were briefly united in confusion, but Vector was able to guess at what this voice meant.

“Ours is not the first reality you’ve invaded,” he said. “We’re not the only Vector Prime, Liege Maximo, and Megatronus to try and communicate with you, are we?”

“Oh, no!” the fourth voice laughed. "Far, far from it!"

“This universe is but one of many,” the second voice spoke again. “Timelines innumerable all branching off one another between the folds of unspace, each and every action taken by their inhabitants creating infinitely more, every moment.”

"Countless alternatives," the first voice boomed. “Trees of probability, an ever-expanding orchard of realities.”

All four voices then spoke in unison, and outside the bridge, the black spire began to turn, rotating as if on an invisible axis as three massive spots of crimson bloomed upon its peak, rolling to face the Primes and their servants.

“We are the custodians of this orchard,” they proclaimed.

“We study each tree, every branch, every blossom. Those that bear rich fruit shall be permitted to remain; but those that are weak and dying, whose sickness threatens to spread and poison healthy growth… these gnarled branches shall be cut. Weed and rot shall be ripped from the soil so that new growth may flourish.”

All aboard the Chronon’s bridge were silent now, gripped with horror as the cacophony of voices rose and fell, giving way to a final, fifth entity who spoke with an eerie calm; an ancient voice that spoke with the wisdom and authority of countless eons behind it.

“We are the Quintessons. It is our duty to cast judgement throughout the multiverse; to determine which realities shall be permitted to flourish, and which are to be destroyed. And now, the time has come for your universe to stand trial.”

Comments and constructive criticism are appreciated and requested!

Chromeharpoon · September 13, 2020, 3:30am

The next part of the Quintesson Wars will be posted soon, for those interested. In the meantime, I’ve cleaned up some of my earlier stories and included a Table of Contents for this thread:

Chromeharpoon · November 14, 2020, 3:06am

The Quintesson Wars: Protocol 19-8.4

Contact made with Liege Maximo, Megatronus, and Vector Prime aboard Chronon vessel. Reactions to our stated intentions fell within expected parameters. Liege Maximo’s interactions with Megatronus and Vector Prime suggest no outward hostilities at present- negotiations with Liege Maximo will likely be unsuccessful.

Analysis of Chronon returned specifications similar to those of Instance 3-446092-43763948. Interdimensional traversal capabilities confirmed; Bekuta Point tracking capabilities nonexistent. Chronon neutralized in accordance with protocol 2-7, with alterations to account for the absence of Optimus and Amalgamous Prime. The arrival of the Appointer will be unhindered.

Reconnaissance in Sol indicates humanity has not achieved advanced weapons or spaceflight technology. Relations with cybertronians are distant. Recommend disregarding humans as candidates for Appointment, though will leave final decision for the Appointer.

Applicable protocol for Instance 0 is 19-8.4, adjusted for emotional state of Liege Maximo detailed above- pursue termination of all Primes until further notice. Court establishment will proceed.

…Yeah, so life got in the way of that plan, unfortunately. This chapter was supposed to be longer, but I figured I needed to post something before too long. Fortunately, the chapter after this will pick things up: the quintesson’s first phase of their invasion will begin proper, and there’ll be a some action to go with it. It’ll be out soon- for real this time.

For now, feedback and constructive criticism is appreciated- if not for this chapter (since there’s not a lot in it), than for any of the other stories I’ve posted here or with my writing in general. I’m always looking to improve.

Flux · November 14, 2020, 3:40am

I’m going to go thru my thoughts on the story thus far; Judgment Part I is great. I love it, it sets up the setting nicely giving key aesthetic details that alienate the Quintessons, which helps these mysterious hunters feel like an actual threat to the primes. It’s great and yet a thing we see in nature. It’s a great set up to get the reader invested in the story.

Judgement Part II is great, we get to see more from Megatronus, Liege, and Vector. Liege pulls the story nicely, being our center of comedic relief. Furthermore the reveal of the Quintessons is awesome, it’s clear that they do feel above the characters we meet.

The Quintesson Wars: Protocol 19-8.4
I like this because it gets into the mechanic thinking of the other side, the other two stories didn’t really reveal all that much about the Quintessons, other than they’ve met the primes numerous times and have cast their brand of judgement on them. This gives us an robotic structured idea of what they see, which is certainly interesting. As you wrote, it is short, it’s not necessarily bad that’s it’s short. Although more detail would be welcome.

Overall, Chrome, I think you’re doing great! I want to see and read what else you have planned.

Chromeharpoon · November 16, 2020, 3:51am

The Quintesson Wars: the Iacon Blitz, Part I

When an enemy announced its intention to destroy you as plainly as the quintessons had done, it was imperative that you destroyed them first.

Currently, the Thirteen were failing in that regard, a reality all too apparent to each of them as they picked themselves up out of the rubble that had only recently ceased to be the Decagon plaza. The twelve-sided courtyard was now a black crater, smoldering in places and littered with twisted metal shards from the building around it… and many of the cybertronians who had been caught in the blast.

Prima swore to himself that the lost sparks would be avenged as he stood among his compatriots, his left arm raised to hold a triangular golden shield to the sky, which was hidden by thick smoke. The Skyboom Shield, a gift to him made by Solus Prime, projected an electric-blue barrier around himself and the other Primes, protecting them from the worst of the quintesson’s strike. It had to be the quintessons, Prima knew; Cybertron’s other enemies were dead, by his hand and those of his fellow demigods. And now these extradimensional invaders would be joining them.

“Well, that was fast,” Liege Maximo groaned as he shoved a girder off of his abdomen with his good arm- the quintessons had attacked the Chronon shortly after delivering their grandiose threats, and he hadn’t survived the assault unscathed before the invaders disappeared from the Benzuli Expanse in a flash of light. “It looks like we don’t have to wait for them to rear their heads again after all.”

“And they will not live to regret it,” Megatronus growled, rising to his feet. He offered Solus Prime his hand, and when she took it he effortlessly pulled her out of a mound of wreckage. Her dull grey armor was scuffed and blackened in places, but from the look in her violet eyes, one could tell she intended to inflict far worse upon her aggressors.

“Is everyone alright?” she asked, hefting a massive gold hammer. She was no doctor, but ironically a good whack from the Forge would mend any injuries her friends had sustained. The other Primes helped each other up, with none suffering anything beyond a few dents and scratched paint. Alchemist Prime quietly remarked that he’d now owe Prima yet another drink.

The Thirteen’s commlinks crackled with static before a frantic voice broke through: Claymore, one of the twelve bots who led the Knights of Cybertron.

“My lords!” he shouted through the feed, “My lords, I have dispatched a team to the Decagon to see to you- please respond!”

“We’re fine, Claymore,” Prima assured the knight, lowering the Skyboom Shield. The dome of energy around the Primes vanished. “None the worse for wear. What’s happening outside?”

“It’s the quintessons, lord Prima,” Claymore reported, his worry quickly subsiding. “A ship, like the one lord Vector Prime described to us has appeared over the city in a flash of green. It’s done nothing since attacking the Decagon; we’re evacuating civilians to the underground shelters now.”

“Fine work, my friend,” Prima replied. “Recall your rescue team and have them see to the evacuations instead. Gather the rest of the council and come to me!”

Claymore acknowledged the order with a proud “seglass ni tonday”, the rallying cry of the Knights of Cybertron, before ending the communication. Alchemist raised a hand, the glyphs on its armor flashing white to summon a gust of wind that blew the smoke over the plaza away. Imposed against Cybertron’s setting sun was the quintesson’s ship: the black spire, marbled with beady red lights that glared down at the Primes and topped with a mushroom-like hood adorned with three crimson spotlights. There was no mistaking it for anything but the same ship that had crippled the Chronon and eluded Megatronus’s fleet, now having somehow slipped past Cybertron’s orbital defenses to loom ominously above Iacon’s golden towers. The Thirteen felt its gaze boring down upon them.

“People of Iacon,” a rumbling voice boomed like thunder over the city, and Megatronus, Liege, and Vector recognized it as one of the five they’d heard during their attempt to commune with the quintessons back at the Expanse.

“The Imperium of Cybertron is now under the jurisdiction of the quintessons,” the voice continued. “We demand your compliance. Disobedience will not be tolerated.”

“Resistance to our occupation is futile; any attempt at such will be soundly rebuked,” the feminine voice now added. “All military forces are to stand down and surrender themselves to us immediately.”

Claymore comes onto the commlink again.

“Am I to assume we’ll be disregarding their demands, my lords?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

Prima’s white metallic skin shone in the evening sunlight; the Warrior of Light looked less like a robot and more like a set of ornate armor worn by primitive human warriors, held upright by a spirit inside that now burned like a roaring blue flame. He reached over his shoulder and drew the Star Saber, the massive great sword bequeathed to him by Primus himself, and its silver blade hummed as it turned a dazzling blue.

He looked up at the quintesson ship: the arrogant new foe that presumed to judge the fate of an entire universe. Its three largest eyes stared back, daring the Primes and their people to strike at them.

Prima flicked his wrist. The Star Saber chopped through air and sent a band of cosmic energy surging forth from its blade. It leapt up and struck the dark obelisk in the sky, and a line of its red lights burst in a sequence of explosions that popped like fireworks. And that was all the answer that both the people of Iacon and the quintessons needed.

…

Prima’s reaction consistent with permutations of Instance 353-23535475. Commence pacification of Iacon.

…

As debris fell from the gash cut into the quintesson ship, the alien vessel began to launch scores of black projectiles from batteries all over its spire. These obsidian orbs rocketed down toward Iacon’s streets, crashing into parks and buildings across the city. Alarms began to wail above the shattering of glass and the shrieking of tearing metal, and behind Prima the rest of the Thirteen drew their weapons.

Walking to the edge of the crater, Prima saw that fifteen of the black spheres had landed on a road beneath the Decagon. They clicked and hissed, unfolding to reveal hideous creatures with hunched bodies supported by long serpentine tails, clad in matte green armor and each sporting a multitude of robotic tentacles tipped with tiny claws. The quintessons looked up at Prima and opened their draconic snouts, revealing a smaller head between their jaws that rotated between five mechanical faces. Most settled for a red and orange visage frozen in a permanent scream of rage, and loosed shrill battle cries at the Warrior of Light. Prima’s aura flared around him as he brought the Star Saber to bear, and he looked back to see his fellow Primes standing close behind him, ready to fight together once again.

Prima turned his gaze back to the quintessons, and with a righteous shout he jumped down to face them.

“Soon” meant two days this time, as it turned out. Hope that was enjoyable, and as always, any comments and constructive criticism will be appreciated.

Flux · November 16, 2020, 4:50am

I really like how this one was structured

the opening paragraph gave a clear cut expectation of what would happen, and they were more than met. If anything Prima’s attack was above what the expectations set for me and that’s just great. It was an exciting read and now I’m even more excited for the next peice.

Chromeharpoon · December 11, 2020, 10:09pm

The Quintesson Wars: the Iacon Blitz, Part II

Onyx Prime didn’t have a “bad” side. Anyone with the persistence enough to provoke the wrath of the Lord of Beasts (and lacking in an instinct for self-preservation) would be best served running the hell away, and could only consider themselves safe once they’d left for the next star system over.

A few quintesson soldiers were about to learn this the hard way, as Prima jumped down from one of the Decagon’s balconies and split one of the tentacled creatures in half with the Star Saber, the blade slicing through both metal and viscera with the ease of a knife through thin air. Onyx Prime soon followed, unfurling a pair of massive wings on his back which thrummed as anitgravity mechanisms beneath their blade-feathers activated to carry Onyx’s massive robot body. He swooped past Prima and landed atop another quintesson ahead of him, pinning it to the ground beneath his forelegs. The quintesson shrieked and lashed up at Onyx’s body with its tentacles, raking at his black-and-amber-hued armor, while two other invaders raised plasma cannons from their hunched backs and shot at his chest and torso. Onyx gritted his teeth as the magnetic fields around the plasma bolts broke against his armor, and the sizzling energized gas beneath them burnt his “skin”; he ignored the pain as he reached down for the quintesson beneath him and seized bunches of tentacles in his large, clawed hands. He ripped the limbs from their sockets with one pull, and as he punched the hoof of his right foreleg through the quintesson’s armor and into its chest cavity he threw his horned head back and let out a loud, throaty roar of fury that could be heard for miles around the great city of Iacon. The Triptych Mask on his face reshaped itself into a four-eyed, hawk-like visage with a crown of sharp horns reaching up from the top of his head: the face of Predator.

Micronus Prime was sure glad to count Onyx as his friend: among other benefits, he figured it made his life expectancy shoot up a few millennia. He watched as the centaur-like cybertronian pulled his hoof, now slick with a dark-brown mixture of blood and mech fluid, out of the quintesson he’d gored, threw the severed tentacles onto the ground, and then leaped for the other two who were still shooting at him. These quintessons shut off their cannons and each raised their tentacles and a set of four arms tipped with long, bladed talons, but these did not dissuade the Lord of Beasts. He galloped into the two quintessons and grabbed them by their tails, tucking his head down as a flurry of claws and blades lashed at his face and shoulders. With a mighty heave he lifted one quintesson off the road and tossed him over the side, where it fell several stories onto a boulevard below. He then thrust is now-free hand down the hood of the second quintesson still squirming in his grasp, grabbing hold of the screeching face within. The hood snapped shut over Onyx’s forearm, its teeth biting into the armor, but the Prime only looked into the terrified eyes of his prey to howl savagely as he pulled out its head. Veins and wires popped, and teeth scrapped down Onyx’s wrist as he ripped the head from its body, its five faces sagging as the life drained from each one’s eyes.

Another quintesson slithered up to sink its claws into Onyx’s side, but Micronus had his friend covered. From the balcony above, the minicon’s body surged with electricity as he allowed his volatile spark to flood the capacitors built into his form. He threw out his hands and loosed a blast of lightning on the quintesson, and it collapsed in a steaming, charred heap. Prima launched a wave of energy from the Star Saber’s blade that sliced through three more; of the fifteen invaders that had landed outside the Decagon to face the Primes, seven now remained. These survivors did not relent- they raised their plasma cannons and sent a torrent of crimson bolts at their foes. Micronus jumped behind a fallen support column, his body smaller and more fragile than those of his comrades, and Prima raised another barrier with the Skyboom Shield to protect them all.

Micronus saw the quintessons immediately stop firing, and their last few shots were absorbed harmlessly by the shimmering barrier between them and the Primes. Without a second’s pause, they split into two groups and started to slither around the barrier, their faces switching to a silver and green face inside their hoods.

So the creatures aren’t just brainless drones. Micronus was starting to miss the terrorcons already. But Alchemist Prime stopped these seven early in their maneuver: the portly robot raised his arms, and a rainbow of light filled the glyphs inscribed onto his massive gauntlets and wide palms. The quintessons suddenly convulsed, reeling backward as raspy howls of agony escaped their jaws. Their own armor buckled under some unseen force and twisted itself into sharp spikes that jabbed inward at their organs. Scowling, Alchemist clenched his fists, and the quintessons seized in unison before dropping dead onto the road.

With the threat passed, Prima dispelled the barrier and drew his left arm back to his side. He cast a wary glance at Alchemist, having not seen such a brutal display of his powers since the battle with the Heralds of Unicron forty-thousand years ago. He’d forgotten how easily the jovial bartender could turn the elements- even the very structure of his enemies’ bodies- into a weapon.

“That mean we’re even now?” the stout Prime asked. The evening sunlight streaming from behind the quintesson ship overhead glinted on the rims of the round spectacles over his six eyes. Prima smirked, and twirled the Star Saber in his right hand.

“The night is still young, my friend,” he replied. “Best not to call the score just yet.”

Micronus looked up from his cover and saw Onyx Prime turn to face him. His hands were clasped together as he drew in a deep breath. His shoulders relaxed, and the Triptych Mask shifted into the passive, hawk-like face of Farsight. He looked down at the quintesson Micronus had electrocuted for him, and then back to Micronus; an appreciative smile spread across his face.

Micronus gave Onyx a thumbs-up and a smile in return, and looked over his shoulder to see Quintus drifting between the bodies of the transformers killed in the decagon plaza. He examined the burnt armor sadly, and pulled a yellow gemstone from his chest. It hovered in the air between his fingers, and began to glow as the Prime of Life uttered a prayer:

“Primus, these souls have been taken from this world too soon, by the unjust hands of an invading enemy. Please, relinquish their sparks, allow me to mend their bodies and return them to us once more.”

Micronus never knew if appealing to the Creator was necessary to use the Emberstone, but Quintus always said a few words to the Bot Upstairs before doing so. It seemed to work: the gem’s glow spread in whispy tendrils to the fallen transformers around the plaza, lifting them off the ground as their damages were miraculously mended. Their sparks reignited within their chests, and they were alive once again. They looked to one another in shock, but Quintus was quick to catch their attention.

“It is not safe for you here,” he said to them. “Come, I will lead you to a shelter.”

Micronus hopped down to join the others as Quintus led the resurrected civilians into the Decagon. “Quintus has already started helping in the evacuations,” he reported. “Figure that’s priority one for the rest of us, too?”

Prima nodded. They’d led their people together, but with a battle upon them the Warrior of Light was taking charge once again.

“They’ve taken us by surprise,” he says. “The knights will raise Iacon’s defenses in the meantime; we see the civilians to safety before launching a counterattack.”

The other Primes nod in agreement, before splitting into pairs to head into the city. Micronus leaped onto Onyx’s back and the Lord of Beasts took flight, soaring off toward a residential district. Beneath them, Optimus Prime ran alone, toward the boulevard beneath the quintesson’s ship.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Micronus asked his friend.

“He has his duties,” Onyx replied calmly, “and we have ours. We must each concentrate on our own tasks.”

Micronus sighed and gripped a raised section of armor between Onyx’s shoulders, as the two Primes flew between the monolithic spires of Iacon. Their windows were shattered, and more quintesson soldiers crawled down their lengths, spat out from their oppressive mothership. The arrogant creatures had dared to strike at the heart of Cybertron, of the civilization Micronus and his fellow Primes had devoted themselves to build. For that, Micronus swore to make them pay.

Wouldn’t be a war story without some action, now would it? As always, comments and constructive criticism would be appreciated.

Chromeharpoon · January 10, 2021, 2:16am

The Quintesson Wars: the Iacon Blitz, Part III

The quintessons swept through Iacon as if they had done it a thousand times before- and they had. They knew the evacuation protocols that Prima’s knights would follow to shepherd the civilians into bunkers beneath the city’s energon lake. They swarmed the anti-air defense cannons at the same time as detachments of knights raced to turn them on their solitary scout ship. And the five-faced soldiers were familiar with the tactics the Primes had taught their soldiers; for every quintesson a knight cut down, another would flank him in the meantime and tear him apart with its talons.

The pacification of the cybertronian capitol city was proceeding exactly according to protocol. Before the sun rose over Iacon again, its defenses would be broken, the heart of the Primes’ fellowship would be dead, and the civilization they had built would fall in on itself with its head removed. Then the Appointer would be free to do its work, and Judgement would proceed.

…

Prima stood between what must have been half a hundred quintessons and the entrance to a bunker beneath the Tower of Pion, a gold and bronze megastructure that climbed high into the dusky sky, just a few miles from the center of Iacon. He dared to look over his shoulder to see the last of the latest crowd of civilians being ushered through the yawning blast doors by Knights of Cybertron. He would allow himself to take pride in his acolytes’ swift response to the sudden invasion later, when there wasn’t a small army bearing down upon him.

Turning back to the approaching quintessons, Prima brandished the Star Saber and charged at the invaders. As he met them head-on, he swung his sword in a graceful arc that cut one of the quintessons in half along its middle. The blade of the Star Saber flashed blue, and a wave of its energy shot out through the felled alien and reduced eight more behind it to smoldering chunks of meat and metal. Prima spun like a dancer as more quintessons tried to surround him, and his sword sang as it threw out more bands of light to cut them down. Too late, he realized that these opponents were a distraction: the threw themselves against his blade to allow four more of their number to slither past him, toward the bunker.

No!

Prima whipped the Star Saber above his head, then slammed the edge of the blade into the metal road beneath his feet. The grey tile cracked and shattered as the sword’s energies surged outward in a shockwave that pushed back the belligerent quintessons. Prima turned, dragging his sword along the road to see the knights at the bunker’s entrance trading bursts of plasma with the quintessons who had passed him. One of the guards staggered into the wall behind him as a shot struck his shoulder, and Prima wound back his sword to intervene-

-But before he could, a blur of red and blue slid into the quintesson on his right, lobbing its head off with an axe. Without a pause, Optimus Prime barreled for the other quintesson, who hissed at the sight of its decapitated comrade. It lashed out with its tendrils; sparks flew as its claws scraped against Optimus’s armor, and the he reeled back. The quintesson lunged forward, thrusting out its talons, and Optimus had just enough time to shove the helve of his energon axe in their path. He allowed the quintesson to pull the weapon from his grasp, and ducked beneath its tentacles to deliver an uppercut to the hood over its face. In one fluid motion, Optimus spun around, snatched his axe from the quintesson’s outstretched arm, and turned back to bury its burning blade in its chest.

Prima ran over to his friend as Optimus kicked away the body of his fallen foe, and looked back to the knights guarding the bunker to see the wounded guard being lifted up by the other. Satisfied that they would both be fine, the two Primes turned their attention to each other. Prima started to speak- to thank Optimus for his timely intervention whilst reminding him that other parts of the city could use his help- but Optimus sprinted past him with little more than a nod of his head. Prima looked after him as he ran, bewildered. Where was he going?

…

Nexus Prime was spread thin, in quite a literal sense of the phrase: the combiner’s five components scrambled across Iacon’s central parkway to provide cover for the crowd of frightened civilians in his care. He could be everywhere at once, and yet it still wasn’t enough: the quintessons were beginning to slip past his components and drag bots off into the darkened buildings around the park. The spire of their ship lorded above them.

“Everyone stay close!”

From five throats, Nexus shouted to what remained of his dependents, gathering them in a huddle. Around them, another wave of quintessons gathered to snatch more transformers away for their unknown purposes.

Not one more, Nexus promised himself. You’re not getting through me this time, freaks.

A flash of orange exploded in the quintessons’ midst, and out from the techno-organic brushed jumped Optimus Prime with his axe drawn, with smoldering chunks of armor and flesh falling behind him. Always one to accept a helping hand, Nexus cheered and gathered his components together. Standing back-to-back with Optimus, he rebuilt himself into his towering, digitigrade combined form.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked Optimus in his basey voice.

“That remains to be seen,” Optimus replied. staring down the snarling quintessons. He realized that their attention was no longer upon Nexus or the civilians in his care: their beady eyes were all trained on him.

" 'Nother one of your ‘feelings’, eh, pal?" Nexus guessed. Optimus felt the sinking weight in his chest: the same sensation he felt whenever the Matrix of Leadership guided his thoughts. It was directing him even now, toward the bottom of the ship hovering above Iacon. Though why, he couldn’t yet guess.

“Fight beside me once again, Nexus, and we may find out together.”

Nexus smirked. “Good enough for me!”

The two Primes laid into the horde, Nexus drawing a massive sword with a bifurcated blade: the Cyber Calibur. As his weapon touched his foes, their bodies exploded into strings of muscle and detached machinery: Nexus applied the sword’s power to mend or dismantle anything it touched to frightening effect. Optimus’s weapon had no such abilities: he relied on its sizzling blades and his own skill, honed by centuries of battle against Unicron’s minions, to cut the quintessons down. The quintessons did not back down, did not retreat even as more of their number fell: they were relentless, and seemed to lack any sense of self-preservation. One swiped at Optimus’s leg and brought him to one knee, but Nexus swung around and reduced the quintesson to spare parts. As the melee continued to unfold, the civilians cheered their leaders on- some of them deployed weapons of their own from their arms and took opportunistic shots at some of the quintessons.

…

Optimus Prime located. Commencing termination as per protocol 19.8.4 (revised)

…

The weight in Optimus’s chest sunk deeper into his spark, like a black hole drawing light itself into its maw. Above him, a low roar assaulted his audio receptors as the sky turned red. He looked up, and saw the tip of the quintesson ship’s spire spit apart to reveal a weapon: a cannon of some kind that glowed with the same sinister amethyst light as the eyes all over its body. A quintesson took advantage of the distraction to tackle him to the ground, and three more jumped on Nexus’s back before he could run over.

Optimus wrestled with the quintesson as the cannon overhead glowed brighter, and its barrel crackled with bolts of crimson energy. The quintesson wrapped its tentacles around his legs, his torso, and his left arm, but a punch square in the face disoriented it long enough for Optimus to wrench his right arm free. The cannon roared like a dragon as its image began to disappear within the storm of blood-red light massing around it.

Optimus felt his hand reach into his chest, outside of his control. A familiar presence gently eased his mind’s hold over his body, as it had done during his last battle with unicron centuries ago. He didn’t fight it; he allowed whatever spirit dwelled within the Matrix to wrap his fingers around the panels beneath his neck, and pull them apart to grab at the sparkling gold shell inside. He felt his hand take hold of the Matrix, felt its surface rippling like water as his vision faded to white, and the roar of the quintesson ship’s cannon suddenly vanished…

As always, comments and constructive criticism are appreciated and requested! I’ve spent the last couple months going through a move and getting started with a new job, so that hasn’t left me much time to write. But I’m starting to fall into a routine now, and hopefully I can start cutting out some time each day to put pen to paper (figuratively, anyway).

Chromeharpoon · February 12, 2021, 12:56am

A Quick Update on the Quintesson Wars and the Future of These Stories.

Writing an anthology about a series of interstellar wars has turned out to be a greater undertaking than I originally anticipated. I originally created this topic to write short stories and bits of lore from around this little fanon-verse I’ve made, but I honestly feel bogged-down by the Quintesson Wars. I had no idea what I was truly committing to when I started it with the Judgement two-parter and I’ve been trying to learn what to do as I go along, which has impacted the quality of my writing greatly (not that it was ever anything exemplary, but I digress

I’m currently writing up a “finale” that’ll end the immediate situation with the aftermath of the Iacon Blitz. After that, I might take a break for just a bit to figure out what it is I really want to do here. I made a promise I couldn’t keep, and for that I apologize.

Flux · February 12, 2021, 12:59am

I feel that commitment emotion looks at SkoS
Anywho, I wish you the best and do note that I have been enjoying all of this, despite not always having something to say about it.

I still don’t know what I was thinking, when I started SkoS, who knew making a wargame by yourself and then creating a world for it was a huge commitment, clearly I didn’t think it thru.

Chromeharpoon · February 28, 2021, 2:53am

The Quintesson Wars: Bad Moons Rising

The quintesson’s ship, that foreboding tower of black metal and piercing red eyes, which had just hours before hung malevolently over the skyline of Iacon, now rested in smoldering pieces across the metal hills around the Well of All Sparks. It’s central column had been snapped apart like an ebony twig, and the mushroom-like hood atop it had caved in, with a great hole punched into its dome. Crimson lights across the wreckage’s surface flickered dimly, trying to hold on to life, while orange fires burned within the wreckage. It was a sound victory for the Primes and newborn race of Transformers; the quintesson’s daring invasion had been soundly repulsed.

But how that victory had been achieved, no-one among the people of Iacon could say for sure. Prima’s plan to activate the city’s defensive weapons had been rendered null as a bright light had suddenly flared at the megalopolis’s center, engulfing the enemy vessel as a loud sound, like the tolling of a great bell, had split the evening air and drowned out the sounds of clashing blades and weaponsfire. When the light and noise cleared a second later, the ship was gone, and a thunderous boom sounded from the plains around Iacon. The Primes and their warriors hadn’t time to ponder the miracle, and instead cut down the rest of the quintesson monsters infesting the city streets, now that they would not be replaced with reinforcements from their ship.

The battle was over. Night had fallen over Iacon and the surrounding plains, and while the populace immediately went to work repairing the damage the quintessons had wrought- assisted by the restorative abilities of Solus, Alchemist, and Nexus Prime- the rest of the Thirteen traveled to the crash site in search of answers. Before the looming visage of the ship’s hood, a ribbon of green light sliced through the air. It grew larger, widening into a gateway cut into the empty space. From its center, Prima, Megatronus, Liege Maximo, Amalgamous Prime, Alpha Trion (accompanied, as always, by Beta Maxx), Onyx Prime, Micronus Prime, and Quintus Prime emerged together, their armor painted by firelight and the dim glow cast down by Cybertron’s twin moons, Hecate and Artemis. Vector Prime walked out of the portal behind them all, and dispelled the gate his sword had created by stowing Rhisling on his hip. The glyphs on its blade stopped shining, and the air around the Primes righted itself again. The robotic demigods looked up at the destroyed ship, none of them taking as much pride in their victory as they wanted to. With only one ship, the quintessons had slipped past fleets of warships and planetary defenses, and proceeded to launch an invasion of the capitol city of their fledgling civilization.

It made Vector Prime wonder: if this enemy was so bold as to immediately attempt such a strike- to leave the rest of the Imperium of Cybertron leaderless and disoriented, no doubt- how would they retaliate now that they had been defeated? If the quintessons truly had visited other dimensions before this one, had they already anticipated the results of this battle?

He shook his head. He wouldn’t allow himself to become paralyzed by fearful ruminations. As the Guardian of Space and Time, a threat to the multiverse such as this new enemy was his responsibility, whether the others shared that sentiment or not. Meanwhile Megatronus kicked at pieces of wreckage by his feet, looking for anything that could have once been a weapon, or a part in the ship’s systems. The segmented plates that made up his face were shaped into a scowl. If Vector thought he had been caught unaware by this new enemy, he could only imagine what ran through Megatronus’s mind.

Vector’s gold hand rested on Megatronus’s pitch-dark shoulder. “This will not happen again,” Vector said reassuringly. “We will be ready for them.”

But Megatronus only turned his grimace to the face of his comrade, and shrugged the outreached hand off of his arm. “Indeed, I shall,” he hissed wrathfully, his eyes burning a hellish red. Vector gave a melancholy sigh, and joined the other Primes in examining the wreck. Only one bot could console Megatronus in his worst of moods, and she wasn’t here right now.

Beneath the quintesson ship’s dome, they found a way into the vessel’s interior. The winding passages were large enough to accommodate their giant forms, though to Onyx Prime they seemed more like the veins and arteries of a massive creature than hallways. With curved surfaces and walls made from thick black cables, they branched off into smaller passages often, and frequently merged with others halls to lead into wider chambers housing unfamiliar machines. Some shipwrights likened their craft to loyal companions, but this monolithic vessel truly felt like a living organism- like the bestial titans that roamed across Cybertron’s equator. The Lord of Beasts squared his shoulders and tensed his claws, feeling like some insignificant microbe within the body of this bizarre creature.

“Fascinating,” remarked Quintus Prime, plucking a cable from the wall and pinching it with his long, thin fingers. Maroon liquid trickled from its torn end. His six eyes were wide with wonder, and his small mouth agape. “Oh, if only Optimus had left it in a more pristine condition…”

“That is one way to appraise this… thing, I suppose,” Onyx murmured, not exactly sharing in Quintus’s enthusiasm. The difference between the two of them, he supposed, was that Quintus couldn’t recognize a true monster among the many forms life took across the cosmos. The quintessons didn’t even come from this cosmos; they were foreign to the natural order, and it terrified the Lord of Beasts.

The Primes pressed inward in to the wreck, keeping on the same path as it went uphill through burst-open hatches and intricate valves. Broken bodies were strewn across the floor: some the Primes recognized as more of the tentacled warriors they had fought, while others were clearly of the same design, but frailer, and without tails to support themselves on. Their bodies simply ended in a web of tendrils bellow their waist, and some even had more additional appendages coming from their flanks, or behind their shoulders. Pinkish flesh wove with complex circuitry beneath sheets of osteoderm and metal. The Primes said nothing as they passed the corpses, eventually coming to a door which hadn’t broken open wide enough to allow them through.

With the strength of the five robots that made up his form, Nexus Prime stepped forward and ripped the hatches from the walls, tearing out trails of wires and tubes beneath them. The Primes stepped through the aperture and into a massive round chamber, the interior of the quintesson ship’s domed cap reaching up all around them, with twin beams of moonlight shining through the massive tear in its side. The silvery radiance shone upon destroyed machines adorned with strange markings, with damaged hologram projectors that occasionally spat out more otherworldly symbols that none of the Primes could decipher.

In the center of the cavernous space, a harness made from gnarled mechanical arms, twisted like the roots of a black tree, reached down and wrapped around a creature encircled by broken monitors. It had no limbs that the Primes could see, just a large, bloated face of necrotic tissue and grey cybernetic implants that held it all together. It’s bony jaws were slack, its mechanical eyes lightless. All over the creature’s body, cables and tubes of varying size stretched between it and the myriad of machines around its harness, which in turn were linked to the other mechanisms throughout the chamber by visceral webs of veiny circuits.

The Primes gaped up at this thing in a dreadful silence, not knowing what to make of it. Now more than ever, these new foes presented themselves as a threat utterly alien to them. For all his terrifying powers, Unicron and his minions were something they could understand.

The creature in the harness suddenly shuddered, and its right eye filled with a dim red light, which illuminated a jagged rupture in the armor above its face, where blood and mech fluid bled out through ridges of brain matter. Creature and harness turned as one, swiveling on some axis in the ceiling to face the Primes as a choked gurgling sound escaped its mouth. Horrified, Prima stepped back and threw a hand on the hilt of the Star Saber.

“What… what in Primus’s name are you?” he gasped. The creature’s jaws drew together as its one working eye widened. Then, it spoke:

"Prima of Cybertron. You and the rest of the Thirteen, acting on behalf of the cybertronian race, have refused to comply with our mandates and submit yourselves to Judgement." It spoke in the detached, eery voice that the crew of the Chronon had heard at the Benzuli Expanse. It shuddered, as more fluid poured from its wound and a few cables on its side tore away from its body.

“Submit?” Prima scoffed. “You expected us to stand by and let you decide if we live or die?”

“Your compliance was mandated, cybertronian,” the creature- a quintesson, to be sure- said. "Your universe has been selected by the quintessons for trial and examination. The compliance of the native civilizations ensures an orderly procession and is convenient on your part."

Prima’s eyes narrowed. “Your people appear more as invading tyrants than judges, from where I’m standing. The Imperium of Cybertron does not recognize the authority you claim over our right to exist.”

“Irrelevant,” boomed the quintesson. More machines began to come loose from its body as the edges of its face sagged. "We are the only authority; only we can observe the permutations of existence, removed from its influence.

“There is a realm of being beyond the ability of even your technological mind to grasp. It affords a perspective that you could not begin to process within tenfold of your spark’s lifespan. What you perceive to be your universe is part of a vast matrix that must be curated, and only we have the means by which to do so.”

The quintesson began to sink into its harness as it drew closer to death, and Prima stepped forward. This shriveling creature’s grand words and pious ramblings did little to sway his mind. He drew his sword from his back and pointed the Star Saber’s blade up at the quintesson.

“You have lost,” the Warrior of Light says defiantly. “You underestimate your enemies if you truly expect them to yield to you- not without a fight, they won’t. The people of this universe will never be cowed, and we will resist your judgement with everything at our command.”

The quintesson’s eye flickered as blood stopped pouring from its head wound. Its flesh sagged, sloughing off its mechanical supports in places as it offered a final rebuke to the Primes:

"Your actions are consistent with previously-observed permutations. You are but a piece in a system far beyond your ability to comprehend. You are a product of probability on a scale unfathomable to you, but which we have observed since before its inception. You cannot break from the confines of your existence. You cannot defy the quintessons.

“You believe you will have war, Prima of Cybertron. We will have Judgement.”

So here it is: the finale of the cut-short Quintesson Wars. More of a look into how they started than a chronicle of centuries of battle and the generations of people who fought in them, but it’s the best I could do. I bit off way more than I could chew on this one and found myself in way over my head.

So this is the end of the Quintesson Wars, but from now on I’ll be returning to just writing standalone vignettes or short stories from around the TOTGA-verse timeline. I’ll revisit the quintessons and the Quintesson Wars again, but in a format more within my capabilities, and sprinkled among other things that I want to share.

As always, comments and constructive criticism is requested and appreciated. Thank you so much for your time.

Chromeharpoon · March 9, 2021, 1:34am

Timeline

A timeline of significant events of the TOTGA-verse, spanning over a hundred and twenty million years.

??? BCE: Primus and Unicron are created on Trecedim. The finer details of their origin is unknown.
???-??? BCE: Primus and Unicron explore the universe. Their opposing views lead to conflict.
???-??? BCE: Primus and Unicron battle for the fate of creation, with Primus wanting to preserve life while Unicron sought to destroy it.
??? BCE: Primus flees from Unicron to the Milky Way galaxy, and sacrifices his physical form to create Cybertron and the Thirteen.
???-??? BCE: the Thirteen train to master their powers and become acquainted with one another. Solus Prime forges the Skyboom Shield for Prima and crafts the Apex Armor for Liege Maximo.
??? BCE: Quintus Prime creates the first generation of transformers to fight beside the Thirteen. Twelve of these transformers found the Order of the Knights of Cybertron and serve directly under Prima’s command. Megatronus commands his own Warriors Elite.
??? BCE: Unicron creates his four Heralds to find civilizations to destroy and to fight Primus’s forces.
???-??? BCE: several millennia of conflict between the forces of Primus and Unicron.
??? BCE: the final battle between the Thirteen and Unicron. Optimus Prime opens the Matrix for the first time, killing Unicron and banishing the Heralds to the Void.
39520 BCE: the Golden Age begins. Cybertronian-kind unites under the banner of the Imperium of Cybertron, led by the Thirteen.
39520 BCE: the Well of All Sparks begins to regularly produce new transformers from its depths. Rapid migration and urbanization across Cybertron begins.
39517 BCE: the Primal Basilica is constructed in Iacon. The Order of the Knights of Cybertron becomes the Imperium’s primary military, scientific, and peacekeeping force.
39500 BCE: The Knights of Cybertron begin launching exploratory missions into deep space and make contact with the nebulon race.
39492 BCE: official relations between the Imperium of Cybertron and the Nebulon Republics begin. Meanwhile, the Knights of Cybertron begin experimenting with cybermatter as a means of establishing colonies on other planets.
39457 BCE: Cybertron’s first moon, Hecate, is selected for colonization and is cyberformed. Mining corporations begin operations on the second moon, Artemis.
39440 BCE: Gigantion is selected for colonization and cyberformed. Solus Prime oversees further experiments concerning cybermatter.
39430-39300 BCE: advancements in cyberforming technology leads to a colonization boom. Chaar, Paradon, Antilla, Caelum, and Conventus are cyberformed and colonized.
39000 BCE: further experiments with cybermatter are relocated to the planet Sero and conducted in secrecy by Solus Prime and the Knights of Cybertron.
38882 BCE: the extradimensional plane of transwarp is discovered by Vector Prime and the Knights of Cybertron.
38803 BCE: cybertronian-kind now uses transwarp as the premier method for faster-than-light travel. Meanwhile, Solus Prime’s cybermatter experiments on Sero lead to the development of the first space bridge.
38800-38795 BCE: a network of space bridges is constructed to link Cybertron and the colonies.
37420 BCE: first contact with the quintesson race at the Benzuli Expanse.
37420-37417 BCE: the First Quintesson War. An experimental machine made by Solus Prime from her experiments with cybermatter is used to drive the quintessons out of cybertronian space.
37416 BCE: the Imperium of Cybertron is inducted into the Federation of Allied Species- the interstellar body politic.
37415-37410 BCE: the Second Quintesson War. The Imperium of Cybertron drives the quintessons out of our dimension with aid from the Nebulon Republics.
36666 BCE: the Third Quintesson War. Attempts by the quintessons to re-enter our universe are soundly repulsed by a muliti-species armed response.
1st Century CE: Solus Prime begins construction of the Omega Lock on Sero. Meanwhile, Liege Maximo spreads lies among the other Primes and their followers, making them distrustful of one another.
200 CE: Solus Prime completes the Omega Lock.
484 CE: first contact with humanity and cybertronian kind on Earth.
1530 CE: the War of the Primes begins. All transformers are recalled to the Imperium of Cybertron to fight. The official cybertronian presence on Earth departs.
1845 CE: the War of the Primes ends with a thirteen-way brawl between the Primes, in which Solus Prime is killed. Liege Maximo is found to be the instigator of the conflict, and the surviving Primes all turn on him.
1845-1945 CE: Liege Maximo is imprisoned in a stasis pod for instigating the war, and the Primes decide to leave Cybertron. The Knights of Cybertron construct an elaborate tomb in the Hydrax Plateau and tell the cybertronian populace that the Thirteen all killed each other in their battle.
1945-1946 CE: Optimus Prime splits the Omega Lock into five pieces, and his disciples hide them across uncharted space. Meanwhile, Quintus Prime gives the Matrix of Leadership to a student of Alchemist Prime in secret, so that the lineage of the Primes will continue.
1946 CE: the planet Clemency is cyberformed and colonized by the Imperium of Cybertron. Liege Maximo’s stasis pod is hidden inside the planet’s colony ship. Meanwhile, another colony ship carrying the Key to Vector Sigma crashes on Junkion. The crash triggers the ship’s cyberforming engines, and Junkion becomes a cybertronian colony.
1947 CE: the surviving Thirteen and the Knights of Cybertron leave the Imperium aboard thirteen colony ships. To the cybertronian populace, it is as if the Knights just mysteriously disappeared. Aethus Prime becomes the second Matrix-bearer and fourteenth Prime, and takes up the mantle of leadership.
1950-2000 CE: the eleven Prime Colonies are established in uncharted space. Meanwhile, Optimus Prime discovers Trecedim at the edge of the galaxy and is appointed as its guardian.
1984 CE: contact with humanity and the Imperium of Cybertron is re-established.
2007 CE: formal relations with the Imperium of Cybertron and the human United Nations begin.
2121 CE: humanity organizes itself under the United Human Polities (UHP), presenting a united front to the intragalactic community while preserving the identity and sovereignty of individual nations. This new superpower quickly begins rapid colonization of the Orion-Cygnus arm of the galaxy.
3355-3359 CE: the Fourth Quintesson War. The quintessons bring a massive Dyson sphere into our universe to act as a staging ground to subdue the Milky Way galaxy. This sphere is destroyed in a joint human-cybertronian assault and the remaining quintesson forces are swiftly quelled.
3359 CE: the UHP is inducted into the Federation of Allied Species.
3370 CE: the Epoch of Stagnation begins for the Imperium of Cybertron.
100013400-100013401 CE: the Dire Wraith Conflict. Alien invaders besiege Cybertron’s outer colonies. Sentinel Zeta defends the Simfur temple from a Wraith assault.
100013410 CE : Sentinel Zeta becomes Sentinel Prime, the 1,316th Matrix-bearer.
100013410-100024000 CE: Under Sentinel’s reign, tensions between the social classes in cybertronian society escalate over concerns of inequity. This burgeoning discontent is escalated by the emerging Decepticon movement led by Megatron.
100024000 CE: the Decepticons seize the colony of Chaar and use its industrial resources to begin raising a military force. The Great War begins.
100024020 CE: the Decepticons lay siege to Iacon and murder Sentinel Prime’s council of advisors. Sentinel Prime himself mysteriously disappears, and the Matrix of Leadership somehow ends up sealed away in the Tomb of the Primes. The Epoch of Stagnation ends.
100024025: the Autobot faction is formed, led by Ultra Magnus, in opposition to the Decepticons. The location of the Tomb of the Primes suddenly disappears from collective memory.
100024585 CE: the Autobots and Decepticons agree to a cease-fire after it is discovered that the core of Cybertron has been severely damaged. If it is not repaired soon, Cybertron and the colonies will die and extinction will be inevitable.
100024585-100024590: the Decepticon Fleetcarrier Invincible is rebuilt into the CFC Salvation following the discovery of one of the Omega Lock’s components within the Sea of Rust. A crew consisting of both factions (and neutral parties) will crew Salvation to gather the rest of the Lock and use it to repair the core.
100024590: the events of Transformers: Salvation. (see original post for details)
100024591: the Great War ends in the Battle of Mission City on Earth. The Autobots defeat the last of the Decepticon armed forces, and thus they win the war.
100024595 CE: transformers are exiled from the civilized galaxy, confined to space around cybertron & the colonies.
100024600 CE: the Imperium of Cybertron reorganizes itself into the Cybertronian Commonwealth, led by democratically-elected officials.
105095316 CE: the colony of Velocitron is founded.
119992707 - 119992906 CE: The Final War- human civilization is nearly destroyed in an interstellar war of attrition. A nanotech weapon renders Earth uninhabitable. The planet Avalon Prime becomes the new home of the UHP intergovernment and the post-Final War heartland of humanity.
119997917 CE: Earth becomes habitable again, and humanity rushes to rebuild their homeworld.
120002915 CE: The events of Transformers: Twilight of the Golden Age. (see original post for details)
120002916 CE: The New Imperium of Cybertron is formed with the reunification of the cybertronian worlds. Axis Prime becomes the 1,317th Matrix-bearer.
120007917 CE: the events of Transformers: Dawn of a New Age. Heroes new and old unite to defend the galaxy from an all-consuming evil.

Not much to say here. We need a timeline if I’m gonna be jumping all over the place chronologically. Comments and constructive criticism are not only appreciated but requested.

BlackBeltGamer98 · March 9, 2021, 5:56am

The two missing entries, what will they entail?

Chromeharpoon · March 9, 2021, 12:33pm

I can’t give it away right now, of course, but it’s got something to do with what the rest of the galaxy was up to during the transformers’ exile.

Chromeharpoon · March 18, 2021, 12:29am

I have made some edits to the timeline- mostly to correct grammatical errors and to include information I mistakenly ommited.

Also, I’ve begun re-writing some of the bios for the various cybertronian colonies. Looking back, a couple of them don’t describe the planet’s culture or important sites as well as I wanted. Spirabilis’s updated bio has been up for a few days now.

Chromeharpoon · June 12, 2021, 10:02pm

Legacy

The Burthov Spaceport, Cybertron, 6.12.120006999

A clear, starry night had fallen over the Burthov Spaceport, allowing the pale light of Cybertron’s twin moons to fall upon the metal land. A massive audience of cybertronians of every kind, from every world- among them scientists, old soldiers, bounty hunters, holy warriors, miscreants, and other varieties of unlikely hero- stand assembled before two of the spaceport’s many docking cradles. Resting within one was a massive vessel, nearly thirty miles in length, bearing a bronze-colored hull accented by maroon on her downward-angling fins: Salvation II, the successor to the modified Fleetcarrier whose crew had saved their entire race from extinction over twenty million years before.

In a smaller berth beside Salvation II was a comparatively tiny frigate- a slender craft built from black metal, appearing as essentially a thousand-foot-long energy cannon sandwiched between two engines and a command center. The Excalibur II- built in memory of the ship whose crew had vanquished the Heralds of Unicron and ushered in a new Golden Age only a few thousand years earlier- glowed with green exterior lights running down the length of its hull, and a similarly-hued aura burned it each of its thrusters.

A tall bot with vibrant orange and yellow armor speaks to the crowd, relating to them the history of the names Salvation and Excalibur- a purely ceremonious gesture, as most everyone in the crowd knew them well- before turning to face their newest incarnations as she drew a long, golden sword from her back, and lifts the blade to the sky.

On her signal, the two ships come to life, gently roaring as their engines flare and exude jets of plasma. The docking cradles release Salvation and the Excalibur’s descendants, their catwalks, cables and tubes peeling away as the two ships begin their climb toward the black heavens. The Excalibur II spirals around Salvation II as the two ascend, quickly overtaking the gargantuan Fleetcarrier with its superior speed.

The crowd looks up, watching in awed and respectful silence as the Excalibur II becomes but a shining green dot in the night sky, and Salvation II a twinkling blue speck- the two almost indistinguishable from the thousands of white stars up above. Their auras then brighten as their transwarp drives engage, and with a flash the two ships vanish, each leaving a dazzling trail of emerald and cyan light in their wake as they soar into the night.

Chromeharpoon · June 29, 2021, 3:43pm

The Prime Colonies

Primogenitum

All of the Prime Colonies were cyberformed and developed with the aid of the Order of the Knights of Cybertron, holy warriors and explorers who were the premier scientists and peacekeepers of the Golden Age. History has no shortage of records and legends of dutiful and honor-bound Knights defending the weak and innocent. Beholden to the Thirteen, but loyal to Prima especially, the Knights of Cybertron came to the Warrior of Light when the other colonies had been sufficiently developed, and settled on the world which he had chosen to be his legacy. The named it Primogenitum.

Primogenitum has two large continents which take up much of the eastern and western hemispheres, and each one has similar environments to the other. Each plays host to vast mountain ranges covered in evergreen forests, great expanses of rolling, grassy hills, lakes, and white beaches along their coasts that give way to the ocean. Primogenitum’s climate is similar to Earth’s northern hemisphere, with four seasons also like Earth’s. The climate warms in the spring and summer, and cools in the fall and winter. Struck by the natural beauty of Primogenitum, Prima’s disciples decided against urbanizing the entire planet, and instead live in separated cities built around Wells of Sparks while leaving much of the natural world untamed. These cities are by no means isolated, however, as aircraft frequently fly between them.

Primogenitum’s capitol city is Machaera, built just beneath the north pole on the ocean between the two continents. Bridges extending from the coast of each landmass connect to Machaera, and it is from here that the Knights of Cybertron rule the planet. The order is led by a council of twelve, chosen from their ranks for years of exemplary service displaying courage, humility, and benevolence. A high percentage of Primogenitum’s population holds membership within the order, sworn to protect life and right injustice across the cosmos. With the reunification of the cybertronian worlds, the Knights are once again returning to their place as the New Imperium’s protectors, and their ornate, medieval visage is a common and welcome sight across cybertronian space.

Prima never ruled Primogenitum, instead living a life of seclusion upon his world while he left the Knights to shape its civilization. When he died, his body was interred within a mountain on the western continent. His sword, the Star Saber, was entrusted to his Conjux Endura, who hid it at the bottom of a lake on the eastern landmass. She is still alive today, and continues to watch over her departed lover’s weapon, only bestowing it to those who possess his pure heart and noble intentions.

Aevum

Aevum is a unique anomaly in the multiverse: a single point in space and time that somehow exists in multiple realities at once, shrouded within a strange energy field that warps the barriers between universes. Intrigued by this bizarre world, Vector Prime chose it to be his colony. Evidently, many Vector Primes across the multiverse made a similar decision: today, Aevum is a hub of sorts for travelers and immigrants from across dimensions, and a gateway from which a traveler could explore infinite realities beyond their own.

Much of Aevum’s surface is encrusted in cities made from blue and black metal, featuring great observatories in which scientists and historians watch history unfold throughout the multiverse. Travel between realities is largely unrestricted, though there are a few rules in place so as to protect the integrity of the fabric of reality. Time travel, for example, is largely prohibited- and while theoretically nigh-impossible, anything can happen in a multiverse of infinite possibilities. Outside of Aevum’s cities is a vast desert. Its geography is constantly changing, and its sands are littered with artifacts from various universes. Anything from old toys to entire starships can be found here, and unsavvy wanderers are in great danger of becoming lost in space and time, never to find their way out.

When the rules of multiversal conduct fail, there exists an organization dedicated to neutralizing threats to all of existence. The Temporal Guard was established by various Vector Primes to intervene in situations which could effect the flow of time and the stability of the multiverse. Navigating such threats is a difficult task- the Guard could just as easily exacerbate a problem they might be trying to fix. Therefore, they are rarely called into action. Aevum is also fiercely protected in all realities, for the damage one could inflict if they were to somehow disturb this multiversal nexus point is unfathomable.

Sophos

Sophos, cyberformed and colonized by Alpha Trion, is a repository of knowledge and cybertronian culture second only to the Vector Sigma supercomputer on Cybertron. The entire planet was rebuilt into a digital library, with immense databanks stored in great computers within its mantle, and tall data towers rising into the sky from within its cities. The native transformers of Sophos dedicate themselves to curating this immense archive, forever burying themselves in research and scouring the galaxy for lost cybertronian artifacts. Sophos has enjoyed a peaceful history throughout its existence, and its people do not keep much in the way of a standing military force. More than any other world in the New Imperium of Cybertron, they rely on the Knights of Cybertron for protection.

The people of Sophos were overjoyed to join the New Imperium in 12002916. Having been isolated from Cybertron and the core worlds for over a hundred million years, its historians now had eons of new history to catalogue and add to their repositories. Since then, the native sophans have been hard at work assimilating the history of the former Cybertronian Commonwealth into their own, comparing notes with other cybertronian historians, and compiling a more complete record of the storied history of the entire cybertronian race. Sophos’s museums are a sight to behold, and are visited by beings from across the galaxy.

Many assumed that Alpha Trion’s book, the original Covenant of Primus , would have been kept on Sophos. However, it is not. The sophans have always believed that it was left on Cyberton following the War of the Primes, and were surprised to learn that their distant neighbors have no idea as to its whereabout either. The current location of The Covenant of Primus is unknown, and many sophans have since left to search for it.

Astrum

Solus Prime was killed in the War of the Primes, leaping in front of a deadly attack meant for Nexus. It was her death that made the rest of the Thirteen come to their senses and lay down their weapons- how tragic that they did not see reason sooner. When the Thirteen and their acolytes left Cybertron, the Knights of Cybertron vowed to establish a colony world in her honor.

Astrum is the Prime Colony founded in memory of Solus Prime: an artificial world built around a neutron star imbued with the life-force of Primus. Primus’s divine energies shrank the star to a diameter of less than twelve miles, and the star now emits the Allspark’s life-giving essence. Astrum is made in the shape of Solus Prime’s crest: a thick ring of purple metal marbled with glowing blue conduits, with a rectangular protrusion extending from its outer side. The ring takes in the energies emanating from its star, using them to power its systems and create cybertronain life.

Astrum’s people live on the inner side of the ring, beneath the pale light of their star. Unique features in the technology managing Astrum’s atmosphere darken the sky at regular intervals to simulate a day-night cycle. The terrain atop the inner ring is mostly temperate, with high mountains, forests and grasslands separated by narrow seas. These environments are carefully maintained by mostly-automated processes within Astrum, allowing the native transformers to pursue creative and artistic endeavors. Astran culture takes after the spirit of Solus Prime, and its people are master artists and builders of advanced technology. The vast majority of the astran population is female- fitting for the world of the first female cybertronian, perhaps- though since the reunification of the cybertronian worlds, the gender ratio has started to even out somewhat.

Astrum’s capitol city is called Meridiem, home to the planet’s finest creators. The city itself is an artistic masterpiece, with beautiful architecture and numerous displays of fine works and impressive technology. Every city on Astrum is something like this, with much space dedicated to both displaying their artists’ masterworks and providing space for them to create new wonders. Perhaps the most sacred locale on the ring is the Astral Caminus, a facility deep within a wintry mountain range with uses energy from Astrum’s star to power itself and create almost anything its patrons can imagine. The Forge of Solus Prime rests in its central chamber.

Vergrandis

Each of the Thirteen was unique, but Micronus Prime was exceptional for his boundless energy and lighthearted demeanor. The first minicon never failed to lift his companions’ spirits, and his followers could best be described as the hardest partiers in universe. It took some time, but they eventually regained their merry fervor after the War of the Primes and founded the colony world of Vergrandis- for which they threw a grand celebration that is purported to have ended in a hypernova at the other end of the observable universe. Nobody was hurt, thankfully. Though Micronus was rendered blind for a good century or so afterward. Or so the story goes.

Vergrandis is not a planet for anyone who detests excessive noise- both auditory and otherwise. Its cities are a chaotic mish-mash of garish architectural styles, bright colors, and neon holograms. Its inhabitants are all minicons and other varieties thereof, taking after Micronus himself both in stature and talent for revelry. The capitol city is Parvos- or, as it’s known in some circles: “Party Central”. Shortly after the formation of the New Imperium of Cybertron, representatives from Vergrandis and Junkion met on an uninhabited planetoid to engage in a “dance-off” to determine who the best partiers in the universe truly were. The competition had to end in a draw twenty years later, after the planetoid was accidentally split in two from the proceedings and its star began to exhibit signs of stellar collapse.

Elementum

In their endless pursuit of knowledge, the scientists and scholars of Cybertron’s First Golden Age eventually came to an inescapable conclusion: that, for all their intellect and unparalleled technological feats, there were aspects to the universe that science alone could not explain or manipulate. There were forces driving the underlying structure of creation separate from the observable physics that catalyzed its more obvious phenomena, and new disciplines had to be made to study and harness these metaphysical energies. Of this breed of devotees to the fantastic, none were more accomplished than Alchemist Prime, born from the Well of All Sparks with an innate affinity for these mystical forces. With the Lenses forged into his optics, he could observe the cyclical movements of these forces behind the veil of reality, see how their ebbs and flows translated into the effects of the physical world; and using the powers that Primus had given him, he could tap into these forces to reshape the world around him to his desires.

After Unicron’s first death, Alchemist threw himself into his studies, to both increase his power and to accrue knowledge to share with his people. He amassed a varied following of like-minded disciples- among them the bot who would become the fourteenth Prime, Aethus- and together they learned to blend the logical with the transcendental, using science and “magic” together to achieve far greater than either could on their own. The Disciples of Alchemist fought to keep their wisdom from falling into the hands of warmongers in the War of the Primes, and afterward they followed Alchemist to establish their own colony world in his honor.

Alchemist and the Disciples chose a cold world far removed from the other Prime Colonies, its surface coated in vast tundras and snowy evergreen forests. Through great cracks in the land, they could see glowing reservoirs of strange energies churning up from within the planet’s core, and their excitement was indescribable. The world was carefully cyberformed, its core transformed into a receptacle for the life-force of Primus, and it was named Elementum.

Alchemist Prime ruled over Elementum for many thousands of years, while his brightest pupils among the Disciples were granted leadership of its individual city-states. They created an academic culture prioritizing the cultivation of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and the people plumbed the depths of their planet’s mysterious features while simultaneously looking out into the primordial forces of the cosmos. They deepened their understanding of the paranormal and expanded their preternatural abilities, some even venturing offworld to battle evil as their ruler had done millennia ago. But Alchemist eventually died, as most things do, and with his passing did the bonds of fellowship between the Disciples break. The heirs to the Prime’s legacy fought with one another for sole ownership of the inheritance, and each city-state began to horde their discoveries for themselves. Their armies made war against each other with their awesome powers, seeking to raid the archives of other cities to steal what secrets and treasures lied within them.

The fighting endured for an eon without a sign of stopping, and so the Knights of Cybertron came to Elementum from their own colony, Primogenitum, to enforce a peace while the Disciples were brought together for talks. At the base of the mountain where Alchemist Prime was interred, the Disciples signed a pact obligated them to share their research freely among themselves and their subjects, and to keep an everlasting peace between their cities. With this accord, the fighting stopped across Elementum, and the planet and its people have enjoyed unity since.

Elementum’s capitol city is Alchimia, nested within a valley between lines of tall, snowcapped peaks and girded by a white wall that shines like marble in the light of the moon. Tall white towers can be seen rising above the wall, housing laboratories and libraries for citizens, scholars and scientists to all use, and between the bases of these buildings run courtyards home to native plants and wildlife. The other cities of Elementum are similar in design to Alchimia, if smaller in size. The mountain housing Alchemist Prime’s tomb borders a dense deposit of energon, the exotic matter’s unique properties reacting with Elementum’s own energies to create astounding effects, such as brilliant auroras in the sky above, or stretches of rock and ice suspended in midair.

Concordia

Concordia is the colony world of Nexus Prime, the First Combiner. Like him, the planet’s inhabitants are capable of merging their minds and bodies to create stronger, wiser, and more powerful beings. They are led by an ancient being called Sum-of-Many, one of Nexus’s closest friends. Sum’s consciousness has been transferred from one team of combiners to the next, each host adding their memories and wisdom to the gestalt’s mind. The result is an entity that embodies Concordia’s history, and the spirit of its people.

Concordia is an ocean world, with nary a scrap of natural land to be found above its endless sea. The planet’s Wells of Sparks form within the ocean floor, and around them, immense artificial structures rise up from the depths to support large cities suspended above the water. Billions of concordians live in these cities, and also in the underwater constructs that support them. Across the planet, these settlements are linked by webs of bridges and railways. The capitol city is Simul, in which Sum-of-Many resides.

Concordia is also one of the few cybertronian worlds to have its moons cyberformed and populated as well. Concordia has five natural satellites, to be precise, each one with a unique climate and named after one of the components of Nexus Prime. Heatwave is volcanic, and its people hardy and resilient; Breakaway is barren and trapped in a harsh eternal winter; Topspin is oceanic, like Concordia, but is wracked with great electrical storms; Landquake is a desert moon with frequent seismic activity, as the name might suggest; and the mountainous moon of Skyfall is covered in lush jungles.

Eukaris

Onyx Prime’s colony world, Eukaris, is far from what many might expect of a cybertronian planet. The Lord of Beasts and his followers were always closer to the natural world than the rest of their kind- ironic, for a race of machines- and enjoyed the company of flesh-and-blood creatures. It was only natural that their world should follow suit. The surface of Eukaris is remarkably Earth-like, with eight continents supporting a vast array of unique biomes surrounded by deep blue seas. Onyx and his acolytes were adamant in preserving these environments and their great ecosystems even as they cyberformed the planet’s core, and integrated themselves into Eukaris’s pre-existing order as opposed to remaking the world to fit their own designs. Eukaris has none of the sprawling megacities of the other cybertronian worlds, with the people preferring to live in the wild with the planet’s creatures. There are a few small settlements built around Eukaris’s Wells of Sparks, with buildings made from wood and stone and featuring only what advanced technology is necessary.

Unlike the other cybertronian worlds, Eukaris does not have a single unified government. Instead, the eukarians live in separate nations which are usually divided by unique environmental adaptations and ideologies. These nations have quarreled in the past, with many having come and gone over millions of years, but today they coexist peacefully. Many eukarians are techo-organic, their bodies made from both cybertronian machinery and living tissue, which typically manifests as muscle and bone. These biological components are sustained by energon, like their mechanical counterparts; and while it’s never been known as to why or how these cyborgs are made, they’ve been a common occurrence throughout cybertronian history. Techno-organics feel especially at home on Eukaris, with their biological functions giving them a deeper connection to the natural order of their world.

Some of the larger and more influential nations of Eukaris include the Whispering Sands, who live in an arid desert on the sixth continent; the South Frost, dwelling in the frigid tundra at the planet’s southern pole; the Below, a hive of insecticons who dwell in a vast underground tunnel network; and the Deep-Dwellers, who claim much of the planet’s oceans and the costal areas. There are many more, each with their own customs, and they all find neutral ground within a long mountain range on the second continent. The Steel Shard Mountains, named for their rich deposits of ore, rise high into the sky, and their valleys are filled with ancient structures hewn from the mountainsides. The mountains are a gathering place for eukarians, where their ancestors cyberformed the planet eons ago. The largest of the mountains, Mount Axalon, was converted into a massive temple dedicated to Onyx Prime, and it is here that the Lord of Beasts rests in death, alongside his fabled Triptych Mask. Many eukarian transformers from every nation live in the Steel Shard Mountains, with many more making regular pilgrimages here for ceremonies and other special occasions. Onyx Prime is greatly revered by all eukarians, and Axis Prime- the current ruler of the New Imperium of Cybertron and herself a eukarian native- is also something of a celebrity.

Muto

Muto is the colony world founded by Amalgamous Prime, the First Transformer. As the planet was being cyberformed, Amalgamous has his Transformation Cog, which granted him his shape-shifting powers, removed and placed within Muto’s core. Amalgamous’s organ was fused with the planet in the cybeforming process, and through his sacrifice, the world became a wondrous machine unlike any other.

Like Amalgamous himself, Muto’s form is fluid and ever-changing. Continent-sized metal plates orbit around the planet’s core, their geographies shifting as they continuously merge and break apart at random. It is difficult to describe Muto’s surface and the layout of its cities, for such a description would be rendered obsolete within mere months. It’s similarly difficult for many to fathom how the transformers native to Muto manage to live in such a chaotic and ever-changing world, but the people here are as adaptable as their planet. Mutan transformers tend to have many alternate modes- some are even Shifters, like Amalgamous, who can alter their bodies unrestricted- and they effortlessly adapt to their world’s changes as they come. Mutans are easy-going but dependable allies who remain by their friends through even the worst of times.

Spirabilis

The War of the Primes was not only a societal disaster for cybertronian kind, but an ecological calamity as well- as close to one as a robotic race could come to, at least. Many species of transformers were driven to near, or total extinction in the civil war. Thus, when the Thirteen left to found their own colony worlds, Quintus Prime- the Prime of Life- chose to make his world a sanctuary for the endangered creatures his followers managed to gather during the war, and a home for all kinds of cybertronian life. The planet its people are themselves a monument: a celebration of the infinite diversity of Primus’s children.

Spirabilis is surrounded by a ring of energon crystals that glisten in the day and night, most visible at dusk and dawn. Its crust and mantle are composed of vast stretches of a white, marble-like substance formed around blocky metal superstructures the size of islands and continents. These structures vary in size and shape, and between them are deep chasms that go down for hundreds of miles, to luminescent blue-green seas of energon surrounding the planet’s core. The surface superstructures hold Wells of Sparks and Hot Spots where transformers are born, and support various different biomes and climates. There are forests and jungles of red biomechanical vegetation, deserts of crimson sand, plains of vermillion grassland, arctic tundras, oceans of water, and more.

The people of Spirabilis live on and within the planet’s superstructures in cities built into the natural geography of their location. Travel between these structures is possible via Ground Bridges, flight, or through bridges crossing Spirabilis’s chasms. All kinds of transformers live here, from the standard humanoid bots, to predacon dragons and massive leviathan-like machines swimming in the energon seas. The culture here is one of deep spiritual convictions and a simple reverence for living things, the natural world (“natural” having a something of a different definition to them than organic beings such as ourselves), and harmony. All life is sacred, and spirabilans live within the natural order as opposed to disrupting it with the widespread urbanization of the other cybertronian worlds.

Bellator

Exceedingly cold, barren, and almost entirely void of life, Bellator is a planet that even most cybertronians find rather unattractive. The energon that the species depends upon for life is held deep within the world’s frozen crust, and the extreme cold is hazardous even to them. But it was here that Megatronus chose to settle in the great exodus following the War of the Primes. In truth, the Dark Warrior had no intention of colonizing Bellator, unlike his fellow Primes and their own chosen worlds; he’d come to the planet to die in solitude, wracked with terrible guilt for killing Solus Prime in their battle atop the Hydrax Plateau. Despite his intentions, Megatronus’s legions of warriors followed him to Bellator and put down their metaphorical roots. While his followers developed a hardy civilization to endure the planet’s harsh conditions, Megatronus isolated himself. When he died, his remains were interred in a massive tomb built within the summit of a lone mountain in the northern hemisphere. Recently, the remains of Megatronus’s weapon, the Requiem Blaster, were placed within the tomb as well, following its destruction in 12002915 CE.

Bellator’s surface is largely flat and rocky, its vast plains broken up by long mountain ranges in which the people of the colony tend to live. The planet’s weather is similarly monotonous, with temperatures well below freezing and constant snowstorms. A perpetually-cloudy sky blocks much of the light coming from Bellator’s already dim star from reaching the surface, which does nothing to improve matters. Energon and other valuable minerals lie far beneath the snow and rock, and were not easily accessible even with Golden Age-era technology. Megatronus’s warriors saw these inhospitable conditions as worthy challenges to overcome, and overcome they have. They built their cities within the mountains, sheltering them from the worst of the frigid wind and blizzards, and bored deep into the ground for further protection and access to energon. A typical bellatoran city is like a great pit, usually at or in the base of a mountain, with layers of buildings and bridges running between its walls for at least a mile down. The inhabitants use heat lamps to keep themselves warm, and their dim yellow and red lights stand out for many miles around in the darkness that often shrouds the planet. A great rift is carved into Bellator’s moon- a scar left by a carless misfiring of the Requiem Blaster some time after Megatronus’s death. Debris from this event still linger in Bellator’s orbit; the people have converted the larger asteroids into orbital defense platforms and docking facilities for starships.

Megatronus’s Warriors Elite were fierce and disciplined fighters, and the society they built follows suit. Bellator’s is a militaristic culture, where every transformer is conscripted into service not long after their creation, and remains in active duty for their entire life. Bellatoran culture has no concept of “reserve forces”, or of a life outside of military service; to them, life is service, and death- whether in battle or after a long and storied career- is their reprieve. But bellatorans do not romanticize warfare- like most other civilized peoples, they consider it to be a gruesome business. But while other cultures would act to avoid conflict, bellatoran transformers consider it their grim, but necessary duty to devote themselves to battling evil throughout the universe. Every bellatoran soldier is trained in a broad arsenal of weapons, and their bodies are made to be weapons in and of themselves. Bellator’s unforgiving climate aids in hardening its people, who pride themselves in their toughness. In addition to weapons and tactical training, bellatorans are instilled with the usual devotion to duty, honor, and discipline common among other “warrior races” in the galaxy, and are also taught to show very little in the way of mercy to evil-doers. Those of good moral caliber have nothing to fear from Bellator; but the wicked will be met with a cold, howling fury like that of the planet’s terrible blizzards.

Bellator’s leaders are a small council of generals who have ascended their society’s ranks through millennia of exemplary service. One of these generals is selected to be a “praetor”, and given additional executive privileges as an arbitrator in the council’s sessions. The praetor is granted an additional vote to exercise as they see fit, and has the power to overrule decisions made by the other generals in extreme cases- and not without great consequence, as well. Bellator’s formidable military has seen much action over the course of many millions of years, in defense of the other Prime Colonies from alien aggressors and, more recently, in the battle over Cybertron in 12002915. Bellator’s people are friendly enough to their fellow transformers from Cybertron and the other colonies- in their own way, at least- and regard most other species in the Milky Way galaxy with respect. Most are inclined to remain in their good graces.

Trecedim

Trecedim is the name given to a mysterious moon orbiting a lonely red gas giant at the very edge of the Milky Way Galaxy. What keeps these two solitary worlds in place is unclear, as the planet has no star; it simply skirts the boundaries of the galaxy, hanging off the precipice of the empty vastness beyond and isolated from civilization. Trecedim’s origins are unclear, but what little is known of the moon makes it an important locale in cybertronian history, and indeed the history of the entire universe at large.

Trecedim is the birthplace of Primus and Unicron, the two gods of cybertronian lore. They lived together here for eons, until Unicron became evil, and Primus was forced to battle him. Their conflict drew them off the moon and out into the universe, and Trecedim was forgotten until Optimus Prime journeyed there many thousands of years later in 1972. Primus appointed Optimus to be Trecedim’s guardian, to protect it from evil-doers and to hide it from the rest of the universe. Optimus did exactly that, and for nearly a hundred twenty million years, virtually no-one knew of Trecedim’s existence. But in 12002915, Axis Prime and her allies journeyed to the moon on their quest to slay the Heralds of Unicron. Now, Trecedim’s existence is known to all, but Optimus Prime still stands guard upon its surface, and has served as an effective deterrent for those who seek to abuse its power.

Trecedim’s power lies in its vast oceans of a strange blue-white fluid. These seas glow ethereally in Trecedim’s eternal night, and contain primordial energies and paranormal forces. It is from these forces that Primus and Unicron were made, and the power within Trecedim is far greater than either of them. Sufficiently advanced technology could be used to harness Trecedim’s seas to perform terrible or miraculous feats, effectively making their wielders into gods. It is for this reason, though, that travel to Trecedim is severely limited, and why it is tended to by Optimus Prime. Optimus has been imbued with Trecedim’s energies, made immortal and possessing great powers to guard this wondrous place.

Trecedim’s landmasses are cool and rocky, made from blue-grey stone and elements not found anywhere else in the galaxy. Hewn from this rock are ancient structures, crumbling from age, where Primus and Unicron must have lived in their youth. Within these ruins, and closer to the coasts, are alluring alien plants that glow blue and purple beneath the starry sky. Trecedim’s landscapes are sometimes painted red by faint light coming from its planet, and gentle winds blow silently between the flora and rock formations. In the moon’s northern hemisphere is a place called the First Well: a sinkhole said to be the exact spot were Primus and Unicron were born. The walls of this pit are studded with beautiful crystal formations, and at the bottom is a pool of Trecedim’s mysterious liquid.

Chromeharpoon · September 20, 2021, 1:32am

Lineage

Cybertron: the Primal Basilica, Iacon, 1947 CE

“Are you… are you certain that I am worthy?”

The pale light emanating from the crystal orb was the only thing illuminating the dark corridor beneath the Basilica. It cast Aether’s slender form and sloping armor in a faint blue hue, and filled the symbols etched into the plating. But the one holding the orb was obscured by the darkness as he held it out to Aether in a small, six-fingered hand. So deep were they in the lower levels of this holy bastion that the walls and ceiling were bare, void of the ornate columns and grand chambers decorated with holographic murals that most cybertronians saw. Few had ever seen this part of the Primes’ seat of power- Aether himself hadn’t known these rooms existed until only a few moments ago, when the bot presenting the Matrix of Leadership to him now had guided him through a labyrinth of back-allies and tunnels at the bottom of Iacon.

Aether’s question hung in the space between the two cybertronians, above the glittering core of their people’s most sacred talisman. The hand that held it was not that of its bearer, but of a bot with six gold eyes within a narrow face, and a slender figure that hovered above the floor. He smiled at Aether and drifted forward, and with his free hand he gently grabbed one of Aether’s and placed it atop the Matrix.

“I?” he said softly, looking down at the Matrix between Aether’s fingers. “No, I’m not sure. But, it’s not up to me, young one.”

Beneath Aether’s open hand, the Matrix hummed softly, and its light brightened. Aether did not- could not- look away, as he gazed into its multifaceted surface and felt another presence enter his mind. It filled the space beyond his consciousness; he felt it at the edge of his thoughts. He sensed the entity’s wants- its need to expand its knowledge of the cosmos and the living things that lived across its many worlds, and the empty spaces in its being that it longed to fill. Aether now felt the Matrix’s hum inside his spark, and to his surprise, he felt the core of his being singing back, resonating with it.

Now, he understood.

Aether gripped the talisman’s shell, lifting it from the other man’s hand and pulling it close to him. “But, why can’t he carry it anymore?” he asked. “It’s been his since the very beginning.”

The old man’s smile fades, and sorrow weighs on his face. He wasn’t so old, really; no older than the rest of his kin, but recent events had worn him down, and left him tired. He looked away from Aether and sighed mournfully.

“The others feel it best,” he began, “that we leave our worlds. Our rule has brought you ruin; our reign must end, and it is time for your people to lead themselves.”

The enormity of the old man’s words pressed upon Aether’s spark like the fabled grip of the Lord of Beasts himself. His species stood in the ruins of a once-golden age, but at the same time at the precipice of an unknown future. The old ways were destroyed with the cities they had built; cybertronian-kind needed new leaders with new ideas around which to gather.

“The Matrix cannot come with us to be locked in some dark vault forever,” the old man continued. “Just as we have made our choice, so too has it decided to remain. Take it, Aether, and use it well. And as it learns from you, so will you- and all who come after- learn from it.”

The old man turned and retreated into the darkness, his emerald and copper tassels and thin tendrils trailing behind him as he vanished. But Aethus Prime was not alone as he made his own way out of the Basilica’s catacombs, and into the golden rays of a new day.

…

Planet Hedonia, 283578 CE

Armax Prime pulled the point of her spear from the broken body of her foe: a monstrous arthropod-like creature with a hard red shell and a weapon in each of its many arms. She flicked the greenish ooze from its innards off the spear and looked up to see another one of the invaders scuttling toward her. The barrels of the guns on its back flashed blue, and a torrent of plasma surged her way. Armax dropped to the ground and transformed, becoming a bullet-shaped truck that roared as its engine came to life. Before the creature could ready another salvo, Armax rammed into it, slamming it against the bombed-out husk of what was once a residential building. The bug screeched in pain as its exoskeleton crumpled, and the harnesses mounting its weapons to its shell pierced the soft tissue underneath.

Armax backed up, letting the crushed attacker fall over onto the ruined street. She resumed her robot mode, the cab of the truck splitting to form her arms and back, while the bed and interior mechanisms merged to make up the rest of her body. She looked out across the battlefield, which had been a beautiful cityscape just some months ago. Now the sky over this part of Hedonia was an angry red as plumes of smoke climbed high above the towers and their shattered windows, and the shore at the metropolis’s eastern border was lined with debris from a downed cybertronian cruiser. Blue flames lapped at the wreckage, fed by energon pouring from its ruptured fuel lines. Five hundred transformers had manned the ship, giving cover for transports ferrying the native hedonians out of the city. Five hundred bots, now dead under her leadership.

Everything was going so wrong. The city had all but fallen to these invaders; she just couldn’t bring herself to admit it.

Something hit her back, and she toppled over, feeling yet another one of the arthropods raking its claws over her armor. It searched for a purchase, latching onto the plating over her back and digging into the narrow spaces between the segments. It was going to rip her apart, but Armax twisted, struggling against her foe to come around and pin it to the road with her weight. She then transformed, her shifting parts dislodging the creature and even slicing through some of its more delicate limbs. It shrieked, its pained wailing soon drowned out by the screeching of Armax’s tires as she drove down its body. The armor on its underside was weaker than on its hide, and she felt it sag and buckle beneath her wheels. She transformed again, and put the creature out of its misery with her spear. She pulled it back, looking over her shoulder to see more of the invaders surging toward her down a scorched boulevard- some of them were already shooting at her with handheld energy weapons. Armax saw in the hellish sky above them that more of their bloated ships with their spindly appendages and pulsing lights were descending through the shroud of smoke, spitting swarms of homing projectiles at the cybertronian and hedonian ships overhead.

What do I do? Armax pleaded to no-one. What can I do?! The creatures fought with such ferocity, and so relentlessly that their heavy losses seemed unimportant to them. She had never faced an enemy seemed so incapable of yielding.

She dropped onto one knee and raised her arms, their sturdy armor protecting her from the flurry plasma bolts that now began to pepper her. Her spark grew cold with despair as she realized her inexperience would now spell her own death, as well…

But in that moment, something else within her burned like a star. Time slowed to a crawl; the sizzling darts fired from the invaders’ weapons lazily swam through the air, while the swarm bearing down on her crept sluggishly over the husks of cars and busses, the fires within the wrecks almost motionless. Within her chest, the Matrix called out to her, ringing like a bell and filling her audio receptors with its ethereal chorus. In her mind’s eye, she saw visions of past battles, of the Primes before her vanquishing the enemies of Cybertron. She saw Megatronus reducing scores of undead terrorcons to cosmic dust with a single shot from the Requiem Blaster; she saw Prima and Optimus rallying the Knights of Cybertron against the slithering servants of the quintessons; she saw Aethus Prime ripping the blood from the veins of more quintesson creatures, forming it into a web of lashes that cut through a battalion of the things as human soldiers past him into the fray.

Now, she understood.

Missile pods on Armax’s back swung around her shoulders and opened to disgorge their volatile contents upon the swarm, shrouding the onslaught in a curtain of fire and smoke. The veil cleared to reveal the charred and blasted bits of a dozen insectile invaders, though more were advancing to take their place. But the sudden annihilation of their front line had given them a moment’s pause- a moment that Armax Prime seized with her renewed confidence. As the missile pods folded away to load another salvo, she charged, reforming her hands and wrists into machine guns that spat twin hailstorms of lead into her foes. The bodies of the slain insects fell back into the still-living creature’s behind them, slowing their advance and forcing them to clumsily crawl over one another to push forward.

Armax kept up the pressure for as long as she could, until the horde eventually pushed through the chokepoint and into the open intersection in which she made her stand. They fought like the quintesson’s serpentine constables: they tried to surround her and overwhelm her with their superior numbers. But that tactic hadn’t defeated the Primes before, and it would not defeat her now. Retracting her guns, she limbered her spear and heaved it through the chitinous walls forming around her. She became a vortex of death, cleaving through limbs and armor and eviscerating the invaders. Something within the Matrix roared with approval; something else felt sympathy for the misguided aliens besieging Hedonia; another presence still urged Armax to gather a glob of their entrails for study. She pushed these thoughts into the recesses of her consciousness, focusing on the end of her spear as it sliced through shell after crimson shell.

There would be time enough for past Primes and past battles; right now, there was a new war to win.

…

Diplomatic shuttle en route to Cybertron, 100013209 CE…

Septimus Prime watched the planet Fellowship rapidly grow smaller against the star-speckled darkness, its many satellites both natural and artificial becoming tiny dots over the neon-lit, urban-encrusted hemisphere that faced the aft of his shuttle. The ship’s pilots were focused on their monitors in the cockpit, and Septimus’s guards kept to themselves on opposite ends of the bay, leaving him to his thoughts as they passed through flotillas of alien vessels on their way home to Cybertron.

His mind dwelled not on the council summit between him and the gaunt-faced nebulon and torkuli representatives- no, he did not wish to endure another headache at the moment. The tiny organics were stubborn and unrelenting in their demands, but that was their duty to their people, and he did not begrudge them. He thought of his own duties as a Prime, chosen by the Matrix: his responsibilities as a leader of the Imperium of Cybertron, burdened to walk ahead and light the way for the rest of Primus’s creations to follow. It was a hard burden to bear, but he took comfort in that he did not bear it alone.

Within the Matrix’s core, he could hear echoes of the Primes who had come before him. In his most dire moments, they cautioned him; when he doubt seized his thoughts, his predecessors would console him; and when indecision paralyzed him, he could look into the eons of memory recorded within the talisman in his chest, turning to the past for whatever guidance it had. But within this repository came another burden: knowledge that had been kept secret among the lineage of Matrix-bearers; secrets that would change the Imperium- the whole civilized galaxy- dramatically, were they ever shared.

They have a right to know. Our people deserve to know what they have lost.

His optic shutters blinked, wiping dust from their lenses, and in that brief moment Septimus had been transported to a field of rolling metal hills under a stark white sky. He was standing now, looking up the high wall of the Hydrax Plateau, its face adorned with towering statues of the Thirteen. A strange ethereal light permeated the area, softening the monuments’ edges and hiding the plateau’s snags and ridges in its glow.

“You heard me,” Septimus called out, undisturbed by his sudden relocation. His voice quietly echoed all around the bluish-grey plains as he waited for a reply. “A leader must be true to those he leads; he cannot deny them of their own history!”

Atop the plateau, a single silhouette stepped into view. It was a small figure with thin limbs, and the light of this realm seemed to shine faintly through its body. Septimus could not make out the figure’s face, but he felt its gaze fall upon him.

They are not ready.

Septimus felt its response within his neural network, appearing in his mind without a sound being uttered. Its “voice”, genderless and light, was unfamiliar to him.

“Who are we to judge that?” he then said, to which it replied:

It is our duty as leaders to protect them. There is pain in that history, in the memories that bear it.

“We were made to be warriors,” Septimus said, sweeping an arm around the plains beneath the plateau, and the lip of the Well of All Sparks some great distance away. “Our people are familiar with pain.”

Pain that comes from without. Unicron, the Quintessons, Dire Wraiths- all external foes. But the wounds we hide are deep within, and they still need time to heal.

Septimus shook his head. His people had healed. The colonies had been restored, their cities rebuilt, all eons ago. The other’s words rang hollow, their position long-outdated.

“You’ve made your point,” he said. “Now I wish to speak to someone else. Someone younger- I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

The other shook its head. There is no-one else. It said. Only thoughts and memories, echoes of your predecessors.

“Yes, I know.” Septimus closed his eyes, frustrated. “With you, it’s certainly obvious.”

Then Septimus detected a brief sensation- an emotion that stirred within him but he did not feel. Insulted. It felt insulted. How…?

They are not ready. The other said again, insistent this time. Not yet. But in time, they will be.

Then the Hydrax Plateau vanished, and Septimus was overwhelmed with a blur of images. He saw bright explosions, soldiers, entire worlds engulfed in flame… but through the chaos, he caught glimpses of majestic cities ahead of the wastelands, of great ships riding into the unknown, and he heard a chorus of cheers behind a deep, echoing knell.

In a second, it was over, and Septimus was alone with his thoughts again, back in his seat within the shuttle. Within his chest, he felt the Matrix fall silent. He pondered his exchange within its depths, and of the vision it had shown him, and he did not understand.

…

The Tomb of the Primes, Cybertron, 100024020 CE

Sentinel Prime felt the Matrix’s presence leave his mind as if a surgeon had opened his hull and torn out his innards. Where the talisman had once resided, there was now an emptiness, a great nothing within himself that the rest of him did not move to fill- not yet. He felt its shell uncouple from his sparkchamber as he lifted out from within himself, and as he did its light spilled out over the ancient murals hewn from the metal walls around him. He turned his old eyes away from the Matrix, lest he be blinded, and he took a heavy step forward.

Behind him, outside the tomb’s entrance, gunfire and explosions echoed from far away. Each blast grew steadily closer as the Decepticons tore their way through Iacon, as he should have known they would.

So my failure is complete. Sentinel thought. There was nothing he could do now to stop this catastrophe that he should not have done decades before, when he could still have changed the present. But now he could look ahead, and prevent those yet to come from suffering for his mistakes.

Perhaps, one day, history will note that I could at least spare a glance to the future. But for now, let it record the folly of Sentinel Prime in all its spectacular horror.

He lowered the Matrix onto a pedestal in front of him, and as he drew his hands from its shell, he felt its light subside. Looking down at the Matrix, he saw that its core was now dark and opaque, and the gold of its container had faded to a dreary grey. Sadness overtook Sentinel as the watched the splendor drain from the holy relic, as it had elsewhere across the Imperium of Cybertron. He remembered how dazzling it had been when Septimus had offered it to him- how bright everything had been back then- and guilt flooded the void within him.

He let his gaze linger on the Matrix, the ornate sarcophagi surrounding its pedestal, and the architecture of the tomb for a moment longer. His would be the last eyes to behold any of it for some time, he imagined. There would be many questions, and few- if any- answers; a mystery to haunt his people for eons to come.

But one day, Sentinel hoped- one day, far from now- they would understand.

College has put some added weight on my day-to-day, but it has broken my writer’s block. So here’s a nice big hopefully-somewhat-enjoyable story/thing to make up for my silence. Comments and constructive criticism are appreciated, if you have any.

Chromeharpoon · September 24, 2021, 2:11am

The Federation of Allied Species

The Federation of Allied Species is a political union of several hundred sentient races throughout the Milky Way galaxy. Each species represents itself as a single government entity within a larger deliberative body, which sets interstellar laws governing social and economic conduct. According to the foundational documents of the Federation, the Concordance of Sentients, this union exists to unite the galaxy’s intelligent life-forms through a simultaneous recognition of commonality and celebration of diversity, in order to uphold and protect the rights and dignities that are owed to all sentient beings.

The Federation holds true that all intelligent beings are equal, and possess a plethora of freedoms and entitlements that no government under its banner may violate. Members found lacking in this regard are subject to sanctions, and can be removed from the Federation should those fail to incite corrective action. While the Federation no longer holds power over a species that has left its ranks, ex-members are likewise stripped of various privileges they may have enjoyed within the alliance. To expel a race from the Federation requires a near-unanimous vote within the Allied Species senate, and to date, only a handful of peoples have ever been successfully removed. The most recent species to be expelled were the cybertronians, who were forced into exile for wreaking destruction upon the galaxy in the Great War over twenty million years ago. However, diplomatic relations between the New Imperium of Cybertron and the Federation have shown promise, and there is nothing within the Concordance stating that an excommunicated race cannot be welcomed back into the fold…

No-one knows for sure when the Federation of Allied Species was first founded: it has existed for as long as anyone alive today remembers, and its membership has been constantly changing throughout its history. Many civilizations have come and gone. Today, the likes of humans, nebulons, lithonians, a’ovan, and many more cultures enjoy membership. The Federation has the power to keep peace and mediate conflict between its member-species, though its power is lesser and ill-defined when concerning intra-species warfare- except in cases when such conflict threatens the livelihood of other races. Such nebulous policy is what has allowed tragedies such as the Great War and the [REDACTED] to occur, though there is comfort to be taken in that such events are rare occurrences amidst eons of peace and prosperity.

Fellowship

Fellowship is the name given to the artificial planet which serves as the political center of the Federation of Allied Species. The date of its discovery has been lost to time, but what is known is that the planet predates the Federation by several millennia, and that it was not constructed by any of its member species, current or former. The identity of Fellowship’s makers has eluded xenoanthropologists and historians for eons, though it is clear from the technological marvel they left behind that theirs was a civilization advanced beyond our comprehension.

Fellowship is a convenient heartland for the Allied Species because of its modularity: from its control center, one can divide its surface into into an infinite number of custom microclimates. Virtually every aspect of these zones can be individually tailored to the needs of a given species- from geography and soil PH levels to gravitational field strength and atmospheric composition- and their boundaries can be reshaped as needed. Fabrication engines beneath the planet’s crust can create a forested mountain range within a month, then submerge it beneath a sea of methane in the next weekend, before draining the ocean to make way for an arid desert before the year is out. Cloning facilities can also grow wildlife to populate these biomes, using genetic templates provided by their inhabitants. While the Allied Species have learned to use these technologies with precision, no-one can say for certain as to exactly how Fellowship is able to perform these miraculous feats.

Most races in the Allied Species maintain a permanent population on Fellowship, living in great cities within their respective microclimates. Other zones are made to accommodate multiple species to encourage intermingling, with gravity and atmosphere that is at least tolerable for most life-forms. In these cities, one can explore hundreds of unique cultures from across the Milky Way galaxy- especially through popular art and cuisine. In the north pole, the Allied Species Senate convenes within a massive enclosed complex built atop the planet’s control center. The control center is off-limits to most, and is manned by a small number of AI that have been inserted into the network controlling Fellowship’s systems. These AI are responsible for overseeing the planet’s microclimates and overall functionality, though there are many more systems that they are unable to access. Fellowship’s builders surely had grand ambitions for the world, and one can only hope that its current tenants are making them proud, wherever they are.

Sometimes I feel like writing out these codex-style pieces as opposed to short stories. Narratives are hard, yo. It’s a lot easier to just put down a few paragraphs of information- especially when it’s all fictitious information you get to make up entirely in your head. Hopefully I can do a half-decent job at both, eh? Whatever comments or criticisms you may have, feel free to share 'em.