Common Knowledge: Emirate Xaaron's reality

[Emirate Xaaron]

Text only

In the beginning, there was the void, the shattered remnant of a devoured universe. From it, gods arose, and the gods warred. Two were Primus, the Lord of the Light Gods, and Unicron, the Dark God of Chaos. Primus tricked Unicron and trapped him in the corporeal shell of an asteroid, at the cost of being similarly trapped. Unicron fashioned his asteroid shell into a transforming world. Primus, seeing this, spun off children from His own body, tiny compared to Unicron but possessing the same capacity to transform. So the Transformers were born. Primus charged His children with the fight against Unicron and granted them the Matrix to assist in this war. The Transformers were but a young species, unready for the final battle, and Primus drifted off into a deep slumber so that Unicron would not find Him and left His children to grow as they would.

This is one creation story. It has fallen out of favour. Many now believe that we developed from naturally occurring gears and pulleys - amechanogensis. Many have no time to consider our origin at all and merely accept that we are, and we must fight. Either way, we flourished and multiplied. City states spread across Cybertron: Kalis, Iacon, Vos, Tyrest, Tarn, Stanix, Polyhex, and others. Each had its own method of rule, and all answered to the Overlord, a title passed down from generation to generation. Energy levels began to taper off. Iacon, ruled by a Council of Elders to which I belonged tried to distributed energy to the worse off city states and improve the quality of life. Vos and Tarn hoarded their energy and kept standing armies. I could see that the peace would not last forever, and giving our energy away as we were, we would be weak when war did come. The people we helped would not be there to back us up in time of trouble. Still, this state persisted. War started shortly after Tarn and Vos annihilated each other and the Overlord died. A gladiator named Megatron rallied the dispossessed of Vos and Tarn and even recruited the city state's former leaders, Starscream and Shockwave, to his cause. They became the Decepticons.

The Decepticons marched on Iacon, and used to peace a we were, we stood little chance. To deal with the military problem, I urged the council to appoint a military leader for the army: Optimus Prime. He took charge of the Autobot army and turned around the war. Barely a thousand years into the war, he took some of his forces into space on the Ark in clear an asteroid field that threatened Cybertron. Megatron and his men ambushed Optimus Prime's ship, and both crews were lost in space for four million years.

The four million years did not pass unmarked. A new warlord, Trannis, rallied the Decepticons. The rest of the Council wished to surrender to him when he marched on Iacon. I disagreed and went underground with a hundred Autobots who also saw the folly of surrender to the Decepticons. Above, Trannis thanked the Council for their surrender and then executed to the lot of them.

I took charge of the war then. I grew my forces slowly, leading guerilla strikes against the Decepticons. In time, my men even grew so bold as to fight the Decepticons openly, and we killed even Trannis. Unfortunately, the Decepticons, dissatisfied with their leader, had been planning much the same. Straxus rose from the ashes, worse than Trannis ever was. My forces were scattered, and it was time to rebuild again.

In time, word came that the lost had been found far away, on a small blue planet called Earth. By Terran reckoning, the year was 1984 when they awoke. Communications were poor, and rumours ran rampant. I planned for Operation: Volcano, a plan to take out the Decepticons' Ten Deadliest Killers and strike a blow to their morale and overall effectiveness. I, the leader of the rebellion, would be the bait, and the Wreckers, a crack squad of Autobot commandos, and Ultra Magnus would swoop in to take out the Ten. All proceeded apace when the Matrix Flame, a sacred artefact that shows the state of the Matrix and its bearer, flickered out. Transformers from an alternate future jumped into our present and caused a right mess, it would later turn out. I'm sure Rodimus Prime could tell you more about this matter. Afraid that Optimus Prime had perished, we were forced to send Ultra Magnus to Earth. Without Ultra Magnus, Operation: Volcano very nearly did not proceed. Three new-built Triple-Changers, Transformers with two alternate modes rather than one, were able to fill in for Ultra Magnus. Unfortunately, the Ten were recalled to Earth. Only one remained. He killed Impactor, leader of the Wreckers and one of my dearest friends. The assassin did not live long.

Optimus Prime did indeed survive, and he returned to Cybertron for a time. We nearly executed him, thinking him a fake, but he proved himself to be true. The war was split between Cybertron and Earth and occasionally parts of space. Offworld, command of the Autobots was variable, but I continued to lead the rebellion on Cybertron. To explain everything that happened on both fronts would take a team of military historians. I'll hit the most important parts.

I will note that there were humans on Earth who opposed our war and hunted and deactivated our kind mercilessly, ignoring the badges that we wore.

Optimus Prime died. Fortress Maximus and his men, trying to escape the war, landed on a world called Nebulos. As a gesture of peace to the Nebulans, some of them tore off their heads and gave them to the locals. Scorponok and his band hounded Fortress Maximus to Nebulos and restarted the war there. Some from both sides gave their heads to Nebulans, gaining transforming heads with Nebulans inside. Some gave their guns and became Targetmasters. Later and for other reasons, Powermasters with transforming engines would be developed. We Transformers took our war from Nebulos, leaving it to rebuild. Earth was not so lucky. Optimus Prime returned to life thanks to help from the Nebulans, but his previous body, the Matrix included, had been shot into space when he died, thereby misplacing the Matrix. Please, if your Optimus Prime ever dies, don't shoot his body into space. It just causes trouble.

My Cybertron had underground engines that could convert it into a spaceship. They don't work. Meddling with them has the possibility of blowing up the whole planet. The Wrecker, Ultra Magnus, the Sparkler Minibots, and I had to deal with a mad scientist who was trying to start the engines and had created a force of zombies to stop anyone who opposed his crackpot vision.

Transformers from our alternate future again jumped to our present and generally played havoc with the time stream. Meanwhile, the Underbase, a massive store of power and information that Optimus Prime had launched into space to prevent it from falling into Decepticon hands, was headed toward Earth and was going to destroy it. Starscream intercepted it, absorbed its power, and killed half of both forces before exploding. He later returned as a zombie and then as fully alive. Long and short of it, Starscream does not die easily, and it's a bad idea to let him near large amounts of power. Due to the Time Wars, reality nearly came unhinged. Part of it was that Shockwave had Cyclonus killed before he was created.

We developed the Micromasters to help conserve fuel and also to better infiltrate Decepticon installations. The Decepticons captured and tortured a number of Micromasters, thereby gaining the technology for themselves. A few of the demons that Primus locked away¹ escaped. Demons are several times taller than a Transformer, and conventional energy weapons just feed them. One verified kill method is overloading them with too much energy, however.

A transtime portal malfunction landed a group of Transformers right next to the face of Primus². Unfortunately, they shot him and woke him up just long enough for Unicron to hear his scream. Faced with the threat of Unicron, Optimus Prime surrendered to the Decepticons. I did not. Unicron's herald, Galvatron, came hunting. I would have stayed to fight, but my troops ushered me below. He hounded me into the tunnels and revealed that he defied his master and anted Unicron dead as much as any of us, if for the wrong reasons. I went deeper in, the Unicronian at my back. I fell on my knees before Primus and prayed.

I ended up here.

---

¹ Didn't he say that Primus was only one theory? One does wonder where demons came from if Primus wasn't involved.

² Take that, amechanogenesis believers.

[Rodimus Prime]

Rodimus has been called out by Xaaron's text report! Lovely.

His attachment is video, although, as with his others, there is the option of viewing an auto-transcribed version. He sits on a metal box that's been moved to his and Xaaron's office, using that as a chair in the absence of actual furniture. He leans against the corner and looks fairly casual, although there is a sense that he rather wishes there was a desk or tabletop of some sort in front of him.

"The Emirate is correct in that I have more details about the time travel incidents, although the information I have on the first one comes to me second hand. Hot Rod was there, but his memories of the event were wiped clean on the conclusion." Rodimus's expression darkens briefly as he mentions this, but returns to normal before he continues.

"I'll get to that in a moment, however. It is because of the time travel that our realities are split. I don't think they fully diverged until the Time Wars that the Emirate mentioned, but each incident of time travel contributed.

"My reality's history is identical to his up until that point, though. After that, it gets a bit different. The Underbase was barely a blip on our radar. It got destroyed through other means, and Starscream was supposedly killed, but either the reports were inaccurate or, well... he's Starscream. Not staying properly dead appears to be a quality he has across realities.

"During the decade and a half that followed, the Decepticons spent a lot of their time and energy battling over leadership, while we were able to recover the Matrix of Creation. In our reality, we never..." Rodimus looks down at Xaaron's text report, and exclaims, "shot Primus?!" He falls silent for a moment, blinks, then looks back at the camera. "Anyway, he didn't wake up then, and so Unicron didn't arrive until later.

"Eventually, the Decepticons reconsolidated under Megatron with Starscream as his second, because apparently Megatron never learns. We were... we were driven completely off of Cybertron." Rodimus pauses. "The last contact we made with Emirate Xaaron's resistance cell was in 1998. "

"Autobot City was constructed, and I was stationed there under Ultra Magnus's command while Prime directed the war against the Cybertron-based Decepticons from our bases on the moons. In 2006 he sent a shuttle to Earth to replenish their energon supply. Megatron, Starscream, and a force including the Constructicons, the Insecticons, Thundercracker and Skywarp boarded the shuttle en-route. All hands were lost.

"They attempted to use the shuttle to get past Autobot City's defenses, but Hot Rod spied the hole in the shuttle and was able to warn the others. Still, it seemed a case of too little, too late as Autobot City came under siege, and eventually our defenses were broken. It was then that Optimus Prime arrived with a force from Cybertron, and the Decepticons were finally pushed back.

"The cost was high. Optimus Prime was mortally wounded battling Megatron, and the Matrix passed on to Ultra Magnus." And Marvel Hot Rod did not leap into the middle of that battle, thanks. "We were still reeling from the losses when Hot Rod, Kup, and Blurr were unexpectedly transported to Cybertron. They were made aware through means they did not understand that Galvatron, hoping to escape his master's control, had gone back in time with his lieutenants, Cyclonus and Scourge. However they knew it, one thing was clear: they could not let those three do as they pleased in the past.

"The safest means of traveling through time, if any means can truly said to be safe, is through mass substitution. That is, someone of about the same mass in the new time is displaced to somewhere outside the dimension to allow for the arrival of the new individuals.¹ When Galvatron and his group jumped back, one of the individuals they displaced was Optimus Prime. This, by the way, would be why the Matrix Flame went out.

"Hot Rod, Kup, and Blurr instead displaced three Decepticons. In the past, they worked with the Ultra Magnus of that time to trick Galvatron into thinking that he was not in his own past, and therefore anything he did could not affect his time. This would eventually, thanks to diverging timelines, become true, but it wasn't at the time. All the time travelers returned and the Autobots, as I stated, had their memory of the events wiped before being transported back to Earth.

"They got back just in time to receive word that Cybertron's moons were being devoured by Unicron. As the group mobilized to assist, they came under attack by Galvatron. Things happened... similarly to Kup's description of these events in his universe. The shuttle being piloted by Kup and Hot Rod and carrying the Dinobots was shot down over Quintessa. Ultra Magnus's shuttle was forced to make an emergency landing on Junk. The group on Quintessa, with the help of the Minibot Wheelie, were able to escape the Quintesson death pits and eventually Quintessa itself, taking one of their ships. We² traced the last known trajectory of Ultra Magnus's vessel to Junk and, after managing to create an alliance with Wreck-Gar and his Junkions, discovered that Ultra Magnus had been destroyed and the Matrix stolen by Galvatron.

"The Junkions were able to repair Ultra Magnus, and Wreck-Gar, by activating Junk's planetary thrusters, brought us to Unicron and Cybertron. Using the Quintesson shuttle, several of us entered through one of Unicron's eyes. After crashing inside, however, we were seperated from each other. Hot Rod found himself alone, and face to face with Galvatron. During the ensuing struggle, he managed to grab hold of the Matrix and was then converted into me, Rodimus Prime." There's a pause, and Rodimus even smiles faintly as he remembers the Matrix in its purity, remembers that initial, incredible power rush. Then he frowns.

"That... initial rush was the only time I've had the power to physically go one on one against Galvatron. I defeated him swiftly and threw him from Unicron's body." Yes, Emirate, you can yell at him for not killing Galvatron later. "I then opened the Matrix and destroyed Unicron's body and all but a spark of his essence."

"Although I would not learn of this until later, Galvatron then reactivated his time jump device and returned to the past. I began work trying to rebuild and reunify Cybertron, until I believed it safe to leave to others, and then went to search for Galvatron or his body. I had come to realize that I couldn't simply trust that he was gone for good, and needed it confirmed. While I was away, Shockwave re-gathered the Decepticon forces and launched an initial strike against the Autobots that would leave us off balance for some time to come, forcing my return."

Rodimus glances down, his expression pulled back into something that almost resembles a smile, but is far too sad and grim to truly be described as such. "In my naivety, I had believed the Wars over. That after we, Autobot and Decepticon, had battled side by side against Unicron, that we would be able to put aside our differences and live side by side as well. And so I, and Cybertron, paid the price for trusting to Decepticon good intentions."

The Prime sighs, shakes his head, and continues. "Anyway, I was then too occupied with the war on Cybertron to continue my search for Galvatron, but still couldn't trust him not to cause trouble, so I set a price on his head. Some time later, I received word that Galvatron had been found. In Earth's past. And a powerful and unpredictable bounty hunter named Death's Head had followed to take him out.

"If I couldn't just ignore Galvatron's potential meddling in my time, I certainly couldn't ignore the trouble those two could cause in the past. I followed with Kup and Blurr." He pauses. "And Wreck-Gar. In the past, we confronted the both of them, and with the aid of the Ultra Magnus and Goldbug of that era were able to capture Galvatron's time jump device and reprogram it to return those of us from the future to where we belonged.

"Only. It didn't work." Rodimus closes his optics at reporting another of his great failures, then reopens them. "Galvatron had reworked the device before we got to it, and while the rest of us returned to the future, he was left behind. Events back in my own time forced me to stay there, particularly the discovery that Unicron's head and his remaining essence had taken root on the planet Junk and enslaved the Junkions. He was forcing them to build him a new body, and a time portal that he intended to use to retrieve Galvatron. With the help of Wreck-Gar and even Death's Head we defeated him once more, but in the process Scourge and Cyclonus escaped into the past, bypassing the mass-displacement mechanisms.

"Galvatron's activities in the past, Scourge's and Cyclonus's bypassing of the usual methods, and eventual the death of Cyclonus, twenty years before he was created, caused the fabric of time and space to start to tear itself apart. Quintessa was the first victim of the rifts caused, but soon both Earth and Cybertron, indeed, the whole universe, were threatened. I took a crew consisting of myself, Kup, Blurr, Arcee, Ultra Magnus, and Red Alert to the past to deal with the crisis and get those who belonged in my time back in my time once and for all. This event is what you may hear the Emirate or Nightbeat referring to as the 'Time Wars.'

"Once in the past, after overcoming an initial misunderstanding between ourselves and the past Autobots, I organized a team consisting of Autobots and Decepticons in both times to attempt to take out Galvatron, who had allied with his past self, Megatron." Rodimus looks down, as though unable to meet optics to camera. "We weren't enough." He looks back up. "Before Galvatron could finish me off, Optimus Prime, who had been displaced by our return travel to the past, used our mutual connection to the Matrix to force his way back into reality and battle Galvatron himself." Rodimus pauses. "He wasn't enough.

"Finally, Galvatron was defeated not by us, but when the temporal rift tore him apart and sucked him in. Scourge willingly threw himself into the rift. Shockwave threw Cyclonus's remains into the rift and, with a high energy blast, was able to close it.

"The rest of us returned to the future." Rodimus pauses again. "Returned to a future. What we discovered on our return, however, was that the future we had known, the timeline we had left... was gone. Our entire immediate history had been destroyed and replaced by a new one. When I left, the Autobot and Decepticon forces on Cybertron were roughly equal, with Autobots slowly but steadily gaining ground.

"I returned to a Cybertron completely and totally ruled by the Decepticons."

"At the time, we had no choice but to withdraw completely off planet, although we returned and managed a toe-hold not very long after. We have since begun the difficult work of regaining territory on our home planet, although when I was pulled from my timeline, we were once more making steady progress in that direction."

Rodimus looks down at his leg, taps it once with his index finger, and smiles a bit sadly. "I am... fortunate in that I have left competent individuals behind me who can be trusted to carry on in my absence. I... have full confidence that they will do well without me."

And then the recording ends.

---

¹ Yes, we know it's silly. However, since this thing is stated in actual narrative boxes and not just through character dialogue, the DZ assumption is that this is really true for Marvel TF universe physics, and that time traveling without mass substitution would have torn apart the time fabric even faster.

² Rodimus Prime usually refers to Hot Rod in the third person, because he genuinely thinks and feels that Hot Rod is a separate person. Hot Rod may have been the raw material that the Matrix started with to create Rodimus Prime, but Rodimus is not Hot Rod and Hot Rod is not Rodimus. No, he does not realize he suddenly switched back to first person here. It is notable that in the Marvel movie adaptation, Hot Rod is pretty much the one calling the shots from the time his group arrives on Quintessa, through Ultra Magnus's return to life, and on.