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The Acid that rains down on Cybertron is damaging to Cybertronians, yes? It bites away at their paint or paint nanites, and when it gets under the armour it can de-grease the important greasy bits and damage any silicone or rubber wires.
It destroys tires, damages fragile sensory components, eliminates nanites, and it probably does unspeakable things to the energon in a mech’s frame.

What does this mean for the Cybertronian buildings

Obviously, they are built to resist these acid rains. Windows and wall materials are capable of withstanding acid. But it would mean that any and all decoration would peel or slough off.

Imagine looking at a Cybertronian city on the horizon, when acid rain begins falling. And slowly but surely, all the colours of the buildings drain away, leaving only a gleaming grey surface.
After an acid storm the cities are quiet, as everyone waits for the acid to drain and for the disposables to get rid of any lingering pools.

I imagine that there are nooks and crannies built into every structure. Small sheltered places were nanites can bunch together and survive the onslaught of rain. After it has been dry and unclouded for long enough, the colour spreads back out over the city and all of its buildings.
And in the Dead End, where the buildings do not have nanite shelters, or even any nanites to speak of - the acid rain washes away the graffiti. Creating a new blank slate for streetmecha to paint.

Whenever there is a downpour and the nanites are taking shelter… there is also a mech in anti-corrosive gel trying to steal them away.
The nanites bunch and knot into a big ball of safety, where just a single good whack can land every single one of them into a bucket - much like how a beekeeper knocks a beehive from a branch.

Mostly, it is done for bragging rights - stealing a bucket of nanites from an important building or memorial is not very profitable. Sometimes it is used by mecha in the dead end to create souvenirs and baubles made with authentic pieces of the memorial, but oftentimes it is cheaper to simply bulk buy cheap nanites and lie about their origin.
To steal all the paint of a building would require more buckets and anti-acid gel than any mech would want to spend on it!
 

 

insecuriosity: (Default)

@harutemu sent me this wonderful little post about the introduction of a new bee Queen to a hive, and of course a bunny came into being!

Just imagine a poor Vehicon - sloppily operated on and then stuffed into a cage. There is no door to the cage, only a large hard energon-wall to protect him from the raging Insecticons on the other side.

Poor mech is springing a leak as they try to rip him apart through the bars, apparently enraged by whatever Shockwave has installed inside of him. They are howling and throwing their weight against the cage - … and they are gnawing and clawing their way through the energon goodie.

It takes a while, of course, but not long enough to finish the five stages of grief. By the time our poor vehicon is begging towards anyone willing to listen, the energon goodie breaks apart, and an Insecticon barges inside to rip him to shreds and-….

…-groom him?

Still terrified out of his mind, the vehicon is deftly passed on from Insecticon to Insecticon until they find him a nice and warm spot in the hive, well-guarded by the strongest warriors.

Observing through video footage, Shockwave marks the fourth experiment as a success. Now that he knows that the device works, if given enough time to tune to the frequency of the Insecticons, he can start working on a prototype that will function without the cage.
insecuriosity: (Default)

When it comes to fanfiction, oftentimes the Spark is the most important aspect of a Transformer’s existence. Without it, they would die. It is insinuated to be the source of a Cybertronian’s sentience/sapience/intelligence, and it is often compared to the human Soul.

At the same time, there’s been instances of reprogramming  ( in both fic and canon ) which forever altered the mech in question. The destruction of a brainmodule has been shown to be almost the same as death.
Rung, with his brainmodule having gone through some trauma, was completely unresponsive and near comatose.  Nautica held onto Skids’ brain module, in the hopes that his spark could be rekindled in some way.

So, even though the details are never explained in canon ( how wonderful, plenty of room for headcanoning!) we know that the brainmodule is at least equal to the spark in importance.

My personal headcanon, is that the spark is what generates emotion, attachments, and feelings. And that the Brainmodule is necessary to interpret the signals of the spark, and to translate outside events to signals that the spark can understand.
They work in tandem, and develop set patterns and ‘shortcuts’ so as to say, as the Cybertronian grows older and has more life experience. 

With that thought in mind, I wondered… What would happen if the sparks were swapped, but the brainmodules were not?

Say, perhaps, a Pre-War Jazz and Prowl?
insecuriosity: (Default)
""Your recent Insecticons writing has an excellent idea and creative turn. I can see that happening in Shockwave's experiments. Although, I am curious to know, what if the chosen "queen" (vehicon) starts to show signs of mutations?"" (Asked by anon on tumblr) 
 

Ohoo, a very interesting prospect!

It is not a stretch to think that close contact with Insecticons could lead to some odd mutations - it was in fact a planned feature of my ‘A new Queen’ story.

It is a personal headcanon of mine that in a world where transformers can naturally procreate, their nanites are capable of heavy modifications to the natural frame over time. It would also be an explanation as to how a Cybertronian could ‘grow’ to a different alt mode, as opposed to getting surgery to have necessary parts and then scanning the relevant vehicle. It is a simple matter of reprogramming the nanites in the frame, so that instead of doing upkeep on the frame, they start reforming in the frame.

It would probably take a while for mutations to happen to our vehicon. A lot of time spent sharing food, living space and habits with the Insecticons, but our Vehicon friend does not have the luxury of being left alone.
Shockwave is specifially creating a control module for Megatron to use so he can control the Insecticons. I doubt that Megatron would like sharing his berth with a hive full of Insecticons and being groomed and fed, so the project is far from over.

The mutations in question would depend on the nanites fed to the Queen vehicon. If all was left up to ‘nature’, than a focus would be put on the vehicon’s gestational chamber and reproduction capabilities. Perhaps with some added spikes and an ability to eat raw energon with small mandibles ;)
insecuriosity: (Default)

Unicron and Primus have, as far as I am aware, been part of the Transformers canon since G, and in that time they have done very little.
That is to say, Unicron was busy eating people and doing generally evil stuff, while Primus was left as an ambiguous and interpretable figure who never interfered or was given a voice/role.

I kinda set them aside as ‘the weak mandatory unexplored Cybertron religion’, until a certain episode in TFP. The episode that revealed Earth to be Unicron; ‘One shall rise’.

To me, this explained so many things. The unexplainable amount of Cybertronian relics, the presence of energon, and perhaps most importantly the similarities between humans and Cybertronians.
It offered a vague hint as to why the humans look so similar to the Cybertronians, and why they have so much in common; at the root they are connected.

Then I got to thinking a little more about this. If I wanted this headcanon to work, it would have to make sense that humans sprouted from Unicron, even though humans are not inherently evil. And Cybertronians are not inherently good!
So I started to look at the other things that set Primus and Unicron apart from each other. Primus is inert, Unicron is active. Primus is order and peace, Unicron is chaos and war. Primus is robotic and Unicron is organic.

It brought to mind a cycle. Order, after all, is only good as long as it is balanced with Chaos. Too much order inhibits growth and keeps change from happening. The same happens with Chaos- if there are too many changes and too much rapid growth, nothing will be able to last more than a short moment before being replaced.

So, what if instead of Unicron being evil, and Primus being good, the two gods cycle back and forth between Chaos and Order?
We would be seeing the late stage of Primus’ transformation - his order and stillness forcing all the living creatures in and on him into death until nothing is left to take.

In contrary, Unicron is only gaining more and more life - his crust is teeming with countless lifeforms! Still organic, still fleeting and chaotic, but there is already a species creating robots and researching a way of continuing life beyond what their organic bodies are capable of.
Just like the Cybertronians did to Primus long ago, humanity will gut Unicron of everything he has to offer, eventually shifting towards order more than towards Chaos. Over millions of years everything is brought to a status quo, and brought under strict rules. Humans become more alike robots, as augmentation becomes more and more apparent.

Back on Primus, abandoned and empty, chaos has taken its toll on him. Heavy space storms are battering him, meteors are impacting him, solar flares boil his surface and dark patches of space freeze him to the core. In spite of that, a single celled organism manages to withstand all this, and it begins to evolve.
As conditions stabilise over millions of years, Primus’ surface is covered in organic creatures - dust and corpses and carbon slowly burying the old relics of the people that lived on him before.

It is not a perfect headcanon just yet, but I am very proud of it. I hope to get an idea where I can use this in a story, but since it cycles over such a long time I think it will have to stay as just a headcanon or background worldbuilding.
insecuriosity: (Default)

""Do you have anymore Insecticons headcanons? Insecticultures always intrigued me thanks to RID15."" - Asked by Sedasan on Tumblr

I loooove Insecticons, oh yes.Regular Cybertronians are already very versatile, but Insecticons allow for even more out-there ideas, headcanons and cultures.

I usually pick between two different origins for the Insecticons, depending on what kind of story I want to tell. Sometimes they are a part of Cybertronian Wildlife, grown way too numerous after the ecosystem was destroyed. Sometimes they are an experiment made by Shockwave, much like Predaking in TFP, and sometimes they are BOTH. Depends on what works best for the story I am writing ;)

In A New Queen ( an older fic of mine ) , they are part of the regular Cybertronian ecosystem. Living off crystallised energon and underground pools and deposits, the war and the energon crisis hit them very hard.
Just like earthen insects, the speed of Insecticon reproduction is one of their biggest strengths. It is still very slow, and requires a ton of fuel over a longer period of time, but when compared to Cybertronian reproductions the Insecticons win by a long shot.

As opposed to every insecticon having mating capabilities, I headcanon that there is a singular Queen that is capable of carrying CNA with them for a longer period of time and create eggs that with enough care and food can grow into Insecticons. There’s really no security net for when there is no more queen, or any brood that is capable of turning into a queen. Before the war decimated Cybetron, a queenless hive would disperse and join other hives - ensuring CNA variety and keeping the species alive.

In RID15, I only remember the one grasshopper Decepticon, and the Zizza. Her powers are very interesting, and they explain how a single insecticon is capable of controlling a hive when all of its members have some sort of consciousness and awareness.

I also like to headcanon that there is a difference between mecha with an insectoid alt mode and Insecticons. Insecticons have their insect form as their primary form, taking a root-mode or a car-mode as their second mode.  Other Insecticons ( think Wasp and Airachnid ) are regular mecha who scan an animalistic altmode.
Insecticon are intelligent, but they are very focused on finding a group and someone to follow. It will be very rare to find an Insecticon alone, and if you do it is usually a mecha with an insectoid altmode instead of an Insecticon. ( This is not to say that a mech with an insectoid alt mode does not experience a form of Insecticon instinct, because I headcanon that they deefinitely do)

Insecticons can also eat or melt metals. They use these metals to provide food for newspark insecticons, or for building a nest.
insecuriosity: (Default)

So, before we got more issues about the DJD. Before we learned their real names and watched as Megatron sent them to the afterlife, I felt inspired by Tesarus.

His grinder doesn’t make that much sense as a torture instrument once you think about it. Permanent harm does not mean as much to Cybertronians as it does to humans with how much of their frame can be repaired and rebuilt without a trace, and the shredding would be too damaging to keep up for long without the victim dying.

So Tesarus was probably not sparked as an executioner or a torturer. No. Tesarus was one of the many, many garbage disposal bots that lived on Cybertron.

You had janitors, the taller, more respectable cleaners that could be found in towers, offices, and habsuites. There were streetcleaners like Tailgate, minibots tasked with plumbing work and garbage distribution - ferrying smaller garbage to their proper drop-offs to be brought to the garbage plant. Those garbage mounts were picked up by garbage trucks, or unfortunate truckformers who had not found a contract for ferrying less disgusting cargo. And finally there are the smelters and shredders; confined to the garbage plant to shred and smelt larger parts of garbage into re-usable and refineable parts.
All of Cybertron’s lower class mecha were disposables, and just like the miners and construction workers, Tesarus was a monoformer disposable owned by his city. As such, he was subjected to certain rules and regulations.

He was only legible for repairs after he fulfilled a certain amount of work, and those repairs only extended to wear-and-tear or injuries that affected his ability to work. A pained leg or a rusted out hip joint was something you had to pay for out of your own pocket, even though the credits paid for the work were only enough to keep a fuel tank full.
By way of example, grinders and smelters with missing legs, arms, or mobility issues were simply kept lined up outside in a row, with only their grabber arms intact to process garbage.

If they do not do enough work to warrant a replacement on their blades, there is a chance of decommissioning, which boils down to being melted down for scrap and spare parts.

Tesarus is one of the garbage grinders in Iacon. With a growing phobia for dirt and grime, he does not have many friends among the garbage disposal bots, and he saves up as much of his earnings as he can to try and earn himself ununtrium blade-lining.
There is, however, only one way that he will be able to save up enough to make that a reality; good ol’ crime!

For a fee, Tesarus hides important caches of illegal substances somewhere in the garbage plant. He also gets rid of unwanted mecha. I imagine that one of those times, he passes someone through his grinder that is too important to go unnoticed, or something similar.
A monoformer disposable wanted dead from two sides is not going to have an easy time. Especially not if you factor in a lack of friends, a phobia for dirt, and the fact that he is easily bored.

And even though Scissorsaw is a great and menacing name… I headcanon that he was called Chipper before he became a soldier for the Decepticons.

Empties

Dec. 4th, 2018 10:49 am
insecuriosity: (Default)

We all know empties. One of the most common of Cybertronian monsters, bar perhaps the Sparkeaters, Empties often serve as a reminder to stay together- Don’t venture out into the wilderness of Cybertron on your own, and don’t set a foot in the darker parts of the Dead End! 

And of course, don’t go hungry for too long, or you’ll BECOME one!!

…but that does not seem to hold up. Not every mech that dies is guaranteed to get up and become an empty. Mecha with slit lines who bleed their energon into the soil of Cybertron are not guaranteed become empties, and even a slow starvation doesn’t mean you will become an empty.
So what is it that transforms a normal mech into a mindless drone with a hunger for pre-digested mech-fuel?

The answer is not far fetched or surprising. Dark energon.

With all the myth and superstition surrounding this dark fuel, it is very doubtful any mech would voluntarily consume it. In small doses it is already enough to transform mecha into horrible monstrosities!
No, there is a reason that Empties only pop up where the situation is dire. When there’s not enough energon to go around, mecha get desperate. They take fuel from places they normally wouldn’t. They are too faded and listless to go through the filtering process, if they even have a filtering system at all.

As they drink from unfiltered and odd sources, small traces of dark energon come into their system. Nothing too dire, nothing transformative. The only way you can see that someone has been drinking dark-energon contaminated fuel is after they have died.
If their spark signature falls away and their frame grows cold and motionless, they managed to die as a creation of Primus. If they get back up, with a hungry look in their optics, it’s already too late.
insecuriosity: (Default)
Yes, I know halloween is over, but any time of the year is a good time for spoops!

When it comes to Cybertronian vampires, I always felt dissatisfied. A mech with pointy teeth that drinks energon from living mecha ? Syphonists, terrorcons and empties already got that niche covered.
Creatures that prey on the spark are less common, there’s the energon leech and the Sparkeater, and that’s where it ends.

Of course, a vampire is almost like a regular human - with only small tells to their monstrous nature. I imagine that a Cybertronian vampire would be much the same - blending in and feeding off of mecha for as long as possible without being detected.

So, what kind of Cybertronian, hidden in plain sight, would have close access to sparks ?

Cassettes!

Think about it. Cassette Decks are the perfect prey of a spark vampire. With coding that urges them to care for smaller sparks and lost cassettes, getting close to one of them is simple. Playing the act of a lost and damaged cassette, they will easily find a host willing to take them in.
With the docking procedure, they are tucked in close to the host’s spark, where they can feed as much as they please. At the same time, they are nestled with other cassettes that they can infect and turn into creatures much like themselves. They feed, until eventually the Host passes away.

There actually used to be a lot more cassette racks on Cybertron before the spark vampires rose in number.
The few remaining cassette racks have found a way to distinguish spark vampires from real cassettes, but after the drastic culling of their numbers, they are no longer the number one prey.

Minicons, after all, can attach to ALL mecha - not just the cassette racks…
insecuriosity: (Default)
I’ve always been interested in creatures and animals, especially in fiction. I always wanted to read about people taming dragons, living among the wolves, being hunted by a predator.

In Transformers, there are virtually no animals to play with in this sense. Insecticons have varying levels of intelligence and sentience, as well as beastformers and Dinobots.
There’s not really a circle of life, or a food chain. All mechanical beings on Cybertron are sustained by energon, and that is it. Period!

So what if there were more differences between different altmodes ? Different levels of sentience, different diets and habitats…

What if Seekers were predators, hunting in trines and flocking together in huge groups? What if Grounders were their prey, and lived buried or protected in odd hive-like cities?
Minibots would have their own groups - less viable as prey to the seekers. The location of grounder cities would dictate their alt-mode and features, like how Kaon has the thickest plating , and Polyhex the most camouflaged paintjobs.

In this world, the different cities have only been in contact for a few hundred vorns, and things are not equal. A miner living in the crowded and crumbling hivecity of Kaon decides to make a stand.
To begin with, he builds a reputation as a fierce warrior. And as a finishing touch ? He tames himself a wild Seeker!
insecuriosity: (Default)
Shattered Glass is an odd beast to work with…. The initial premise sounds so very simple; swap around which bots are the good guys and which ones are the bad guys.
But in practice, this becomes pretty complicated. Which elements of a character would get swapped, and which ones stay ? Would a sadistic mech like SG!Ratchet even GET his medical license?  Or would his gruff to-the-point nature be replaced by a pleasant ‘go-with-the-flow’ attitude that does whatever it wants once witnesses have disappeared?

Would he still have a clinic in the Dead End if he was not invested in the troubles of low-caste mecha ? If he had his clinic to abuse the lower castes, why would he risk living so close to them, where they could burn his clinic down?

There are a ton of possibilities there though. Maybe SG Ratchet offered free repairs if his patients came in with their own parts, and a surplus T-cog or optic, Maybe he was content taking ‘favours’ from mecha that he could collect on in the future.
Why not ‘pay’ guards by offering them a full tank of energon every day, and free repairs?

Perhaps Ratchet was never really a great surgeon in the Shattered Glass verse. Instead he got his position from the Prime as a reward, for bringing so many of the guttermechs to the Autobot side. Most of them end up being early-war cannon fodder, but the guttermech ‘Deadlock’ becomes a fearsome warrior.

Drift doesn’t want to stay with the Autobots, he really doesn’t, but he has a debt to pay.
insecuriosity: (Default)
I’ve always found Cassette’s interesting. They seem so versatile- capable of hiding away in someone else’s frame and living independently outside of them. Small enough to be overlooked, but still capable of wreaking havoc - especially when teamed up with someone else!

It is the part of symbiosis that always puzzled me. Because it isn’t very symbiotic if you can only connect with a teensy tiny group of mecha that were specifically DESIGNED to allow you to make a connection.
Sure, there are other ways for mecha to connect via cables, cortic patches, or sparks - but a relationship as such is often labeled as Amica endura or Conjunx endura. NOT a Symbiote.

So, in an attempt to give more detail to how a symbiosis between two mecha would work, and how it would make sense as a frametype, I began making an AU. ( The typical last resort of anyone trying to make sense of a canon )

Symbiosis is a bond between two mecha that benefits both partakers. In the TF media seen thus far, it seems that this symbiosis comes more from doing jobs for one-another. Soundwave shelters his symbiotes in a specially made deck, and the symbiotes in return obey him and follow his orders.
It isn’t something that would naturally grow, or something that makes sense from a design perspective - unless the symbiotes were made to be drones. Mindless extensions of the bigger Cassette Deck.

But the symbiotes we see in the comics have free will, personality, intelligence, and their own motives. So that doesn’t really fit in.

A more physical symbiosis would much more resemble the original relationship between a cassette and a Cassette deck. The mechanical storage space provided by a symbiote could increase a mechs’ processing power, the legitimate equivalent of “downloading more RAM”  so as to say.
Without a Cassette Deck to actually read anything that the symbiotes are providing, the symbiotes have very few ways of communicating or getting rid of their data.

Sadly, this only really makes sense from the point of ACTUAL cassette tapes. Technology has evolved, and so has our idea of what an advanced alien technology might have to offer. It no longer makes sense that a smaller robot would be unable to speak, or that he would need specialised equipment to even communicate with other machinery.
Even in a war setting, this could be more of a burden than a boon. Important Intel could go lost because of the death of a cassette deck. A small mobile spy would not be able to relay messages because it cannot speak without its host.

Here is where I started to think of an AU - something I could work into a story.

What if Symbiotes are not restricted to just Cassette Decks? What if they are the kind of small thing that gives a noticeable boost, but just gradually enough that mecha do not seem to notice?
What if the clear drop in frame performances upon removal is seen as a proof that symbiotes are bad for you instead of good? What if there are symbiotes living out on the streets, transformed into a compact data-stick mode, hoping that someone will pick them up and plug them in for extra storage space?
insecuriosity: (Default)
"" If I may ask, do you have any headcanons/thoughts/fan-theories on Unicron's connection to the human race? I cant find anything on the subject and I want to hear everyone's personal take.""  ( Asked by anon on Tumblr ) 

I do have some headcanons! They are all attached to my headcanon on the cyclus of Primus and Unicron.

Unicron and Primus are twin sparks that are each other’s opposite. Unicron is chaos where Primus is order, darkness vs light, organic vs robotic.
Unicron is the unmaker for all robotic life, but organic life is too insignificant to bother with. Microbes, bacteria, spores, moss, organisms, all of it is too small and fleeting to pay any attention, and can thus flourish in the mess that Unicron leaves. As that one gif says; “Life, uh… finds a way.”

With that in mind, any organic life that formed on the destruction of Unicron would have to do with what they’ve got. In case of Transformers Prime’s Earth, Unicron himself went dormant and grew a little colony of organics.
His blood and CNA is what humanity and all of Earth’s animals built upon to come into being, and you can see this clearly in how Beastformers so closely mirror the animals on Earth, and how the humanoid shape eventually became the most common one on both planets.

In line with my headcanon on Primus and Unicron existing in an endless cyclus, the organic life on Unicron’s shell will eventually create robotic life, and will create a new line of Transformers in the far, far future. Similarly, Primus will fall into disrepair and become a ruin - which will eventually flourish with organic life, and the cycle continues.

This was a fun question to answer, thank you ^^

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