#cybertron

Two new prints

Song of the Starcrossed - Chapter 4 - aruachan - Transformers - All Media Types [Archive of Our Own]

New chapter up on AO3!

(Kaon - Part 1)

All optics in the pavilion gawked at the sight of the champion gladiator who had materialized from the sky and was now drawing himself up to his full height in front of a smaller, red and blue plated bot.

He’s shorter than I expected, thought Megatronus. Amusement played across his faceplate as he watched the stunned archivist regain his composure. “Orion Pax, I presume.”

“Megatronus,” Orion broke into a delighted grin. “It’s so good to see you!”

“The pleasure is all mine.” Megatronus gave a little bow and made a gracious gesture with his arms. “Welcome to Kaon, my friend. Come - allow me to show you around.”

here we go again! (this is the quickest way to answer all these asks without clogging everyone’s dashes with a bajillion bits of answer spam, btw, i’m not trying to hide these questions or imply they’re not good)

answered asks include the rules of war, Bayverse drillers, volcanoes, MREs, group homes, necromancy, self made packages, Omega Supreme, the extent of rewriting one’s coding, and detaching limbs

kind of all of the above? different cultures, governments, and people groups had different opinions and strategies on how war should be conducted throughout history, and tactics evolved along with technological and cultural changes. during the Prime Wars of ancient history, when the ruling Firstforged had largely disappeared and people were left to squabble over their relics of power and claim authority for themselves, it was a destructive free-for-all, and as time went on people slowly figured out generalized boundaries to respect or cross. but these were largely localized wars between tribes and people groups. the first universal civil war of Cybertron that encompassed everyone on the planet was the War of the Threefold Spark, started by Exarchon. this war saw an awful lot of changes to leadership and city-state structure, and features that remain in place today, like the Maxilla series of forts south and east of Rodion, established by the original Overlord to shore up defenses against Exarchon. the forces of the Threefold Spark were brutal and inhumane, but so were the opposition. out of that came some general rules of conduct and the concept of restraint when dealing with enemies, out of a respect for Cybertronian life. whether or not people actuallyfollowed those codes of conduct varies throughout history and culture

the modern Stratocracy actually comes from a military coup of the previous regime, the Triumvirate. the Grand Architect rose up and overthrew the three despots. naturally, his loyal forces installed him as the new leader of Cybertron, and he went on to conquer the colonies, unifying all mecha under his rule in a way that hadn’t been seen for vorns. as soon as that was accomplished, he dissolved the military, declaring war the pastime of either evil mecha or ones with no choice. the majority of his forces went directly into service as legal Enforcers. so while the Stratocracy may technically be a demilitarized state, their extreme police forces are essentially a domestic military exercised by the government for control of the populace. since they aren’t actually called a military, however, they are exempt from the historic precedent of restraint and boundaries to prevent war crimes

yes! drillers are a rare, giant species of mechanimal living deep under Cybertron’s surface, acting as excavators and tunnel architects to clear out the complex understructure of the layered strata. a different subspecies lives on Lunas 1 and 2 also, smaller but faster and more social than their aloof cousins. they’re almost never seen by mecha as they usually roam too deep, and the occasional underground team who does spot them must be very careful to leave unnoticed, lest they get eaten!

(also this is a Bayverse appreciation zone, i love those movies even though i have many many negative things to say about them, they and the Bumblebee movie got me into Transformers)

aside from the obvious answer of hotspotsofsentio metallico, there’s a few geological features that fit the bill

and after ten minutes of searching i am unable to find where i’ve mentioned them before so let’s hope i can recite these from memory. there’s a small handful of actual volcanoes, although they behave a bit differently since Cybertron is not a planet with a molten core/plate tectonics, and has a different composition from Earth. volcanoes spewing lava are more along the lines of giant smelter’s pits from natural forges deep inside the planet, instead of spots in the crust where liquid rock escapes. some of this lava is super funky looking too, like blue lava (a real thing, look it up!) and often mixed with sentio metallico or heavily charged energon from nearby leylines, with a good chance of photonic crystals forming once it cools. there’s also tar pits, yareta forges and other natural molten vents, flaming oil or gas reserves that have been burning for centuries, and heavily irradiated scars in the earth. more typical liquid rock type volcanoes are common on Caminus, Eukaris, and Pyrovar of Devisiun. Prion of Devisiun and Velocitron don’t have a molten core, and Carcer’s tectonic activity is ridiculously slow

i thought about making art for this, but i’ve sort of already answered this. to quote this post:

a protein shake (oops misspelled it in the picture) is a very silt-heavy drink, which means it’s full of granulated materials and nanites meant to provide self-repair resources along with fuel. Most often it’s a thick energon slurry with added powders, but sometimes other liquid bases are used. There’s an endless amount of flavors, and the only limitation is making sure not to add two ingredients that will react explosively or fuse into an undrinkable solid. It might be good for other dishes, but it kinda ruins the point of a shake.

what this means is a shake contains both energy and upkeep fuel necessary for a mech’s diet. silt-heavy shakes have enough physical material mixed in to count towards self repair while also providing the energon requirements. if something can’t be mixed into the drink itself, you can make the container out of that material and simply eat it afterwards. it’s not so much a battlefield food anymore, but definitely used for busy or overworked people who have no time to make real meals. it’s the ONLY thing empurata victims can eat, added directly to their fuel lines

(warning for child neglect and death)

@hashkivenu so it’s a little bit backwards from human society. group homes are the norm, and nuclear structured families are a personal choice. group homes don’t exist to be backups when nuclear family parents can’t or won’t take care of their kids, and they aren’t obligated to search for or take in new children from bad situations. the vast majority of them get new kids directly from the creches at hotspots, as patrons tour the planet every so often to pick up newsparks they feel will fit into their group home. there are some exceptions, like the Safeguard Aerie which was specifically founded to take in “troublesome” kids from other group homes in order to keep siblings together, rather than splitting them, which is the only reason Starscream, Skywarp, and Thundercracker are still being raised as a complete trine

every layer of society has some cultural enforcement of functionism, which means even early on in life a mech will be subjected to the perception of their frametype. if they’re obviously disabled or mentally unwell, have an undesirable frametype, or somehow otherwise aren’t considered good enough to be put in a group home, they could be straight up abandoned by the creche workers and left to be absorbed back into the hotspot. those who age out of the creches without being picked up by a touring patron are sent to overflow group homes, created to take “leftover” sparklings. there’s not usually a lot of “leftovers”, though. the patrons themselves are generally free to treat their kids as they see fit. abuse and neglect are illegal of course, and group homes never have to worry about lacking energon to feed their kids since rations are assigned by the state. but if a child with a function-impairing disability gets lost in the city on an outing and the patron simply cannot find them? well, the patron did all they could, how sad that the child was misplaced, truly what a tragedy. that’s what happened to Red Alert as a sparkling. abandonment at any age is the first most common way a kid becomes a junker, and many kids with stricter/unkind patrons live with the constant unspoken threat that if they misbehave, act too annoying, or otherwise make themselves undesirable, it’s a one way ticket to homelessness for them. this is, obviously, a horrific way to grow up, but it’s not uncommon, and that’s the kind of home Deadlock is from

the second most common is by familial circumstance. if a child is adopted by an adult, and that adult becomes a junker, then the child can either be passed to another preexisting parent or legal guardian, be surrendered to a penitentiary home, or follow their parent to the streets. this happened to Springer, since Impactor technically wasn’t a junker when he adopted Springer, and junkers aren’t legally allowed to adopt from a creche or group home. running away is also a rare way gutter children are created, by running from a predestined function, abusive home, or out of sheer childish recklessness. that’s how Bludgeon became a junker. Wheelie doesn’t remember ever having caretakers so he was probably abandoned, and Nightracer doesn’t remember anything prior to being a nymph, so she has no clue what happened to her

it’s funny you mention this because i will tell you that there are, technically, at least two necromantically revived characters alreadyin SNAP, and no this is not including the immortal characters like Hellscream and Optimus. don’t worry, you’ll find out more when we get to the zombie episode :) it’s in season 2, if you want to guess

but yea, it’s perfectly possible. i mean you could argue that the immortality of the heroes is a form of autonecromancy, and if Hellscream ever follows his damn character arc and learns to do good things for other people, he might figure out how to turn that power outward to revive others instead of just himself. (and this is so far ahead and incomprehensible i won’t consider it a spoiler, but in SNAP’s sequel someone who’s been dead a long time gets pulled literally from the brink of death back to life, which is basically textbook necromancy right). but it’s still a pretty rare and strange ability, and bringing someone back to life often causes more problems than it solves… especially if you were never meant to have that power in the first place

it can vary some, yeah! some folks probably have internal settings for different mass and dimensions, but still within certain tolerances, and dependent on having the physical resources to package. overstuffed packaging is probably uncomfortable to process, but doable

and yes, sympathetic covert gifts are very valuable to junkers. material processing frames make those gifts easy to create and distribute, but anyone cautious and clever enough could get a meal to a junker. junkers have to be pretty wary about what help they take, though, because plenty of people view them as failures of function instead of people to be helped. trusting the wrong friendly face was the reason Damus got empurata’d, and Nightracer and Red Alert know very well to avoid the “charities” set up to give “aid” to gutter children that really just take them directly to penitentiary homes

weeeeeeeell

this is spoilery, but. when the Autobots find Simfur, abandoned way down in the depths of the Forbidden Zone, they carve out a little niche for themselves. a safe spot, where the horrors of the dead city are out of sight and out of mind. they don’t often venture further into Simfur, but on the few occasions they do, they find what seems to be a great processional highway leading downwards towards a great gate that might very well lead to the center of Cybertron itself. they can’t get past the gate, however, because of the enormous, desiccated ship that lays crashed in front of it

it takes the Mistress of Flame far too long to listen to her cityspeaking instincts and realize that ship is somehow alive

the hard limit is what the physical frame is capable of, as determined by the spark’s inner coding and the way it was forged. the vast majority of frames are capable of processing hydroxide, it’s simply an error in code that means the digestive system fumbles and gets irritated, and fixing that would be relatively easy for someone very well versed in functional coding of the frame. but if you were to take something not universally edible, like literal junk food that was never created to be eaten in the first place, or incredibly corrosive acids, or large chunks of difficult material like diamond, it’s not actually a guarantee that a mech physically has a frame tough enough to deal with it or the specialty organs to process it, coding or not. even for junkers who have to eat that kind of trash, it takes a long time of eating this food and getting sick for the frame to start adjusting to their circumstances, and they still have a point at which there are things they simply cannot digest. you can recode the frame that exists as is to (hopefully) do what you’d like it to, within its preexisting limits

jacking into a mech’s systems, editing their processing, and changing their coding is always a risky business. processor surgery exists, used for things like beastformer domestication or naturalizing an added upgrade to one’s frame, and firewall upgrades and OS patches are distributed like vaccines, but that’s not the same as full-on recoding. mnemosurgery is an extremely unresearched field in SNAP, barely acknowledged by medical institutions and often explored only by the… less scrupulous, shall we say

and what those less scrupulous people have found is A) it is incredibly difficult to battle the deep set hardcoding created and maintained by the spark itself, governing the major functions of the frame and quite a few minor functions too, often overwriting whatever changes they make, and B) at some point, no matter how much upgrading, editing, careful coaxing, and unethical wildly overpowering changing you do, the frame will just… fail. the metal will fracture, or the processor will fatally crash, or the spark will gutter out. it’s like there’s some kind of unspoken, invisible barrier, and a mech simply cannot surpass it for some reason

so! assuming you had a junker with an extremely educated, very specialized background in the functional coding of the frame, with a sterile environment needed to safely open someone up and access their processing centers without barriers or firewalls, and the incredibly precise interface machinery needed to read, edit, and insert coding to a living frame… they might be able to change their colors. since the spark itself is what generates a person’s paintjob that paint nanites follow, only influenced by other sparks one bonds with as a child, you have a chance at changing colors, and then changing right back in a few days as the inborn coding of the spark reasserts itself. or, conversely, maybe you change the color no problem, but you give yourself sunspotting problems or fordite syndrome. or, perhaps you change the wrong colors, or the wrong places, or get the wrong shade, or accidentally kill off an entire section of nanites. or! maybe you change colors and there are no side effects at all! it’s a gamble. that’s why it’s so under researched, because it’s so incredibly hard to consistently get the results you want, despite the incredible possibilities of mnemosurgery and other recoding procedures. and of course because so little has been explored, that makes it harder to accomplish, which makes it less desirable to research, and the issue feeds back on itself. it’s a lot like genetic experimentation today, where taking out one little dot or removing “junk” genes or switching up a sequence just the tiniest bit ends up having enormous repercussions. viable as a path of research, but at the moment it isn’t anywhere near developed enough to be a common, normal procedure everywhere

that said, when editing coding directly often fails, editing coding indirectly can succeed! like i mentioned above with junkers eating largely inedible things for a long time, until the frame slowly adapts to toughen up the digestive system and eke out some nutrition from trash. for paint specifically, the most common indirect coding edit is tattooing, which for mecha can be either a temporary paintjob or a permanent frame inclusion. scarification is one method, and another is nanite mimics that integrate into a person’s top couple layers of paint and emit a passive signal that they’re supposed to be there, eventually tricking the self repair system into maintaining them and keeping the tattoo. a sentio metallico bath would end up removing both scarification and nanite mimic tattoos since it would boost healing enough to get rid of them, but those are still pretty effective indirect methods of editing coding

(the post this is referring to)

ehhhh hm. not super long, i think? it’s not like limbs are regular detachable kibble, meant to be taken off with inbuilt physical features that allow for it. the amount of time it would take to safely surgically remove, medically sustain and store, transport, and then reattach and heal someone’s limbs just to keep them dentained is wayyyy too much time, energy, and resources when you could instead knock them into medical stasis lock and be done with it