#darhos

Was Devil Gigatron present in the Uniend cluster?

Dear Gigatron Guesser,

Decades after Bumblebee and his team liberated Cybertron from Cyclonus and his neo-Decepticon movement, peace had seemingly come to Cybertron at long last—but not all the Decepticons responsible for the soft coup had been brought to justice. ‘Bots like Bulkhead and Wheeljack scoured backwater systems for any Decepticon stragglers. Upon learning that the original Grimlock had gone missing, they tracked his last known location to the spinward rim of the galaxy, far away from Cybertron, where they made a shocking discovery: for years, various civilizations in the sector had been tracking a number of large, unidentified starships: shockingly, these mystery vessels were based on ancient Cybertronian schematics, massively upscaled copies of the Ark that had carried the Autobots off Cybertron so long ago.

These ships were orders of magnitude larger, jumbled hodgepodge designs that combined reliable Cybertronian technology with exotic alien weaponry and mysterious energy sources. These self-sustaining "war worlds" carried the foundries, armories, and shipyards required to support an army’s worth of Cybertronians, and were also capable of creating that same army: vast shipboard cloning facilities could mass-produce new protoforms and hybridize their CNA with the genetic data of many different alien creatures. Planets like Darhos and Ijurn had been scoured of their natural resources, strip-mined to support the construction of these terrible vessels.

Dear Rising Refugee,

Although Shockwave gladly lent his considerable scientific acumen to Megatron’s regime during the last days of the war for Cybertron, his first priority was always to himself and the sanctity of his experiments—once Megatron had surrendered and sequestered himself on Chaar, Shockwave simply went his own way and never looked back. Civilizations on the galactic rim would occasionally report strange break-ins into decommissioned research facilities and file reports of missing gene samples; periodically, alien traders would claim to have encountered monstrous techno-organic creatures lurking on distant worlds, but even I am unsure of the veracity of these tales.

A few decades after Shockwave vanished from history, an archaeological dig on the far-off world of Darhos accidentally stumbled across an old military bunker that some unknown party had repurposed into a makeshift genetic laboratory—a laboratory that included significant caches of pilfered Cybertronian technology. The lab was in disarray; the researchers noted signs of a scuffle, a severed purple hand, and a set of three-toed, oil-stained footprints leading out of the building and into the wilderness beyond.