#darksyders

I know the cyborgs of which you speak, though they are beneath my notice—even if they did unintentionally aid those infernal Darksyders in staying free of my Vehicons' control...

Dear Builder Breaker,

Skold had been a crowd-pleaser during the Games, thanks to her signature unwavering strategy. In her heavy double-tracked tank form, she would absorb blow after blow, waiting for her opponent to become exhausted and energy-drained before finishing them off with a single shell. She only lost once: to a turbine-powered Maximal jet named Nyx, who tricked Skold into firing a shell at her own reflection, immediately knocking herself out. Nyx used a sharp metal fragment as a lance and delivered the killing blow, whereupon she was immediately hailed as a champion and promoted to the Maximal Flying Corps. However, as Skold was taken to be recycled, it turned out that she had survived Nyx's attack and was merely unconscious. She fled and eventually found herself working for Megatron's Darksyders, becoming an enforcer for those poor bots who bought Beast Upgrades but failed to pay interest on those upgrades. About five decades after Unity Day, she served as a bouncer for Megatron while he presided over the Cybertronian Parliament.

One day, she was sent to extract funds from a delinquent payer and "teach them a lesson", but she discovered the payer was none other than Galvatron and his three Generals. Galvatron offered her a key role in the Grand Galvatron Uprising, to wreak havoc against the Cybertron Parliament for its decades of stagnation. She quietly accepted, keeping her new role as a Vehicon General a secret from everyone, even Megatron.

As for Nyx—she had once enjoyed the prestige of belonging to the Maximal Flying Corps, but as the Resistance became dominant, she grew disillusioned by both factions, becoming a recluse. Once, when exploring tunnels underneath the surface, she came across a strange message scribbled on a wall: "Nyx Quest". Disturbed yet intrigued, she followed a trail of game-like hints through the tunnels until she came to a dead end, where a display appeared. Nyx saw the face of a strange reddish bot with antennae. It spoke just as she began to wonder: "GG, scrub. Saw your Let's-Play and knew you'd be up for a challenge, seems you've legit got some skills—so I can trust you with this choice loot." A strange golden disc appeared before her. "Turns out there's an exploit that lets you rewind the game clock. I made a guide to all the future DLC patches, every release note and bug fix, and was gonna give it my noob self, but now I'm getting into game design so IDGAF (leave a review if you liked my mod BTW, I'm about to check). Should let you get ahead of the meta, if you're not a cheat-hating tryhard. GLHF." Nyx took the disc, not understanding the strange words, and played its contents. She saw records of a future Cybertron, full of wonders—and terrors! She saw that the Second Vehicon Apocalypse was underway! She rushed to Cybertron Parliament to tell them the terrifying news.

Skold was already there, psyching herself up for attack. When she saw Nyx, she knew she had the perfect opportunity to kill her old enemy and get payback for the shame of her earlier defeat—but this threw her into doubt. If she were to attack then, would she really be doing so out of belief in Galvatron, or simply to settle a grudge? She realised that her loyalty was to Megatron after all, and in sparing him, spared Nyx too.

Dear Destruction Dialoguist,

There have been many, ranging from the small to the incomprehensible, and to list them all would probably take too many of your decades, so I hope you'll understand if I limit this answer to just the one. While the Grand Uprising raged across Cybertron, a grave danger had emerged offworld—a threat neither the Protoformers or the Builders alone could address, or even comprehend.

In their distant past, during Galvatron's war with the Human Confederacy, one of the worlds caught in the crossfire was the small planet of Temptoria. To Galvatron, Temptoria was just another organic-inhabited world, fodder for his conquest, and raw materials for his Grendel Gambit—but unbeknownst to him, Temptoria had come into being around a multiversal anomaly: a living breach in the barriers between dimensions. Prior to their extinction, the Temptorians had believed it to be a mark of the creators upon the world, which they called the Brand. They used it to connect symbiotically with other realities, with "the crossover" being one of their most sacred rituals—but as centuries passed without them, the Brand grew stagnant, and fell to ruin. Dimensional instability spread from the planet, and at the epicentre, a timestorm threatened to unleash itself.

It was when the first of the anomalies reached Cybertron that I was alerted to the danger. In that reality, Blackarachnia had successfully forged an alliance with the Darksyders prior to the Vehicon Apocalypse, pushing Megatron to be bolder in his operations; during an attempt to seize Grimlock from Builder custody, they came into open conflict with Hot Rod's forces. Major Mayhem was mere moments away from tearing off Dirgegun's head, when a small group of Autobots from a distant universe spontaneously materialised in the middle of the street, towering over the Micromasters and Protoformers. To Megatron's surprise, the Autobot seemed to recognise him—and he certainly recognised the Autobot, as impossibly, it was none other than Optimus Prime!

I intervened, cutting short a potentially disastrous battle between the gathered parties by sending everyone through a dimensional gateway to Temptoria, and spoke to them about the Brand. I explained that if we didn't mend the brand, it would devour everything, reducing every universe to an endless loop of spacetime, the same events playing out eternally without development or resolution. The parcity of new information would bring about a memetic equivalent to heat death, and the Multiverse would be forever ruined. The gathered Cybertronians agreed to help me; in the case of Optimus Prime and his crew, only I could return them to their home dimension—and as for the rest, I suspect that many of them had designs of their own for the Brand. Regardless, I voiced my thanks, as it had taken a great deal of effort to bring them all together at the same time.

The situation we were faced with was undoubtedly the greatest "crossover" in history, a nightmarish unending mockery of the Temptorian's limited events. The Brand was exerting a continuous effect on other universal clusters—even ones from the greater Megaverse—taking their properties to make itself even more potent, threatening to subsume them entirely. All around us were strange beings, pulled from dimensions undreamed of, and the Brand was trying to make them part of itself, no matter how impossible that seemed, destroying itself in the process.

Hot Rod, Optimus and Megatron led their teams against these aliens, who seemed more confused than anything (I admit to being rather confused as well, especially at how many sounded similar to the Transformers). Still, it was an epic confrontation: they valiantly fought off the aliens while I saved the Brand. No sooner had I done so than the anomalies began to vanish, in the opposite order to that in which they had appeared; I had just enough time to thank Optimus Prime's crew (and answer a few lingering questions they had about one of their number's origins) before they disappeared. And, with the last of the anomalies gone, the Protoformers and Builders suddenly found themselves in the past—before they'd even set out on the mission to begin with!

Dear Bad Breaker,

The Darksyders' lawyer was Iguanar, a cunning Predacon with a reputation for underhanded tactics, though he himself credited simple faith in his clients for his success record. Iguanar had been previously employed by the Builder law firm Blackcat, Graphy and Zaur as a paralegal and administrative assistant; following a series of professional humiliations that made it clear that he would never be able to move above that position, he quit the firm and established his own legal practice. Heavily relied upon but widely distrusted, Iguanar saw himself as a "kindred spark" to the Darksyder leader Megatron—an assessment that I believe Megatron was not so enthusiastic about.