#dianosk

Are there any universes where Shockwave is an autobot?

Dear Shocking Swerve,

Oddly enough, after scanning through several million realities, I have been unable to identify any in which Shockwave is an Autobot—a rare occurrence indeed! There are, of course, several where the logic-driven Decepticon has worked with the Autobots after determining it to be the most rational course of action, and a few in which he has infiltrated the Autobots under false pretences; "Longarm" seems to be a favored alias of his across the multiverse when doing this, as seen when he became a member of Autobot Intelligence, or when he joined the Autobot Axalon Trading Company.

Dear Mushroom Master,

Indeed they have! You may recall the Maximal starship Dianosk and its many deep-space colonization missions—here is the story of one such adventure…

Several solar cycles after departing Starbase Rugby with a fresh complement of thirty protoforms, the four-man crew of the starship Dianosk—consisting of captain Updraft, engineer Ratchet, security officer Regulator, and ensign Brakeline—arrived at a red planet somewhere on the spinward edge of the galaxy. While the planet Dykayra had been known to Cybertronian astronomers for some time, no Transformer had set foot on the planet since before the Great War, many millions of stellar cycles ago.

Although the Dianosk picked up no signs of extant intelligent life, orbital scans picked up vast forests of skyscraper-sized mushrooms, whose toxic spore clouds would choke out any organic lifeform in nanokliks. More intriguingly, their sensors detected rich veins of subterranean energon, as well as signs of extensive prior habitation—the tips of ancient, crumbling towers poked up through the red fungal canopy, while abandoned maglev lines and crumbling superhighways criss-crossed the planet. Intrigued at the prospect of discovering a lost civilization, Updraft ordered his crew to land their ship in an abandoned spaceport; to better explore the planet’s treacherous, fungus-based ecosystem, he decided to activate a protoform to assist them in their endeavors, whose native alternate mode would allow him to better explore the terrain. The scanning process yielded FunGus, a gregarious young Transformer whose unusual mycelium alternate form allowed him to easily navigate the planet’s terrain.

The five-man exploration team established a temporary command post as a beachhead for further exploration of the city. As they picked through the detritus, the team uncovered many strange clues regarding the planet’s prior inhabitants—garments they surmised to be hazard suits of some kind, and an abandoned botanical research lab where dozens of brightly colored mushrooms had long ago burst from their holding tanks—perhaps, they surmised, the source of many of the strange, colorful mushrooms that seemed to form the ecosystem’s primary basis. Before the team could report back to Updraft, however, they were attacked by dozens of strange, humanoid fungi! Although the creatures only wielded crude melee weapons fashioned from old lead pipes and rusted nails, they were numerous, and difficult to deter—worse yet, amidst the chaos, FunGus abruptly turned on his crewmates! The terrified crew dragged the wounded Brakeline to safety, even as FunGus escaped into the overgrown sewers beneath the city along with their attackers.

Unsuited as they were to trekking through the dangerous fungal jungle, it took several more solar cycles before the rest of the team could locate their escaped ensign; when they did find him, it was in a series of abandoned catacombs, where a network of glowing tendrils connected him and hundreds of other fungus-creatures to an enormous, building sized fungus. As one, the aliens moved in on the Cybertronian explorers… but, before the encounter could descend into violence, FunGus announced that Queen Mycellium, ruler of their collective, had chosen him to serve as her mouthpiece. Millennia ago, she explained, their race began as parasites: a freak lab accident created a race of aggressive spore-based lifeforms who reproduced through unwilling hosts, until they and their progeny had choked out everything else on the planet, including the original civilization responsible for creating them. In the intervening years, however, they had attempted to move past their ignoble beginnings, and her collective hopefully marked the beginning of a new era of peace and understanding. She and her minions had mistaken FunGus for a wayward member of her own tribe, and attempted to “liberate” him from what she perceived to be alien captors; their unique form of spore-based communication had accidentally driven FunGus into a frenzy.

Dear Erudite Explorer,

The Maximals spearheaded a number of exploration initiatives in the years before Megatron’s conquest of Cybertron and the ensuing Spark War. Some missions simply involved scanning and logging habitable planets from orbit, but most starships carried a cargo of protoforms and a number of basic prefabricated components that would allow a single ship to seed simple outposts on several dozen worlds and establish a transwarp link to Cybertron. A crew might spend a period of time exploring a particularly noteworthy planet—surveying interesting native life or conducting geological surveys for rich veins of energon—or they might simply drop a cargo of protoforms on a life-bearing planet and quickly move on.

As the post-war Cybertronian society gradually expanded its aegis across interstellar space, the Maximal High Council expected that it would gradually “link up” with these remote facilities and provide them with the equipment, manpower, and resources required to build these basic outposts up into full-fledged colonies—however, only a handful of worlds developed in this way before the Vehicon onslaught permanently ended any attempts at a third Cybertronian empire.

What kind of animal will Beast Wars Ratchet be?

Dear Genus General,

Ratchet transformed, as his name suggests, into a common rat—he shared a body-type with Rattrap, though due to a quirk of the gene-scanner his alternate mode was white-furred and red-eyed.