#downwash

Dear Whirl Wonderer,

As these two events took place in entirely separate universes, this is unfortunately not the case-although the tale of the two Whirls is itself quite an interesting tale.

The older Whirl was a veteran Autobot; a former drill sergeant at the Yuss flight academy, he joined the Autobots shortly after the beginning of the war—when he wasn’t distracting airborne Decepticons with a dizzying array of loops, barrel rolls, and jinks, he was hovering over the battlefield, bombarding fortifications and static artillery emplacements with homing rockets and chemical weapons. Always a tough, disciplined soldier, it was Impactor who first approached him in the hopes that he would join the venerable Wreckers—and indeed, Whirl jumped at the opportunity to join the up-and-coming squadron. I am sorry to say that Whirl’s by-the-book attitude did not fit in with the unorthodox chain of command and tactics the Wreckers so often utilized; rather than try and force his new teammates to conform, however, Whirl simply allowed his own standards to slip lower and lower. His increasingly brutal tactics on the battlefield led many of his own allies to give him a wide berth—and although some crueller ‘bots derived entertainment from his increasingly detached, sociopathic sense of humor, it was clear that he adopted this new persona, at least in part, to try and distance himself from the horrors of the war and the acts of unspeakable violence that he committed every day. 

Once Impactor finally went too far during the massacre at Triax, news of the growing “Wrecker problem” finally reached the ears of Autobot high command. In response, Impactor was court-martialed and imprisoned, and Optimus Prime appointed Ultra Magnus to replace him in the hopes that he could whip the unruly unit back into shape. Once he took over, Ultra Magnus made a point to comb through the service record of every Wrecker—and while some remained, far more were shipped off to military prison for their crimes. In some way, I think that Whirl was glad to finally be relieved from duty, even though it meant riding out the next four million years in a backwater prison. 

Dear Proto-batch Professional,

Of the five ‘bots who made up the first group of Rescue Bot Academy recruits, Wedge was the first to emerge by a significant margin. However, he was kidnapped moments after he’d emerged from the Well of All Sparks and shipped to Trepan’s neo-Decepticon blacksite for reconditioning, which greatly stunted any potential social and emotional growth that he might have made otherwise. 

As for the rest… Optimus Prime’s sacrifice reignited the Well of All Sparks; before long its frantic pulses of new lives settled into a more reasonable rhythm that shaped the lives of the new postwar Cybertronian civilization, and a new batch of protoforms arose once every few days. Thus, Medix was a member of batch 221, Whirl—formerly “Downwash”—hailed from batch 238, and Hoist batch 245.