#praum

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.

Dear Dino Delver,

By the end of the Great War, the Decepticons were in disarray. The liberation of Chaar was the decisive hammer blow that shattered the Decepticon war machine beyond repair and forced them to the outer rim of the galaxy to start anew. While some stubborn Decepticons did their best to rebuild—forming squabbling rump states, roaming pirate fleets, and bizarre cults—Trypticon simply retreated to a distant, unnamed moon to recuperate.

Perhaps, once, Trypticon would have sought bloody retribution against the Autobots—but his once-legendary hatred had developed into something else: exhaustion. Trypticon was tired of war, tired of killing, tired of being used and abused and thrown away by his fellow Cybertronians. He knew that he would never have a place among the Autobots, but could not bring himself to turn on the Decepticons he had fought alongside for so long; instead, he simply transformed to starship mode and set out to forge his own destiny.

Centuries later, a team of Maximal explorers stumbled across the remains of a massive obsidian-black warship of Cybertronian design buried among the sand dunes of Praum. Wandering junk traders and scavengers had long since stripped the vessel clean for parts, leaving nothing but an eerie superstructure that whistled in the desert wind. For years, historians wondered and debated and argued—was Trypticon attacked by something? Did he encounter some kind of structural failure or run out of energon? Did he take his own life by deliberately crashing himself into the planet?