Dear Vector Prime, can you tell us the story of Crash Combiner Skyhammer and Shocknado from RID 2015?
Dear Combiner Compatriot,
Their story, as with many other poor ‘bots on post-war Cybertron, begins with Cyclonus. As ambitious as he was ruthless, Cyclonus had already brought Cybertron under his heel after a well-placed coup, leaving the populace none the wiser as to the true nature of the new High Council. But Cyclonus was not content to stop there, however—he wanted to resurrect the Decepticon empire, better and stronger than it ever was, so that when Megatron inevitably returned he would find a well-oiled war machine ready to wreak destruction upon the galaxy. Cyclonus sought to purge every possible failure that had led to the undoing of the old order. In the twilight of the war, with so many of his forces dead or lost to the reaches of deep space, Megatron grew to rely on Vehicon warriors—primitive and single-minded, with no capacity for lateral thought—and this, Cyclonus believed, was the Decepticon leader’s first fatal flaw. The new Decepticon order, he decided, would have no room for such archaic throwbacks.
Only a few weeks after Bumblebee and his team left Cybertron for Earth, the High Council announced the formation of the Badgeless—supposedly, a new pan-factional group of peacekeepers who would protect and serve Cybertron unconditionally. The reality, however, was far more sinister: Cyclonus and his many moles in the Cybertronian government were building an army by harvesting new protoforms directly from the Well of All Sparks. These unfortunate newborns were snatched from the Well the moment they came online and spirited away to a top-secret black site. Under the ministrations of Trepan and his partner Psychobat, these “recruits” received a stream of hypnotic suggestions and propaganda in between controlled dosages of high-intensity radiation; those that survived the irradiation were transformed into combiners—any one soldier could combine with any other. With the right string of code words, these sleeper agents could spring to life to become deadly Decepticon shock troopers: intelligent, versatile warriors who were twice as obedient as any Vehicon and capable of combining to become exponentially stronger than all but the mightiest Cybertronian. Skysledge, Stormhammer, Shockdrive, and Warnado were among the few recruits that made it to the end of this process, becoming high-ranking field officers in the clandestine army.
Only a few weeks after Bumblebee and his team returned to Cybertron and established a truth and reconciliation commission to determine how far Cyclonus had been allowed to extend his tendrils into the Cybertronian government; while investigating rumors of missing persons, Strongarm and Dropforge stumbled across one ill-timed “procurement mission” and brought it to the attention of the provisional High Council. Furious that such a thing could be allowed to happen on Cybertron, Optimus Prime insisted on personally leading the raid on Black Site Alpha. He and his unit arrived just in time to save a fresh batch of would-be Decepticons from the first step of indoctrination. Several victims, including both Stormshot and Wedge, took the rescue to heart and eventually became full-fledged Autobots themselves.
In between his various adventures on Earth, Ratchet has turned his attention to rehabilitating the unfortunate bots who had been previously corrupted by the process, establishing support groups and repatriation efforts to return them to normal society. Stormhammer and Skysledge have taken an active role in the process, and are currently working with the High Council to locate and reacclimatize more members of this “Lost Generation”.
