#shortround

more silly side-character Transformers comics! with guest appearance by a non-side-character!

Transformers Cybertron's biggest nerd and G2 Menasor+Defensor owner, Shortround

so to recap, the first time vector saw me was when fleeing our base on the junk planet. but! that wasnt the first time i saw him!

as u all know, im a time traveller. what you dont know is that i may slightly have traveled back in time from the future. and by slightly i mean. A Lot. i dont know how far. i mean- ok i cant say too much but heres what you need to know about the future- the future im from, i mean. there are no autobots or decepticons. nobody uses energon weapons or cyber keys, we have- well something else. the mini cons are still around but nobody powerlinxes. our calendar is different, we have thirteen months. people still fight,, just differently. i didnt come back in time to change it or anything like that, thats not something i want, but at the same time i dont particularly miss it? am i making sense

Yes, go on.

well um. i guess what im getting at is that i didnt know i had this power. some personal stuff happened that nobody wants to hear about and suddenly i was flying through- well through the timestream. except i didnt know thats what it was, i was just freaking out. my memory was malfunctioning, i couldnt remember where or when i was, i couldnt stop thinking about all these mistakes. idk if u have this thing, where like, u feel theres someone right behind u looking at u? i started having that feeling, worse and worse, until suddenly everything stopped

i remember i was floating in space. and above me, except it felt like below me, there was this monster. it looked huge, some of it was shining in the sunlight but there were entire parts of its body where i could only tell it was there because the silhouette was blocking out the stars behind. it was like the whole thing was made of knives. and i should have been terrified but there was this bot floating there with a sword?? in the future there was nobody who looked like that, and as it turned out there was nobody else in the past who looked like that either. i think they broke the mold when they made u

Oh, I was a retired model, nothing more.

well they dont make them like they used to

Besides, I do believe my mold is still intact in some universes.

shushh!! honestly. anyway obviously as it happened it turned out we beat the hytherion but i didnt know any of that! i was like, wow,, this guy is gonna get chumped. but before i could do anything it lashed out at me, and suddenly i was back in the timestream. this time i had a sense of what was going on, and it felt like i was moving more slowly. i think the hytherion leaves, like, a sort of depression in spacetime? did u notice that?

Yes, it does. Anything moving through the higher dimensions is likely to be caught by its temporal pull.

right so yeah. i tried to like, calm myself down, ground myself in the moment sort of thing? and it worked! except i fell right into a rust sea. luckily not long after a couple of bots came by and picked me up

Who were they? If you don’t mind—I’m asking on the audience’s behalf here, they’re usually interested in those sorts of details.

oh right, yeah! they both turned into boats, but i dont think they were locals. there was this girl called minerva, i got on with her, and the other one was named shortround, who. well to put it bluntly he was the person equivalent of a waste disposal unit and i did Not get on with him. anyway as they took me to shore we had this insane conversation where they kept acting like they knew who i was and had been looking for me, and i dont remember what i said but it was probably just total nonsense. eventually though i worked out that id traveled back in time

I must say, to hear you tell the story, you acclimatized to your newfound powers very quickly.

lolll well it didnt feel like that at the time. i felt that i needed to find someone who could do something about the monster id seen in the future, but i didnt want to tell anyone about what was happening to me. i talked to their boss, sky lynx, you already mentioned him, and i was trying to get info without giving the game away. so i found out about megatron and the cyber planet keys, and little old me went “hmm, this guy seems like a bad enough dude (complimentary) to kill that thing”. but then sky lynx got suspicious so i panicked and traveled back in time again. by this point the comedy of errors had begun and i was powerless in the face of it

its so silly looking back on it. every time i traveled back, they already knew who i was, so i knew i was only going to travel back again. and sure enough eventually id put my claw in my mouth and say the wrong thing and rather than face the confrontation id just go further back in time. and you! u were worst of all!

I was?

u kept being so nice to me! and i didnt know what id done to deserve that, or what u wanted from me. and id seen u, in the future, i knew what happened to u, i just couldnt bring myself to say it. and u know how that turned out…

Everything worked out in the end.

mm. u know what i mean. i felt like such a fraud. ok u know this already, but for everyone out there at home, there was Never any chance of me killing vector prime!! i knew he was alive in the future. and besides even if i tried u wouldve just pulled some crazy move and left me looking silly like the rest, dont lie. but i guess really the main thing was that i was already maybe slightly catching feelings, and i couldnt believe i was so in denial that id ended up in a situation like that. i knew that if i jumped again, id have to go somewhere else, because that time none of the decepticons had recognised me. so instead i decided to suck it up and face the consequences

and hoooooooo, it was a total nightmare. turned out that all those times sky lynx had been suspicious, because he thought i was working with u? dude had me dead to rights! thered been two of me all along, there was past me- future me? going back in time in blissful ignorance, and there was present me playing 5D fullstasis to help you and the junkions without me finding out about me. but then eventually it was over. and after all that, it turned out that the cyber planet key everyone had been finding over? it was just a knockoff! junkion never even had one in the first place. can you believe it

i think thats the whole story? i dunno i feel like i glossed over some parts

Not at all, my love—you told it far better than I ever could.