I was trying to put into words some of the worldbuilding I have around Sky Ballet’s universe + the reason their Primus is basically a benevolent eldritch abomination of incomprehensible age that makes Crossed Sparks’ much younger Primus seem like a fresh intern on the first week of the job, so here it is:
The universe of Sky Ballet as a whole is incomprehensibly old. So old that in a lot of ways it resembles Swiss cheese more than anything, riddled with holes that lead to other universes or to the void between universes or nowhere at all. So old that it borders on mindbreak horror even for the Transformers themselves and they already have the capability to live to insane lifespans.
We briefly see Optimus’ personal ID and forging date in Sparks and based on that, Cybertronian civilization should have started around 180 million cycles ago, but that’s a bit misleading. 180 million cycles ago was not the start of their civilization; it’s when their last calendar reset happened.
Culture and history ebb and flow and repeat, but there comes a point where keeping all of that old knowledge becomes redundant and irrelevant. In general they tend to do a calendar reset every 250-300 million cycles, because that’s how long Rung usually lives. When the mortal incarnation of Primus dies, the church does a big funerary ceremony, enter a few centuries of mourning period (this would be considered “cycle 0” and doesn’t have a predetermined length as such) until Rung is reborn and they start the calendar anew from cycle 1.
Because of the ungodly timespans involved in their civilization’s history, the mortal Cybertronians don’t tend to keep track of things from past calendar eras all that well. They hold onto records from their current era and maybe the one before, but anything before that? Only Primus knows what went down back then, quite literally.
At the end of an era, as part of the funeral, Primus renders anything and everything capable of storing data inoperable for a few days while he uploads the entire historical database to his own archives. This is what makes the Matrix’s internal archive so special: it’s the only thing in the entire universe that holds all the collected historical data from the entirety of Transformers history. Which is, consequently, why you can’t simply browse the damn thing; you need to know exactly what you are looking for to find literally anything in it.
(As a side note, while Ballet’s Primus is much too “big” and multidimensional to really meaningfully interact with his children and the material universe, having all that comprehensive knowledge + the personal experiences of every Rung who ever lived means that on the rare occasion when he does actively enact his will on the universe through a proxy or another, he has a fairly decent idea how to express his benevolence in ways that won’t misfire horribly for the targets of his love, at least by divine standards. Not to say that he never fucked up before, but who hasn’t turned an entire colony of thousands into sparkeaters by trying to fix a much less harmful coding error in the population before, right?)
The age of the universe has some other consequences as well; some parts of it are looping, other parts are looping sometimes… any kind of metaphysical bullshit you can imagine can happen in Ballet’s universe. Universes like to coil up and loop in on themselves, metaphorically speaking, so if something is significant enough to leave an imprint on the fabric of the universe itself, then it will likely repeat in a different era. It’s entirely possible that almost the same civil war plays out with almost the same people every couple of eras, their history just literally doesn't go back far enough to document it.
(This is also why, while Primus is devastated over Unicron’s death and is expected to be in mourning for the foreseeable uuuuh forever probably, there was no divine repercussion for them killing a capital G God. This has happened before and it’s only a matter of time before Unicron pops back into existence eventually—although being “killed” definitely put him out of commission for a couple of eras at least.)
This also opens up the possibility of other shenanigans, like some degree of foresight/future sight: if someone happens to get glimpses of a past era where things were similar enough, they might be able to make guesses about how things would progress in their own era, but these visions are never fully reliable because the past era could diverge at literally any point and lead to a different outcome.
All in all, it doesn’t really come up in either fic, but I wanted this contrast to exist between the two when I hashed out the background for them: Crossed Sparks’ young universe, their Cybertron in its first ever era with barely 4 million years of history, where the civil war is still avoidable because it hasn’t been etched into the fabric of the universe, coming into contact with Sky Ballet’s ancient universe, where everything is just more, reiterated and evolving over and over again with each repetition until you can put Sparks’ D-16 and Ballet’s Megatron next to each other and they are barely recognizable as the same person.
