Intersectionality

The fifth Beast Wars: Uprising story released, "Intersectionality" was released nearly five months after "Micro-Aggressions" on the 25th of August, 2016. It was actually the second story written by Jim Sorenson and David Bishop, following on from Jim's solo work on "Broken Windshields", but was pushed back for various reasons. One of those is its length, 81 pages, which at the time made it the longest story in Beast Wars: Uprising, and it was ultimately the second longest story when the series wrapped up. The story was initially written to be split up into five parts, modeled on the five-part "Five Faces of Darkness" mini-series that served as the premier for the Sunbow The Transformers cartoon's third season, , with each part being released on a weekday from Monday to Friday (along with a similar form of mini-series with Ron Friedman's five-parters for G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero: "The M.A.S.S. Device", "The Revenge of Cobra", "The Pyramid of Darkness", and "Arise, Serpentor, Arise!"). In-keeping with this, there are several hold-outs from that original plan, as each part has bits quickly summarizing the previous one, and individual "covers" in the style of comic books were drawn by artist Josh Burcham. When the parts were all merged together, the format changed to that of a comic hard cover collection. "Intersectionality" was written by Jim Sorenson and Dave Bishop, with artwork by Josh Burcham and Tomoya Hosono, coloring by Jesse Wittenrich and Christopher Colgin, edits by Wittenrich, and copy edits by Louis Sun.

The story follows on from the one major piece of Beast Wars: Uprising fiction that came before the prose stories: the 2014 Transformers Collectors' Club magazine story arc "Alone Together", which saw Trans-Mutate and Protoform X/Rampage, exiled from Cybertron, go up against the threat of Lord Imperious Delirious and his Destructons on the planet LGC-8803. The story arc was written by Greg Sepelak and S. Trent Troop (with a prologue by Wittenrich and Pete Sinclair), penciled and inked by Naoto Tsushima (who Jim and Dave wanted to get back for "Intersectionality", but which ultimately fell through), colored by Evan Gauntt, and lettered by Wittenrich. I don't have annotations for them on this site, since the story arc had no involvement from Jim, but you can check out my TFWiki articles on them here.

The title of this is derived from the term "intersectionality," which in short describes the complex factors surrounding a person's identity and appearance (such as gender, race, religion, sexuality, etc.) and how they "intersect," creating various unique modes of privilege and discrimination, a term coined by American black feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989. In this story, Maximal, Predacons, Autobots, Decepticons, Cybertronians, aliens, and so on find their lives intersecting with one another.

The cover was drawn by Tomoya Hosono (a Japanese artist, who is incorrectly credited as "Hosono Tomoya," evidently the result of someone looking at his name and not switching them around, since in the Japanese language, one's surname is said first) and colored by Jesse Wittenrich, featuring Hard Head, Hydra (mistakenly colored with a red face rather than a silver one, making him look like Lazorbeak), Saberback, Killer Punch, and Magmatron staring up in profile, as the Dinosaur plummets to LGC-8803 in the background. I'll delve into who these characters are once they show up in the story proper. In keeping with the idea of the story being in a fake "hardcover" collection, you can see a crease where the "book spine" connects to the front cover. Also keeping the comic theme is the listing of the last names of the writers and artists on the bottom. The credits page reproduces the cover, but in black and white. The tagline at the top following the story's title, "A TALE FROM THE BEAST WARS: UPRISING UNIVERSE" is inspired by the two comics from BotCon 1997 and BotCon 2000 produced by 3H Productions, "Ground Zero" and "Terminus", which were marketed as Tales from the Beast Wars: Transformers. They even use the same font! On the table of contents, we have a bit of art that was presumably originally meant for the fifth part; it features Rampage triumphantly shouting with Lord Imperious Delirious' severed head on the Predacon shuttlecraft. So, let's get into the story!

The story starts with a prologue, with our first depiction of humans in the story outside of descriptions from Transformers. The idea of an advanced humanity blockading Cybertron was set up back in "Broken Windshields" and expounded upon in "Head Games" and "Micro-Aggressions", the latter of which had an entire Cybertronix section that explained the rise of humanity. The Confederated Terran Colonial Fleet and the Allowed Zone were specifically named in the later. The Spooky Action at a Distance is a strange name for a ship, but it seems to be an homage to the ship names of the Culture, a society of humanoids and artificial intelligences from The Culture Series of novels and books by Scottish science fiction author Iain M. Banks. "Spooky action at a distance" is a translated bit of German ("Spukhaften Fernwirkung"), from a phrase German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein used to flippantly describe the EPR paradox (short for Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, the other two names belonging to Russian-American physicist Boris Podolsky and American-Israeli physicist Nathan Rosen) in a letter to fellow German physicist Max Born in a letter from March 3rd, 1947. In any case, this whole opening bit is an extended homage to the sci-fi television series Star Trek and its many sequels, which will become apparent shortly.

Chak, as many of you know, was one of the two protohuman children who were occasionally seen in season three of the Beast Wars cartoon, friends of the Maximals. He's been resurrected in the modern day (more on that in a bit) and serves as one of the crew members of the Spooky Action at a Distance. "Slow time" is what is normal time to us, with the advance virtual reality of the Terran xonasphere presumably being faster somehow. The parallel autosequencer is probably just some sci-fi jargon. The xonasphere is presumably the CTFC equivalent of the internet. "Xona-" is derived from a proposed prefix for a unit of measurement in the International System of Units (SI for short), which describes units of 10 to the 27th power. It was proposed by American computer scientist Jim. V. Blowers in the early 2000s. Quantum entanglement is a real-life concept in quantum physics, and was in fact first described by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, though it would not be confirmed or named until later. The Spooky Action at a Distance was last retrofitted on the colony of Ny Norge 26 of its months ago; Ny Norge means "New Norway" in Norwegian in the Bokmål writing system. Norway is a country in Europe, and the naming system follows on from the previous colonies mentioned in "Micro-Aggressions", Xin Shanghai and Tamil Duniya.

On the xonasphere, Chak has 7.294 x 10 to the 6th friends: that's 7,294,000! Chak is a 22nd-century ignis-jazz enthusiast; I don't think ignis-jazz is a specific thing, but it appears to be a joke about two subcompact cars: the Suzuki Ignis and the Honda Jazz (the European name of the Honda City). Negative-gravity asteroid-jumping is pretty obvious. Traditional chess is the real-life game. I'm not sure if the rating Chak has, "amateur++," is based on a real-life rating system. "Circ'-enhanced" is short for "circuitry-enhanced," one of the three branches of modern humanity mentioned in the Cybertronix section of "Micro-Aggressions". They have augmented their bodies with cybernetics and consider humans who have stayed fully biological as second-class citizens; Chak is evidently a part of that branch. 3D chess is a real-life concept that involves multiple boards of chess, but in-keeping with the Star Trek homage, it's probably a reference to the Star Trek version of tri-dimensional chess, first seen in the original Star Trek series. Chak is a part of the Saint Rand Alumni Organization, Saint Rand apparently being a college. Saint Rand is Ayn Rand, a Russian-American writer who developed the philosophy of Objectivism, which is...well, let's just say, controversial, at best. He's also a member of the reform branch of the Ædificate Party of Kawkab Exxon-Google, which is a political party. Aedificate is the second-person plural present active imperative form of the Latin verb "aedificō," which means "I build." The letter it starts with, "Æ," is a character in the Latin alphabet, seen in the Old English language, and still used in certain languages like Danish and Norwegian. Kawkab is Romanized from the Arabic word "كوكب," which means "planet". Exxon-Google is likely a merger of ExxonMobil (an American multinational oil and gas company) and Google (an American multinational technology company, who own the search engine of the same name). Thus, Kawkab Exxon-Google is probably a planet. Chak has left behind "quasi-sentient info specters" on local yotaspheres and zettaspheres, essentially digital copies of himself. "Yotta-" is another SI prefix, which is considered official: it is the largest of the SI prefixes, standing for 10 to the 24th power. "Zetta-" is the prefix that follows it, 10 to the 21st power. The Chishiki umbilicus connects Chak to the xonasphere; Chishiki is a the rōmaji transcription of the Japanese word "知識 ," which means "knowledge."

"Femto" is short for femtosecond, which is one-one millionth of a second. Chak has optics, rather than organic eyes, as part of his upgrades. Chak lives in a crèche onboard the Spooky Action at a Distance, presumably the French verb definition that means "to inhabit". "Newtonspace" is what Chak calls normal space; it's obviously named for Isaac Newton, the 17th century English scientist, who came up with many of the basic rules of physics still in-use today. As a child, Chak lived near Lake Nobunaga in a rain forest; presumably, the rain forest is the same one seen several times in the Beast Wars cartoon, which was located somewhere in Africa. Lake Nobunaga, meanwhile, takes its name from Oda Nobunaga, a 16th-century Japanese feudal lord regarded as the "unifier" of Japan. More on Screwball in a bit. "Neg-spin" and "plus-spin" are terms referring to elementary particles, from what I can tell; essentially "negative" and "positive" with the concept of "spin" from physics.

Una was the other protohuman child from Beast Wars; she tended to show up more. She is fully biological, and as such, as part of her status as a "second-class citizen," she has smaller quarters than Chak; obvious, "'logicals" is short for "biologicals." The endocrine system is the system of the human body responsible for hormone production; obviously, Chak is attracted to her, despite their rivalry. We'll talk about the CTCF uniforms in just a bit. "Spec" is short for "speculation." Una mentions how the Spooky Action at a Distance fought an Intruder corvette last month. The Intruders were cavemen-like aliens from the 1970s G.I. Joe Adventure Team toyline, highly-intelligent "strongmen from another world" who set out to conquer Earth. In the fourth chapter of "Alone Together", "Delirious", it was noted that the Destructon Medusa (we'll get to her later) was a creation of the Intruder Empire, with her profile in the Transformers Collectors' Club magazine (published in the same issue as "Delirious", issue #59) described how she was originally built to serve as a diplomat for them, until embarrassing the Intruder Prime and being reassigned to "entertain" the elites of the Intruders. Keep her connection with the Intruders in mind...

The Gung Ho was a Maximal ship commanded by Big Convoy in the Beast Wars Neo cartoon. We'll find out who the "old man" is in just a second. "Prob Matrix" stands for "probability matrix." Sol is the Latin name for the Earth's sun. Back in "Head Games", the term "Macromaster" and "Megamaster" were mentioned as counterpoints to Micromasters, with the former being normal-sized Transformers, and the latter being the massive city-bots. Macromasters was a Transformers fan-comic created by Filipino fan Don Figueroa, who would go on to be a professional comic book artist for the franchise.

Now, a quick explanation. Chak and Una were named in homage to the 1985 dark fantasy film, Legend. Chak was named after the film's protagonist Jack, played by Tom Cruise, while Una was named after the fairy Oona, played by Annabelle Lanyon. Beast Wars: Uprising continues this theme with the captain of the Spooky Action at a Distance: Blix, named after the evil goblin played by Alice Playten. He is the Beast Wars: Uprising version of the "leader Neanderthal" that lead the protohuman tribe to which Chak and Una belonged; the one seen using Dinobot's makeshift hammer at the end of "Code of Hero". Before we continue with the story, let's first take a look at the illustration, drawn by Tomoya Hosono, depicting Chak, Una, and Blix on the bridge of the Spooky Action at a Distance. Their uniforms are inspired by the Starfleet uniforms, specifically the version seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Chak's appearance is vaguely like that of the Borg, an antagonistic alien hive mind from Star Trek; mostly, the character of Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager (played by Jeri Ryan). Una's hair style appears to be based on that of Star Trek: The Next Generation character Deanna Troi (played by Marina Sirtis), the counselor onboard the Enterprise-D. I can't say if it's intentional or not, but Blix looks vaguely like Jean-Luc Picard (played by Patrick Stewart), the captain of the Enterprise-D, and his mannerisms also vaguely remind me of him. What IS intentional is the metal sash-like object adoring him; this is a baldric, an ornamental belt that both denotes rank and can carry weapons, worn by various characters, including Worf (played by Michael Dorn), the Chief Security Officer onboard the Enterprise-D. Now back to the story!

The bit about Chak and Una greeting Blix sounds vaguely like a Vulcan salute, continuing the Star Trek references. The Eutychus Project is the ongoing resurrection of all of humanity, mentioned in the Cybertronix sections of "Micro-Aggressions". Pyschals are the third branch of humanity, gifted with telepathic and precognitive abilities. The Pleistocene is one of the geological epochs of Earth, from 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, when human first began to evolve. Early humans were much smaller than modern day humans. 18 Ny Norge years is about 20 Earth years. Sinosperanto is apparently a modern human language; it's a combination of Chinese (with "Sino-" being a prefix relating to China, such as with the Sino-Japanese War) and the constructed auxiliary language Esperanto, created by Polish ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887. The joke about the rock on a stick, like I mentioned before, is in reference to the makeshift hammer of Dinobot from the Beast Wars episode "Code of Hero".

Screwball, the ship's artificial intelligence system, also takes zir name from a character in Legend, a dwarf played by Billy Barty. Back in an early post of the Facebook version of Ask Vector Prime (specifically May 23, 2015), Vector Prime indicated that "the Second-Born Intellects in the Confederated Terran Colonial Fleet of Primax 209.0 Gamma choose to self-identify as neither male nor female but somewhere in between." As such, Screwball uses the pronouns of ze/zir, a fairly recent pair of non-gender conforming pronouns attested in 1972 at the earliest, derived from the plural German pronoun, "sie," which means "they/them." Ze generates a holomatter avatar to interact with zir crewmates; holomatter was introduced in IDW Publishing's Infiltration series, holograms that allowed the Autobots to disguise themselves with "drivers" that could physically interact with the world around them. Of course, it continues the Star Trek themes, with the holodeck seen in many episodes of its various series, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the Emergency Medical Hologram from Star Trek: Voyager, aka the Doctor, as played by Robert Picardo. The gauntlets ze are wearing probably look like that on a knight's suit of armor. Geta are a form of traditional Japanese footwear, which look like wooden flip-flops.

Chak has "autonomics"; presumably, a mechanical version of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for regulating the non-voluntary processes of the body like the heartbeat. Chak's face is enhanced with silicates, presumably meaning the type used in circuit boards. Homo sapiens circuitus is the scientific name for the circuitry-enhanced branch of humanity; "circuitus" is Latin for "circuit." The burst of cosmic radiation the Spooky Action at a Distance detected was the return of Blackarachnia to her home dimension, back in "Broken Windshields". The mesosphere is the part of the atmosphere directly above the stratosphere, the "middle" layer of the atmosphere. The recording is Lio Convoy's assassination of Supersonic and his announcement of resistance from the end of "Broken Windshields". Una swears by Francis Crick, a British molecular biologist who, with American colleague James Watson, wrote the paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Humanity's policy of sterilizing Cybertron's colonies at the first sign of any trouble (with a 240 hour/10-day evacuation period) was mentioned in the Cybertronix section of "Micro-Aggressions"; despite their high and mighty nature, humanity's first instinct is to destroy when it comes to Cybertron. Elba was a Guardian-owned prison world from the Challenge of the GoBots episode "Escape from Elba", named for the island to which French Emperor Napoleon was exiled after he abdicated. The AllSpark Almanac II indicated that it was the planet on which Garrus-9, the Autobot prison from IDW Publishing's Transformers comics, was located.

"Basso profundo" is Italian for "deep bass," essentially meaning a deep voice. Tachyons are a hypothetical particle that move faster than light; you see them used a lot in science fiction for teleporting and communication, like in Animated. "Non-linear chronological movement" is time travel, obviously. "Dim-skipping" is short for "dimension skipping." A quantum lock is a seal in reality which prevents any time travel or dimension hopping into or out of a region in space time. The prehistoric Earth of the Shattered Glass universe had a quantum lock placed around it to hide away the Origin Matrix, as seen in the "Beast Wars: Shattered Glass" storyline. Five times ten to the fourth is 50,000; Chak probably should have gone ten to the fifth. Superstring resonance fatlines is in reference to both the real-life scientific concept of superstring theory, and Fatlines, a communications technology from the Hyperion Cantos series of science fiction novels by American writer Dan Simmons. PBS is the Public Broadcasting Service, a non-profit American educational television broadcaster. Professor Ōgaki (or Doctor, as he was called) was a scientist who worked the New Energy Resource Research and Development Laboratory, seen in the Victory episode "The New Warrior - Hellbat". Deluge was one of the 1993 Decepticon Color Changers from Generation 2, an Indy-style race car whose bio presented him as a scientist. In IDW's All Hail Megatron series, he helped set up the Decepticon's reverse-engineered space bridge. Remember him for later... Spanner, meanwhile, was a neutral scientist specialized in interdimensional engineering, from the two-part story arc in issue #17 and #18 of the Marvel The Transformers comic, created by Bob Budiansky and Don Perlin. He was captured by the Decepticons and forced to build the space bridge and was forcibly rebuilt into the space bridge itself. Quantum jumps were used in IDW Publishing's Transformers comics to enter ships into transwarp, much slower than a space bridge. The Dinosaur was the ship of Magmatron and his Predacons from Beast Wars: Neo, but as we'll see...well, let's wait on that, shall we? I believe this is the first time the term "proto-races" has come up in Beast Wars: Uprising, obviously derived from the use of protoforms to create Maximals and Predacons.

And now, let us get into part 1:

The art for the first part's "cover," as previously mentioned, is done by Josh Burcham. It is done in homage to the cover of Marvel's New Mutants volume 1, issue #39 (published May 1986) with lineart by Art Adams and inks by Bill Sienkiewicz. It depicts Lord Imperious Delirious in place of the White Queen Emma Frost, as he holds aloft the unconscious Magmatron, Longrack, Rampage, and Trans-Mutate (who are in place of the New Mutants Magik, Cypher, Cannonball, Karma, Magma, and Wolfsbane). We'll delve into these characters more as they appear in the story. The cover is presented as being a photograph of an old comic, with shiny "reflections" from the light. In the top left corner, we have a little "corner box," where on a real comic the publishing information would go; this "comic" is a part of Transformers: Timelines. The art of Lio Convoy is like the art of Optimus Prime that adorned most of the original Marvel The Transformers run; it was done by Dan Khanna (pencils), Jake Isenberg (inks), and Jesse Wittenrich (colors), and used as part of his tech specs, his bio in issue #61 of the Collector's Club magazine, and the cover to "Broken Windshields". This comic has a little "thrift store" resale-sticker on it; it gives its price as 20.09 CPKs. CPK stands for Cyber Planet Keys, the power-enhancing objects made from the very life force of Primus on Cybertron's four colony worlds from Cybertron; the art in BotCon 2014's "Hoist the Flag" comic repurposed the Cyber Keys as coins, and later Beast Wars: Uprising stories will use them as such. The 20.09 price tag might be a reference to the fact that the Beast Wars: Uprising universe was first conceived of in 2009, with the publication of TransTech/Beast Wars: Uprising Blackarachnia in issue #25 of the Collectors' Club magazine. On the bottom, it's marked as being part of 2016's "Chilling 20", a celebration of 20 years of Beast Wars since its debut in 1996, similar to 2014's "Thrilling 30" celebration of the brand's 30th anniversary. In reality, Hasbro would do a 20th celebration as well...with one singular toy, a redeco of the Beast Machines/Robots in Disguise Air Attack Optimus Primal in the Platinum Edition line to celebrate the Year of the Monkey. Yeah. The "Chilling 20" logo has a reptilian, slit-pupil eye in the zero, like the one seen in the commercials for the Beast Wars toyline, and renders 2016 in the Beast Wars logo font. Clean art of the cover would later be used for a "mini-print" included with a set of sticker decals sold by the Collectors' Club in the final days of their run. And now for the story!

Section 1: The Maximal and Predacon cast of this story are almost entirely characters from Beast Wars Neo, the latter of whom make up the majority of crew members. The three Predacons in the opening are playing the card game Triad from the rebooted 2000's version of the sci-fi television series Battlestar Galactica, as indicated by Hydra's shout of "full colors!" Hydra was a Predacon Pteranodon, a redeco of the American Beast Wars Predacon Lazorbeak, who was himself a redeco of Terrorsaur. In the Beast Wars Neo cartoon, Hydra only appeared in two episodes, a lonely Predacon on an outpost by himself, who was an extrovert who wished to socialize; here, as a member of the Dinosaur's crew, he's able to. While not described in-story enough to get a sense of his body-type, he's intended as a "virtual redeco" of BotCon 2016 Terrorsaur, who was a retool and redeco of Combiner Wars Air Raid. Guiledart was a Predacon Triceratops, who in the Beast Wars Neo cartoon served as Magmatron's right hand man; here, he's the weapons and security specialist of the Dinosaur. He's a "virtual retool" of Generations Thrilling 30 Roadbuster, with a new head based on the original Guiledart. Finally, Hard Head was a Predacon Pachycephalosaurus, a heavy retool of Beast Wars Dinobot. In the Beast Wars Neo cartoon, he was a dimwitted Predacon grunt, but his profile in IDW Publishing's Beast Wars Sourcebook depicted him as a ground forces commander who wasn't very good at improvisation, but could lead troops to victory given an attack plan. Beast Wars: Uprising splits the difference by making him the junior security specialist onboard the Dinosaur, a well-trained but inexperienced young bot studying under Guiledart. His name was spelt as "Hardhead" in the original Beast Wars Neo toyline and cartoon; as with previous Beast Wars: Uprising stories, this name change serves to distinguish him from other characters with the same name, in this case the 1987 Autobot Headmaster Hardhead. Hard Head is a "virtual retool" of the Cybertron Defense Hot Shot toy from Cybertron, with a new head based on the original Hard Head.

Holo-cards are a fairly generic term, but I imagine they're supposed to be like the holographic cards Rattrap was playing with in the Beast Wars episode "Power Surge". The laser core was a part of a Transformers anatomy mentioned in the Sunbow The Transformers episodes "Divide and Conquer" and "The Autobot Run", seemingly part of their life-functions. Later fiction would merge them into the concept of sparks, such as in Beast Machines Mechatron's tech specs or the Binaltech toyline's story, which indicated that it was alternatively the container holding the spark or the center of the spark itself. "Crying over spilled energon" is the Transformer way of saying "crying over spilled milk." I'll talk more about Saberback when we get to him; all you need to know now is that he carries tarot cards with him, hence the bit about card tricks. We'll learn who the captain is later.

Dead-End was a Predacon ammonite from Beast Wars Neo. The original version was male, but this incarnation of the character has had her gender changed to female, like Blackout and Spaceshot in "Micro-Aggressions". The original Dead End was characterized as someone just dedicated to killing, who didn't enjoy socializing with others; this version of the character has that aspect of her personality focused on. Dead-End is a "virtual retool" of Power Core Combiners Undertow. The original version of the character was named "Dead End"; like Hard Head, she's been renamed to distinguish her from another character with the same name, in her case the Stunticon Dead End. Engex was a drink first mentioned in the prose story "Bullets" included in the trade for IDW Publishing's Last Stand of the Wreckers mini-series. We'll get to Longrack soon as well. Dunno if it's intentional, but the parsing of the last line ("'She must be very lonely.' Hydra said, sadly.") MIGHT be a reference to the title of Hydra's spotlight episode in the Beast Wars Neo cartoon, "Lonely Hydra".

We have our first section break when we get to the end. However, unlike all the other Beast Wars: Uprising, they are not in a Cybertronian language, instead using Roman letters and Arabic numerals. That's because it represents the game of chess that Chak and Una are playing in the prologue! The graphics are yet another Star Trek: The Next Generation homage, as they're done up in the style of the LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System) operating system seen on the computers of the Enterprise-D. At the top of this particular section, it reads "T93W-LOOP"; I haven't been able to figure out if that or the alphanumeric bits on the left side ("500-4F3R" and "9F2-85DV") are references, though the first appears to correspond with Una's turns, as it changes to something else when Chak is playing. Above the middle bit it says "UNA," and it changes from that to "CHAK" based on whose move it is. In the middle it reads "Pc2-c4(2)"; when you take it and all the other alphanumeric strings in middle of the section breaks, they all come together to be moves from a sample game of Tri-D chess, a real-life game made by Andrew Bartmess based on the aforementioned Star Trek in-universe game, which you can see here. On the right side it's a bit tricky to read: from top to bottom it says "FLOW," "MODE," and "RCMD," which is short for "recommend." To the right of that besides the circular graphic is "CMD," which stands for "command." On the bottom it reads "/PRGRM HYPCHSS," which stands for "program: hyperchess," hyperchess being an alternative name for Tri-D chess. I won't go through these unless there's something new on them, just to save the trouble of repeating myself. Now back to the story!

Section 2: Lead sulfide crystals are a kind of robotic food item, a favorite of the robot-eating aliens known as the Mecannibals, which were seen in issue #53 of the Marvel The Transformers comic. We'll talk about Magmatron once he shows up, and we'll talk about who Dead-End is feeding when their identity is revealed later. The section break this time has the update alphanumeric bits: "L49S-LOOP," "7TF-9H5G," and "4RD-6N32." Again, no clue as to what they mean.

Section 3: Longrack was a Maximal giraffe from Beast Wars Neo, who served as Big Convoy's uptight second-in-command onboard the Gung Ho, constantly criticizing his other crew members for even the most minor mistakes; here he serves as second-in-command of the Dinosaur. Because of that, his personality in this story is modeled on that of the unlikable, snobbish man-turned-hologram Arnold Rimmer from British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf, as played by British actor Chris Barrie. He's depicted here as a straight repurposing of Cybertron Longrack, a version based on the original redecoed and retooled from Armada Hoist; Longrack's Cybertronian form in the IDW Publishing Beast Wars comic The Ascending was inspired by that toy. Chronometer is a fairly generic term that's showed up a bunch in the franchise: it essentially means "watch." Saberback was a Predacon Stegosaurus from Beast Wars Neo, a cowardly bully who relies on his mystical abilities to conjure an air of enigmatic mysteriousness around himself. His Beast Wars: Uprising incarnation ignores the cowardly aspect, instead focusing more on his mystical nature, though unlike the original he doesn't do anything overtly magical in the story. He serves as the navigation specialist on the Dinosaur and is a "virtual retool" of Prime: Beast Hunters Bumblebee, with a new head based on the original Saberback.

A breem is a unit of time on Cybertron, equal to about 8.3 Earth minutes. It was first mentioned in issue #17 of the Marvel The Transformers comic, and has been used in multiple continuities since. LGC-8803, as mentioned previously, was the planet that Trans-Mutate and Rampage crashed on in "Alone Together", after the prison ship they were being transported on was shot down by the Destructons. The message that the Dinosaur has received was a distress call sent by Lord Imperious Delirious in the final chapter of "Alone Together", "Clarity". Killer Punch was a Predacon Styracosaurus from Beast Wars Neo, an intelligence officer utterly obsessed with collecting data. His profile in the Beast Wars Sourcebook added an extra element: that he was a conspiracy theorist who was utterly paranoid, which is faithfully translated here. He was previously mentioned back in "Broken Windshields" as a winner of one of the Games and a survivor of a Cull. The original Killer Punch was a heavy retool of Guiledart; as such, Killer Punch is also depicted as a "virtual retool" of Generations Roadbuster, with a head based on Killer Punch's original. More on those unusual readings in a bit. Nothing new on the alphanumeric strings in the section break; I believe it's consistent from here on out, barring a few places here and there.

Section 4: And here we meet Magmatron, chief engineer onboard the Dinosaur. The original Magmatron was leader of the Predacons in Beast Wars Neo. He split into three altmodes: the Landsaur (a Giganotosaurus), the Skysaur (a Quetzalcoatlus), and the Seasaur (an Elasmosaurus), which all could combine to form the chimera-like Magmasaur. To replicate this, Magmatron is a virtual redeco not of a Transformers toy, but rather, TakaraTomy's Dia-Battles V2 toy from their rebooted Diaclone toyline, which can similarly split into three components (all of which are vague, jet-like spaceships) or form into one big alternate mode. While a villain, Magmatron has shown an honorable side in most of the fiction he's appeared in, and he became a Maximal who lead the Dinobots when his toy was imported for the American Beast Machines toyline, hence his characterization here.

Synapse is a Micromaster version of a Mini-Con from the Japanese version of the Energon toyline (known in Japan as Super Link). A redeco of Corona Sparkplug included with Armada Powerlinx Optimus Prime, he was part of the second wave of blind-packed Micron Boosters (Micron being the Japanese name for Mini-Con). A post from September 24, 2015 on the Facebook version of Ask Vector Prime characterized the original Synapse as an intelligent but smarmy Autobot-aligned Mini-Con, and that is followed up here, though Synapse will be decidedly more sinister...

"Fizz-rat" is probably meant to be "frizz-rat," a species of mechanimal mentioned in the Wings Universe prose story "Flames of Yesterday." A hydrospanner is a tool from Star Wars, first seen in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back; all of Magmatron's tools are from Star Wars.

Crazybolt was a Predacon frilled-lizard from Beast Wars Neo. A redeco of the American Beast Wars Predacon Iguanus, he was characterized as a master thief and escape artist, whose comrades had little trust in him, save for his partner-in-crime Bazooka. Here, Crazybolt is the junior engineer onboard the Dinosaur, and his untrustworthy personality is dropped, though we do see his escape artist talents and his friendship with Bazooka, which...well, we'll save that for when we get to it. Crazybolt is a "virtual retool" of Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar, with a new head and green-and-gold colors. Notably, the original Crazybolt was a dark brown, yellow-green, and red; the green-and-gold comes from the Decepticon Crazybolt from the 2015 Robots in Disguise series, who turns from muscle car into a massive lizard-like robot form.

Section 5: Note that the transmissions appears to be from Trans-Mutate, but as we saw in "Alone Together", Lord Imperious Delirious was the one who sent the signal. Hydra notes that the signal's been filtered through a computerized vocoder...meaning that Lord Imperious Delirious mimicked her voice. Trans-Mutate was shown in flashbacks in "Alone Together" to have first worked under Predacon crime boss Cryotek in "Perception", before being abandoned by him and joining Rattrap and Botanica's resistance cell in "Alone Together: Prologue", before being captured by Maximal forces shortly after her encounter with Protoform X. Trans-Mutate was indicated to be an insulting nickname given to her by others in her profile from issue #55 of the Club magazine, which she eventually took on as her own name, having forgotten her original. She's a version of the character created by Christy Marx for the Beast Wars episode "Transmutate", who was a misshapen protoform befriended by Rampage and the Maximal Silverbolt, who ultimately ended up accidentally destroying herself trying to shield the two from firing at one another, not wanting either of them to be hurt.

Trans-Mutate and Protoform X were being transported to Garrus-16 on Elba by the Claustrum, until it was shot down during a mandatory break in transwarp travel over LGC-8803 by Lord Imperious Delirious. The claustrum is a thin layer of neuron and glial cells connecting the cortical and subcortical regions of the brain. It is believed to have some sort of function that relates to consciousness. Protoform X was being transported due to his escape and murder of multiple Maximals, as detailed in his profile in issue #55 of the Club magazine. The original version of Protoform X in the Beast Wars cartoon was a Maximal experiment to recreate Starscream's immortal spark, as detailed in "Bad Spark" and "Deep Metal". Escaping, he went on a killing spree before being captured by the Maximal Depth Charge and being placed in a stasis pod, with Optimus Primal secretly being ordered by the Maximal High Council to take the pod onboard the Axalon and dump it somewhere remote. When the Axalon was redirected to pursue Megatron and his Predacons, Protoform X's stasis pod was ejected along with the other stasis pods, and after the destruction of the Vok-built artificial moon orbiting prehistoric Earth, Protoform X was eventually freed. He was captured by Megatron after being briefly defeated by the Maximals, and the Predacon leader enslaved him by removing one of his extra sparks and putting it in an energon-cage that would cause pain to the monstrous Transformer if he disobeyed. In addition, Megatron renamed him Rampage. In the Beast Wars: Uprising universe, much of the story is seemingly the same (an effort to replicate Starscream's immortal spark before escaping and being captured by Depth Charge), but in reality he and Trans-Mutate were part of an experiment to recreate Point One Percenters...which I'll go more in-depth about later. In this version of events, "Rampage" was a moniker given to Protoform X by Lord Imperious Delirious. And of course, the Builders don't want anyone to know what they've done, so both his and Trans-Mutate's entries are heavily redacted...

Cybertronix is the written and spoken language of Cybertron from Beast Wars and Beast Machines; it was created by Mainframe Entertainment as a cipher language for background gags in the two shows. It comes in two written varieties: Maximal and Predacon. The Cybertronian frequency is probably from Trans-Mutate's stasis pod's navicomp, which Lord Imperious Delirious retrieved after his Destructons captured her and Protoform X. The Captain's holographic head is obviously because he's prone and can't move around the ship. It's noted to be purple, and that's not just the color of the hologram, so keep that in mind...

"Best speed" seems like a fairly generic term, but it was used a few times during various Star Trek series when the Enterprise or whatever ship was going to warp speed. Bazooka, the ship's main pilot and helm specialist, was a Predacon Euoplocephalus from Beast Wars Neo, a strong, honorable, and serious samurai who always kept his word. The honor bit is stripped out for this one, but he's still a kindly and likable fellow whose always sure to look out for his friends and a brave soldier. In the cartoon, as previously mentioned, he was partners in crime with Crazybolt, which will become important later. This version is a "virtual retool" of Generations Warpath with a new head based on the original Bazooka. We'll talk about Apelinq in just a second. Once again nothing new on the section break front.

Section 6: A hint about the truth behind the Dinosaur in the description of the shuttlebay as "greenish-purple." Apelinq was a Maximal gorilla and is the odd one out of the cast, sold at BotCon 2000 as part of the Beast Machines toyline. A redeco of Beast Wars Transmetal Optimus Primal, he was characterized as a computer xenoscientist, and was a member of the modern incarnation of the Wreckers. His description here (wearing glasses, using his hands as feet) puts me in the mind of Beast from Marvel's X-Men comics. He's depicted here as a "virtual retool" of the Transformers: Crossovers Hulk toy that turned into a tank, with a new head based on the original Apelinq. On the original Beast Wars Neo Hardhead toy, the pilesaber was the blade that fit inside his tail weapon; for Beast Wars: Uprising Hard Head, it's Cybertron Defense Hot Shot's removable arm-mounted dagger. Nano-strength magnification lenses are essentially Transformer glasses. The Builder Assembly are Cybertron's current political leaders, made up of Autobots and Decepticons.

Section 7: The signal Hydra picks up is the one mentioned in the prologue: Lio Convoy's call to resistance from "Broken Windshields". The Pit is the Cybertronian equivalent of Hell, first mentioned in the Beast Wars cartoon. The term "politbot" seems to be derived from "politburo," the executive committee for communist parties, found in both current and former communist countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and so on. Arkus was a planet seen in issue #2 of 3H Productions' The Wreckers comic, where Magmatron and his Dinobots fought the Trans-Organic known as the Dweller, ending when Magmatron sacrificed his life for the others. We'll learn more about the incident Longrack mentions later. Not sure if tachyon logic gates are from something, but logic gate is a real-life computing term. Sublight refers to a method of travel that is slower than light.

Section 8: The fuel-pump is the Cybertronian equivalent to the heart, first mentioned in issue #29 of the Marvel The Transformers comic.

Section 9: Nothing new here.

Section 10: Here we have a bit of cribbed dialog from "Broken Windshields". The "red and white bot" is Lio Convoy. In the Beast Wars Neo cartoon, Hydra was shown to man a Predacon outpost on the planet Porcupine all by himself. Another mention of the "Arkus incident," revealing that Killer Punch believed a stowaway got onboard the Dinosaur while the ship was at that planet. Remember back to Dead-End's bit earlier, however, and realize Killer Punch might not be all that crazy...The term "magnetic disruptor coil" appears to be new.

Section 11: Equilibrium circuits sound fairly generic, but they were mentioned in the Sunbow The Transformers episode "Desertion of the Dinobots, Part 1". Interesting mention of the word "fortress" there... Frag is a standard sci-fi swear, though it saw its fair share of use in the Beast Wars cartoon. And the Intruder corvette mentioned earlier returns! It should be obvious now that it's being used by the Destructons.

Section 12: Gear shredders were a form of weapon from the Fall of Cybertron video game. Not to give away the game, but the Dinosaur is armed with an anti-gravity repulsor field and a laser cannon; Trypticon's profile in issue #4 of Marvel's The Transformers Universe indicated he had two anti-gravity repulsor disks in city mode and a flashing laser cannon in mobile battle station mode. A seismic-shock missile is presumably a less-dangerous version of a seismic-shock warhead, which was seen in issue #24 of Dreamwave Productions' Energon comic. And that's the end of part one!

The cover for part two features a claustrophobic Killer Punch trying to make his way through the corridors of the Dinosaur. The cover price is given as 5.78 CPKs; not sure if that number is a reference to anything. And on we go!

Section 1: Apelinq has prehensile feet. Aside from the aforementioned Beast connection, the Crossovers Hulk toy has sculpted, individual toes, and obviously, gorillas have prehensile feet. Hics are a unit of measurement roughly equivalent to a kilometer, mentioned in the prose story "The Magnificent Six!" from the Marvel UK Transformers Annual 1991.

Section 2: Again, more hints with the weaponry of the Dinosaur. Trypticon's battle station mode is armed with dual photon launchers and destructo beams, while in robot mode, he can shoot heat-seeking plasma bombs from his mouth and a particle beam cannon is mounted in his nose area.

Section 3: We saw several artificial stone structures back in "Alone Together", with pyramidal and reptilian themes; the ziggurat seen here is the pyramidal base of Lord Imperious Delirious from "Alone Together". Later in the story it will be given the name of the Draco Ziggurat. Curvilinear means "curved lines." "Somatosensory" means "sense" as in touch or feeling warmth or pain.

Section 4: Guiledart uses the sci-fi swear "slag"; it saw extensive use in Transformers fiction from Beast Wars to Animated, but which fell out of use in major fiction shortly afterwards, due to it being a derogatory slang term towards women in the United Kingdom. Primus, you probably know, is the God of Light who created the Transformers. "S&R" stands for "search and rescue."

Section 5: Hard Head's twin pulse-beams are obviously Cybertron Defense Hot Shot's twin cannons.

Section 6: Killer Punch is reminded of his stint in the Games; a machete he used against Ultra Mammoth was among Eject's sports memorabilia in his office, back in "Broken Windshields". Recharging slabs are beds; they've shown up in IDW Publishing's Transformers comics, like More than Meets the Eye, though I can't remember where they were first mentioned.

Section 7: As mentioned before, Magmatron can split into three separate components. Dead-End is trying to hide what she fed earlier. Another mention of the Star Wars tool, the hydrospanner.

Section 8: The Mutacons were introduced in the 2013 "Aligned" guidebook The Covenant of Primus, Transformers from the Cybertronian colony on Neutronia who, after fleeing their world to escape the Rust Plague, found the original Transformation Cog of Amalgamous Prime, granting them the ability of infinite transformation and combination abilities. And here we go: the Destructons, or specifically, Bruton.

The Destructons were evil beings from the third issue of Blackthorne Publishing's short-lived The Transformers in 3-D comic in 1988, which was intended to be a three-part story, believed to be created by writer Alfred Williams and artist Dante Fuget. They were evil techno-organic creatures from the distant past, who rampaged across the universe killing everyone they found, only to eventually be sealed away by the Logicons. Eventually, they became considered little more than myths, until they were accidentally freed in the present day...and then the storyline was never concluded. However, in 2014, they were brought back in "Alone Together", reinvented as fully robotic beings, "Second-Born Intellects" who were built by organic races, having banded together under Delirious, on a crusade to both liberate machines from their organic masters, and later to destroy the Cybertronian race, as Delirious found them disgusting due to their sparks. Bruton was destroyed by Protoform X/Rampage at the end of "Alone Together", but he was shown being rebuilt by Lord Imperious Delirious, using the stolen navicomp of Trans-Mutate's stasis pod to download the secrets to transformation technology, with which he has given Bruton his naval mine-like alternate mode. Aside from the large and aggressive ogre-like Bruton, there's Psychokhan, Medusa, and the team leader, Lord Imperious Delirious. Bruton was created to perform manual labor by the Lunartix in Beast Wars: Uprising, the evil aliens from the Star Brigade subline of G.I. Joe toys in 1993, and is armed with the Confusion Club, which is shown in this story to cause those struck by it to be...well, confused.

Section 9: I feel like the deck and frame numbers might be references, but I'm not sure what.

Section 10: The second Destructon is Psychokhan, a centaur-like samurai warrior. Armed with the Psychospear, he was constructed by the Symbions as a gladiatorial fighter; the Symbions come from Symbion, the planet of the 1985 Coleco toyline Sectaurs, which featured insectoid-like humanoids and giant ridable bugs. Psychokhan is the only Destructon in the story who doesn't transform; the idea, according to Jim and Jesse Wittenrich, was that he would turn into a mechanical version of old Chinese fireworks/fire arrows, with his legs becoming arrows: specifically, based on this image. Bruton feels he needs to redeem himself because he was offlined by Protoform X/Rampage in "Alone Together". The micro-missiles Hard Head uses were sculpted details on the original Cybertron Defense Hot Shot toy. Crazybolt's bladed staff is Reveal the Shield Wreck-Gar's axe weapon. And Trans-Mutate enters the scene!

Another illustration by Tomoya Hosono, featuring Psychokhan about to finish off Hard Head, only for Trans-Mutate to attack from behind. Trans-Mutate line to Crazybolt is a paraphrased line from the 1984 sci-fi action film The Terminator, where Kyle Reese tells Sarah Connor "come with me if you want to live!" It's been quoted in multiple films, television series, comics, and more since, including the film's 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, where the heroic T-800 of that film says it to Sarah Connor.

Section 11: The brain module is the brain of a Cybertronian, as established in the original Marvel The Transformers comics, and is the second most part of a Transformer's anatomy after the spark. And here we have our third Destructon, Medusa, the snake-like female member of the group. As mentioned previously, she was built by the Intruders, and is armed with her eye-emitted "Medusa Beams," which her aforementioned profile in issue #59 of the Club magazine described as physics-bending weapons that alter strong and weak nuclear forces of their targets, disintegrating them. After being offlined by Trans-Mutate in "Alone Together", she has been rebuilt with a gear shredder alternate mode.

Section 12: The energon compressor in Trans-Mutate and Protoform X's cave was presumably taken from the Destructons. Bazooka takes a stasis nap, which were first seen in the Animated cartoon. As previously mentioned, Trans-Mutate's profile stated that she had forgotten her original name. "Forging" is a concept from IDW Publishing's Transformers comics, though it has its roots in Simon Furman's runs on the Marvel The Transformers comics; in IDW, it refers to those Transformers who were created when Vector Sigma sent its energy through Cybertron's surface, creating sparks that formed living metal bodies out of the substance of the planet. In the Beast Wars: Uprising universe, Trans-Mutate is explicitly neuro-divergent, specifically having autism (or whatever the Cybertronian equivalent is). Point One Percenters were introduced in IDW Publishing's More than Meets the Eye ongoing series; those born with sparks so extremely powerful that they could handle heavy modifications to their bodies, like the Decepticon Phase Sixers or the loadbearers who wore the Magnus Armor. Many of the most important figures in the Great War in IDW's comics (Optimus Prime, Megatron, Grimlock, etc.) were Point One Percenters. Cybertronian bodies are composed of a "living metal," with a genetic code, an idea that goes back to Marvel's The Transformers and Generation 2 comics. "Batch proto-initiators" were mentioned in issue #3 of IDW Publishing's Infiltration mini-series; essentially, they are those who bring protoforms online, their "parent."

Section 13: "Surplus to requirements" is a phrase that pops up frequently in Transformers writer Simon Furman's work, known among fans as a "Furmanism."

Section 14: The transformation cog is the part of a Transformer's body that allows them to change shape, introduced in season three of the original Sunbow The Transformers cartoon. In the 2010's, the Prime cartoon gave it the shortened name of the "t-cog."

Section 15: Nothing to talk about here.

Section 16: The description of the sculpture inside the Draco Ziggurat matches what we saw in "Alone Together", though I'm not sure if they're meant to represent anything specific. The pyramidal block of obsidian that Saberback comes across, decorated with an ornamental eye, sounds like a smaller version of the structure seen on the floating island created by the Vok, as seen in the Beast Wars cartoon two-parter "The Trigger". It was later given the name "Brigadoon" by the Japanese guidebook Beast Wars Universe, taken from a mysterious Scottish village in the 1947 musical of the same name by American lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and Austrian-American composer Frederick Loewe. Keeping up with the Vok connection, the way the pyramid envelops Saberback and Apelinq with green light sounds similar to how the Vok probe abducted Optimus Primal in the Beast Wars episode "Chain of Command".

Section 17: And here we have our big reveal, after hints with the ship's weapon systems: the Dinosaur is the Decepticon city-bot, Trypticon! Trypticon was mentioned back in "Head Games" by Fortress Maximus as being active after the war. The "Aligned" continuity version of Trypticon, introduced in the 2010 video game War for Cybertron, also turned into a spaceship; after being heavily damaged, his higher brain were shut offline, and he was locked as the Decepticon flagship, the Nemesis. In the Prime cartoon, he briefly came back online due to an infusion of Dark Energon, placing the Autobots and Decepticons into stasis, only to be shut down by the Autobots' human allies. And that's part two!

The cover for part 3 is, again, by Josh Burcham, and features a classic 8-bit video game rendering of Saberback and Apelinq going up against the polterglitch inside the virtual world, with their "lives" up in the left and right corner. Saberback and Apelinq look more like their classical counterparts than their Beast Wars: Uprising selves, but given it's not meant to be a literal image, that's not an error. The price for this issue is 7.90 CPKs; again, not sure if that is a reference or just random.

Section 1: Microhics are part of the same measurement system as hics, presumably equivalent to micrometers or something along those lines. As a virtual retool of Power Core Combiners Undertow, Dead-End is armed with arm-mounted Gatling cannons. The personal weapon of the original incarnation of Magmatron in Beast Wars Neo was his "Magma Blade," a longsword formed from his Landsaur mode's neck and a launchable blade part. The Dia-Battles toy is equipped with several longswords known as the "Crash Caliber." Magmatron's shoulder-mounted diabattle cannons are named after the toy he's based on; they're located on his shoulder-mounted wings. Dead-End has a golden diving helmet; this is based on Power Core Combiners Undertow's combiner mode head, which was itself based on old-fashioned diving helmets (the kind that were large and spheroid).

Section 2: I feel like Bazooka's description of the Intruder corvette ("grey with a green engine signature, angular except for a single rear-mounted cylindrical thruster, long fin on either side," with Trans-Mutate adding that it has "a white cranial substructure painted on the front, aka a skull) must mean it's meant to be based on a pre-existing ship, but I'm not sure what. The Inferno was the early name for the Cybertronian version of Hell known as the Pit from Beast Wars, which was eventually replaced when the character named Inferno was introduced on the show. Bazooka is able to extend his chest cannon and pivot his shoulder mounted weapons; the former was part of the transformation for Generations Warpath, although I'm not sure if he can do the latter. The joke about how Hard Head lives up to his name was done for the original Hardhead in IDW Publishing's Spotlight: Hardhead, when he took a pointblank headshot from a mind controlled Nightbeat with little more than a scratch. A centihic is equivalent to about a centimeter; "within a centihic of its life" is equivalent to "within an inch of his life." Crazybolt toys with a vibrocutter; vibro-cutters are a weapon/tool in both Star Wars and the long-running British sci-fi series Doctor Who. We'll go in more depth with Lord Imperious Delirious' origins when he shows up.

Section 3: "Doppler" is a word associated with real-life scientific concepts, most prominently the Doppler effect, itself named for 19th-century Austrian physicist and mathematician Christian Doppler. While the concept of the afterlife for Transformers was seen briefly in both the original The Transformers cartoon and Beast Wars, it was Beast Machines that fleshed it out as per its description here and gave it the name of the Allspark. Desecrus was a criminal namedropped in issue #28 of IDW Publishing's More than Meets the Eye, created by James Roberts. The Desecrus Formulation is a reference to 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, and his philosophical statement "I think, therefore I am." It first appeared in French ("Je pense, donc je suis") in his 1637 treatise Discourse on the Method, and more famously in Latin ("Cogito, ergo sum") in his 1644 book Principles of Philosophy. Apelinq's process of imagining himself (thinking up every bolt and screw) is a homage to the original Apelinq's Transfer Interlink system, which allowed him to download virtual objects and weapons into reality. Saberback and Apelinq are attacked by a polterglitch; not sure if it's a reference to anything. Cybercats were mentioned in the Cybertron episode "Challenge". The phrase "brave new world" originates from the 17th century play The Tempest by English playwright William Shakespeare. In the modern day, it's perhaps best known as the title of a 1932 dystopian science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley.

Section 4: The description of the autoguns is specific enough to make me wonder if it's a reference, but I'm not sure. In Beast Wars Neo, one of Guiledart's abilities was his Thunder Horn attack, which fired energy beams from his beast mode horns. Here, it's been reimagined as a virtual retool of Generations Roadbuster's rifle.

Section 5: A class-III conduit appears to just be a generic term.

Section 6: Lord Imperious Delirious was the leader of the Destructons, a vaguely reptile-like mechanical supremacist who seeks to free his fellow Second-Born Intellects, and despises the Cybertronian race, viewing them as perversions due to their sparks. Both "Alone Together" and his profile in issue #59 of the Club magazine described how he originated as a database of memory engrams of an advanced species, which overtime merged, creating a singular intelligence. His signature ability is his "Delirious Fire" psychic attack; in the original The Transformers in 3-D comic, it simply caused its victims to have trouble thinking, but "Alone Together" reimagined it as plunging those struck by it into a hellscape created by their mind, born out of their worst fears.

Section 7: The term "polterglitch" is derived from poltergeist, which refers to a supernatural event where a ghost or ghosts cause physical disturbances in the location they are haunting. Clankcobra is a new term; it's obviously the Cybertronian equivalent to a cobra, but I can't determine what the "clank" part is a reference to. Saberback is armed with the Laser Burn Bow; the original Beast Wars Neo could fire his "Laser Burn" attacks out of his right hand. Here, it's become part of his weapon, a virtual redeco of Beast Hunters Bumblebee's Eagleshot Bow. In tank mode, Apelinq fires blasts from his Linear Blast Cannon; the original Apelinq toy's gun was called a "linear blast pistol," as stated in his profile in issue #3 of 3H Productions' The Wreckers comic. Again, Apelinq use of the virtual realm brings to mind his original counterpart's Transfer Interlink abilities. The trailer he creates is based on the alt-mode of Sentinel Maximus, the fusion of Primal Prime and Apelinq created by Primus from 3H Productions' stories; Apelinq became Hyperlinq, the Headmaster component who drove the rest of Sentinel Maximus in vehicle mode. As a redeco of Transmetal Optimus Primal, Apelinq had a tertiary Transmetal form, his legs converting into a surfboard of sorts; in The Wreckers comics, he was shown to generate the board with his Transfer Interlink abilities.

Section 8: Mechanometers are a unit of measurement, first mentioned in the Sunbow The Transformers episode "City of Steel". Guiledart's shoulder mounted rocket launcher is, of course, Generations Roadbuster's missile firing gun.

Section 9: "Dull surprise" is a term that originates from an episode of the 90s comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000; in the episode in which the characters riff on the 1988 sci-fi B-movie Alien from L.A., where they described the main actress Kathy Ireland's reaction shots (or lack thereof) as expressing an emotion of "dull surprise." In the Transformers fandom, this term was applied to the artwork of Dreamwave Productions artist Pat Lee and those who followed his style, slack-jawed expressions that conveyed little to no emotion. We have another illustration by Tomoya Hosono, featuring Medusa saving Dead-End from Synapse. Dead-End's face is slightly feminized in comparison to the original Dead End, softer in appearance.

Section 10: Protoform X/Rampage is flashing back to his early days of experimentation at the hands of the Builders. Lion/eagle hybrids most famously include the griffin of Greek mythology. Hard Head's ID number, 29827281-12-2, is taken from a form that appears at the end credits of the 2011 video game Portal 2, followed by the song "Want You Gone". Nano-gnats were mentioned in the Beast Wars prose story "A Meeting of Minds", published in the 2004 anthology book Transformers Legends. Now for part 4!

The cover for part 4 features Magmatron and Guiledart confronting the captain of the Dinosaur: Full-Tilt! The "sticker" indicates that the comic is 1.22 CPKs, and that the copy is heavily damaged, as visible from the creases all over the cover.

Section 1: Magmatron is able to fold in his hands and replace them with Gatling blasters, as the Dia-Battles V2 toy does for its alt-modes. Magmatron's Magmablade is stored in his wings, which is also true of the Dia-Battles V2 toy. Tightbeam communication is a technology in sci-fi stories that is sent on a focused beam of energy.

Section 2: Vibro-knives are yet another Star Wars weapon. Fun fact, Leviathan is the name of a creature mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible, and the word has come to be used for large sea animals like whales in general. Once again, the pyramid is similar to the one on Brigadoon from "The Trigger", and the description of the virtual ecosystem feels much like the paradise seen in that episode, on a much larger scale.

Section 3: Longrack swears by the supercomputer known as the Oracle, the evolved form of Vector Sigma from Beast Machines. The fuel pump is the Cybertronian equivalent to the heart, first mentioned in issue #29 of the Marvel The Transformers comic.

Section 4: Here we see Protoform X's regenerative abilities; this was seen previously in "Alone Together", which was inspired by a scene in the Beast Wars episodes "Deep Metal" where, after Depth Charge ripped part of Rampage's chest open, the metal warped itself back into the proper position. Imperious' Delirious Fire attack is given the nickname of a "Technicolor inferno"; technicolor was process first invented in 1916 to add color to motion picture films, which was improved upon in the ongoing decades, before being eventually supplanted by other color techniques in the 1960s. The term "technicolor" is sometimes used as a euphemism for overly brilliant colors. I don't think the cuffs Lord Imperious Delirious has are meant to be anything.

Section 5: The flux constrictor is presumably derived from the "magnatomic flux constrictors" on the nacelles of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek; specifically, the retrofitted version of the ship from 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Section 6: A micro-insertion logic probe is another piece of Star Wars tech, this time from the 1999 novel Hard Merchandise.

Section 7: A floating mountain, powered by a large amount of energon crystals, was seen in the Beast Wars episode "Power Surge". The Eye of Providence is a symbol that is found in multiple cultures. It's closely associated with Christianity, where it depicts the all-seeing eye of God, and is part of the Great Seal of the United States; it's the pyramid with the eye you see on the back of the one-dollar bill. It is also the subject of many conspiracy theories, such as those about the Freemasons and the Illuminati. Perception filters are a technology from Doctor Who, a telepathic effect that caused people to not notice objects or individuals attached in some way to the filter.

Section 8: Another mention of the term Second-Born Intellect, which Imperious prefers over the term "artificial intelligence." Delirious' hatred of Cybertronians for their nature as energy-beings powering mechanical shells was revealed in his aforementioned profile.

Section 9: The Dinosaur's captain is revealed to be none other than Full-Tilt! Full-Tilt was one of the partners of Trypticon for his original toy; transforming into a small buggy car, he could be launched in Trypticon's city mode, and served as his partner's chestplate in his robot mode. Full-Tilt never received a characterization back in the day; unlike the partners of Trypticon's opposite, the Autobot Metroplex, Full-Tilt never appeared in the cartoon, and his role in the Marvel comic was taken by an original character named Wipe-Out. His only appearance in classic media was in third issue of the Japanese Transformers 2010 tie-in manga published in TV Magazine. Since then, he's appeared in cameos here and there, with some stories calling him a drone, and others depicting him as a fully sentient Transformer, but this is the first time he's ever really been depicted as having any sort of character; a surprisingly kindly Decepticon who cared for both Trypticon and the people under his command. It's lightly implied that, back in the war, they had some sort of romantic relationship ("More than friends."), but years of resentment over those smaller than him being allowed to move and transform has caused Trypticon to grow to hate the one person keeping him alive.

Full-Tilt's toy wasn't particularly detailed, and he's suitably described as such here. Powermasters were a type of Transformer released in the 1988 range of figures; Transformers who came with partner mini-figures who transformed into engines that unlocked the larger figure's transformation. In fiction, they were depicted as being an energy source for their partners, freeing them from certain fuel requirements. Full-Tilt acts as both, powering Trypticon and providing him with transformation abilities. The Great Push was mentioned (not by name) in the Cybertronix timeline from the previous story, "Micro-Aggressions", which revealed how, near the end of the war, Galvatron attempted one final push into the Terran Confederacy territory, which resulted with humanity retaliating and essentially ending the Great War. Full-Tilt mentions that the Great Push occurred three hundred stellar cycles prior to the present; in the Beast Wars episode "Dark Designs" it was established that the Great War had ended three centuries before the present day of the Maximals and Predacons.

Section 10: As mentioned, Crazybolt's original tech specs depicted him as a master escape artist.

Section 11: "Pistoned off" is a play on "pissed off." The Chaos Bringer is one of the titles for the monster planet Unicron. Gaea (mispelt here as "Gaia") is the sister of Primus and Unicron, and transforms into planet Earth. She was introduced in the 2015 Transformers Collectors' Club storyline "Another Light", and was based on a character on a t-shirt created by Erik Sturdevant and Rob Meyer, sold at the unofficial BotCon 2004. Robo-chickens were mentioned in the Cybertron episode "Titans". Dead-End pet is explicitly mentioned here...

Section 12: Our fifth and final image from Tomoya Hosono, this time with colors by Christopher Colgin, who would eventually become the "main artist" of Beast Wars: Uprising. It features Saberback and Apelinq at the bottom of the mysterious pyramid while flying spectral creatures fly around them, with a green staircase leading to the red eye at the top of the structure. I wonder if the 25,000 steps is some kind of reference to something; it feels like a spiritual sort of number. Antroids (spelt here as "ant-droids") were mentioned in the Sunbow The Transformers episode "More than Meets the Eye, Part 3". Apelinq studied at the Iacon Academy of Science and Technology; the institution was first mentioned in issue #167 of Marvel UK's The Transformers comic. Apelinq's BotCon 2014 toy tech specs mentioned he studied as the "Cybertron Science Academy," while over in the Facebook version of Ask Vector Prime, a TransTech version of Apelinq was mentioned as one of Vector Prime's students at the Axiom Nexus Academy of Science and Technology.

Section 13: Nothing to note in this section.

Section 14: Another hint of what's to come with Crazybolt and Bazooka. The body of Hard Head as controlled by Bruton fits more in line with the characterization of Hardhead in the Beast Wars Neo cartoon: a stupid, aggressive grunt. The "crooked robot" bit is likely a reference to the English nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man", first recorded 1842. Bazooka's chest-mounted turret fires a "Gigaton Blast"; the original Beast Wars Neo version of Bazooka could unleash his "Gigaton Stamp" attack from his Euoplocephalus-mode tail. Lord Imperious Delirious reveals his alt-mode: a massive dragon.

The final "cover" features Rampage on the hood of the Predacon shuttlecraft as Lord Impreious Delirious tries to escape. A bit of scale issue here, since Rampage is about a fourth of the size of the ship, which in story can hold a robot the size of a small Builder, but it's not meant to be a literally image. In fact, it's an homage to a famous shot from the 1964 black comedy film Dr. Strangelove, where Major Kong rides on an H-bomb as it prepares to strike a Soviet ICBM site. Fans might be familiar with it thanks to another homage to the scene from the Beast Wars episode "The Agenda (Part III)", where Rattrap rides atop Ravage's crashing transwarp cruiser. The cover price is 12.90 CPKs, and it notes that the "issue" is rare as the finale.

Section 1: As mentioned, Lord Imperious Delirious acquired Trans-Mutate's navicomp at the end of "Alone Together". "It could be hurt, so it could be killed" is another paraphrased Furmanism. Another joke about Hard Head's hard head. Trans-Mutate resisted Imperious' Delirious Fire attack with Protoform X's help at the end of "Alone Together".

Section 2: We'll find out who Dead-End companion is shortly. The idea of memory storage units on a wall in Trypticon's ship mode core vaguely reminds me of Animated Omega Supreme, who was shown to have a similar set up in the episode "A Bridge Too Close, Part II". The purple tank is Brunt, Trypticon's other partner, who was formed from parts of Trypticon's city/base mode. Like Full-Tilt, he barely appeared in classic media.

Section 3: Guiledart summons his pistol (another accessory of Generations Roadbuster) from subspace. Every so often in the original Sunbow The Transformers cartoon, an animation quirk would occur where characters would summon their weapons from out of nowhere. In the 90's, online fans would come up with the fanon explanation that they were summoned from personal pocket dimensions, which would eventually be canonized in various stories from the Transformers Collectors' Club.

Section 4: Nothing to note here.

Section 5: LGC-8803's true name and nature are revealed: it is actually an artificially created planet named Metascan Omega. The Logicons of Metascan Alpha showed up in The Transformers in 3-D #3 as the beings responsible for imprisoning the Destructons long ago, a highly advanced race centered around logic and harmony. The naming pattern of the planets (Metascan Alpha and Metascan Omega) is in reference to the title given to Christ and God in the Christian Book of Revelation. Not sure what the war mentioned here might be; it might not be intended to be anything at all.

Section 6: Delirious inflicted nightmares upon Protoform X/Rampage in the final chapter of "Alone Together" with his Delirious Fire attack. The description of Lord Imperious Delirious scuttling around on all limbs puts me in the mind of General Grievous from 2005's Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Another bit about summoning weapons from subspace. Rampage's original Beast Wars toy box technical description described how he had back-mounted "galva-conductors," stored in his beast mode crab pincers. Rampage finally accepts his new name here, and does the Dr. Strangelove bit in-story.

Section 7: "Out of the silicon forest" is the Cybertronian way of saying "out of the woods." The Silicon Forest is a nickname for a cluster of technology companies in Portland, Oregon. A Wessex-head bit driver is another Star Wars tool, this time from 2015's Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Alpha Trion was an Autobot sage originally introduced in the Sunbow The Transformers episode "The Search for Alpha Trion", who has gone on to appear in many stories, and has since been revealed to be one of the Thirteen original Transformers. The "Aligned" version of the character was an archivist at the Iacon Hall of Records, who wielded the artifact known as the Quill, which he used to write in the Covenant of Primus. The Cybertron Longrack toy's Cyber Key gimmick caused his right arm (his vehicle mode excavator shovel) to extend and "punch." His tech specs termed this attack as his "Crushsteel Punch"; the original Beast Wars Neo Longrack had a similar extending arm gimmick, termed the "Crush Arm."

Section 8: Brunt's turret is noted to be a smaller version of the Dinosaur's primary laser cannon. On the original toy, Brunt's turret became one of Trypticon's towers in city mode, and the flashing laser cannon in Trypticon's base mode, which flashed with battery-powered lights to simulate firing. Dead-End's pet is revealed: the Sharkticon Gnaw! The Sharkticons were the servants of the Quintessons, mass-produced robots who converted into shark-like monster modes, as originally introduced in The Transformers: The Movie. In the original toyline, the Sharkticon toy was sold as an individual named Gnaw. In Dreamwave Productions' Generation One comics, Gnaw was shown to be the pet and friend of the Autobot Wheelie. The scene of Trypticon's ego-death is a homage to the scene from the 1968 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Dr. David Bowman is forced to disconnect the circuits of the antagonistic artificial intelligence HAL 9000 onboard the Discovery One; Trypticon claims he feels his mind going, and that he is scared, near verbatim of the final words of HAL.

Section 9: Gription clips were seen in the 2006 Star Wars novel Legacy of the Force: Bloodlines, while tollo-wrenches were mentioned in the 1989 Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game adventure book Crisis on Cloud City. Bio circuits were mentioned in the Sunbow The Transformers episode "Changing Gears".

Section 10: Not to much to note here, beyond it showing us Trans-Mutate's worldview. It's been used a few times this story, but I thought I'd mention that "scrap" was the favored Cybertronian swear starting with the Prime cartoon, after Hasbro decided to stop using slag after they found out it had a derogatory meaning in the United Kingdom.

Section 11: Metascan Omega's directives vaguely brings to mind the Prime Directive of Star Trek, a non-interference rule with lesser-developed civilizations.

Section 12: Avionics are electronic systems used by aircraft, artificial satellites, and spacecraft.

Section 13: Nothing to note here.

Section 14: Nothing to note here.

Section 15: Trypticon's head is noted to be optic-less; in the original Sunbow The Transformers cartoon, Trypticon's model sheet didn't color his eyes separately from the rest of his head, making him look like he had no optics.

Section 16: This part takes place a few months (or orbital cycles) later. Trypticon's city mode has been named "Dinosaur City." Bazooka and Crazybolt have begun a romantic relationship; the Conjunx Ritus ceremony is the Cybertronian equivalent to a marriage ceremony, introduced in IDW Publishing's More than Meets the Eye comic. In the Beast Wars Neo cartoon, Guiledart was intensely loyal to Magmatron. "Son of a glitch" is the Cybertronian version of "son of a bitch;" it was first used in IDW Publishing's Last Stand of the Wreckers issue #5.

Section 17: Una swears by Mendel; Gregor Mendel was a 19th-century Austrian Augustinian friar and scientist, who experiments with breeding pea plants laid the foundation for the modern scientific understanding of genetics. The "Quints" are the Quintessons, evil aliens who were the creators of the Cybertronian race in the Sunbow The Transformers cartoon, who were served by their Sharkticon minions. "Veg-state" is short for "vegetive state." The final section break simply says "Checkmate," signifying Una's victory in chess.

We have a fun little extra before the story's epilogue: a catalog for Swindle, Swindle, and Swindle in the style of old comic adverts that sold things like x-ray goggles, ventriloquism lessons, and muscle enhancing techniques. Swindle, Swindle, and Swindle was a store run by three Swindles on Axiom Nexus, seen in the TransTech stories "Withered Hope" and "I, Lowtech". 2259.246 was the stardate of the first issue of IDW Publishing's Star Trek: Khan comic. The products here are accompanied by illustrations provided by both Christopher Colgin and the uncredited Bill Forster; I'll try to do them left to right. I can't figure out anything for any of the product numbers.

The x-ray optics are an obvious parody of x-ray glasses. The hand resembles the skeletal hands of Transformers as drawn by Alex Milne. The goggles, meanwhile, are just a made-up design. Triad, as mentioned, is a card game from the 2000s reboot of Battlestar: Galactica. A circuit diagram is a visual depiction of a circuit; presumably here it's being used in place of abs, as indicated by the word "beau."

A videomatrix is an audiovisual recording device from Nebulos seen in issue #3 of Marvel's The Transformers: Headmasters comic.

The space-time continuum rupturing toaster was mentioned in the Rescue Bots episode "The Island of Misfit Tech". It's depicted here visually as a fancy-looking toaster.

The plasma dynamic thruster was a component of the space bridge in the Animated cartoon. In the third season three-episode premier "TransWarped", Bumblebee was accidentally transported across the galaxy multiple times when he found one in the wreckage of the Decepticon-built space bridge, eventually being consumed by a Rock Lord (the rock monsters mentioned here, based on the Tonka GoBots spin-off toyline Rock Lords). Later, it was used to force the Decepticon-controlled Omega Supreme across the galaxy. The line "meet strange and exciting rock monsters" is paraphrased from satirical slogans parodying American military recruiting slogans during the Vietnam war in the 1960's. One of the most famous versions of the line comes from 1987 black comedy war film Full Metal Jacket, where the character of Private "Joker" Davis says "I wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them."

The Omega Keys were introduced in the War for Cybertron video games, where a fake version of it (which is what the art here is based on) was guarded by Zeta Prime from Megatron, who sought to use them to unlock the Vaults of Iacon; the real Omega Key was in fact the massive Autobot Omega Supreme. Later, in the Prime cartoon, multiple Omega Keys appeared, artifacts which could activate the Omega Lock (an artifact introduced in the Cybertron cartoon) and revitalize Cybertron. In the Ask Vector Prime story "Echoes and Fragments", Sideways and the Renegade Gong manipulated the Omega Locks on GoBotron and Cybertron, briefly merging the world of The Transformers: The Movie with the world of Challenge of the GoBots.

Insectatron repellent is, of course, a robot version of insect repellent. It's shown spraying a chibi version of Beast Wars Waspinator; on the can itself is the Beast Wars Predacon insignia behind the "No" symbol.

The "Learn Hypnosis!" ad is another thing you'd tend to find in these sort of comic book ads. The art depicts Animated Mindwipe preforming hypnotism; both him and his Generation 1 counterpart were master hypnotists. Dark science was an esoteric concept, first mentioned in the pseudocanonical novella Alignment, before showing up in Dreamwave Productions' The War Within: The Dark Ages mini-series. There, Mindwipe (as part of the Chaos Trinity with Bludgeon and Bugly) were shown as practitioners of dark science. Datatrax are a storage medium first seen in the Beast Wars cartoon.

The exploding cy-gar is based on the exploding cigar gag gift. Cy-gars are the Transformer equivalent of cigars, first seen being used by Kup in IDW Publishing's All Hail Megatron series; as such, the art shows Kup as the recipient of one (based on Nick Roche's gaunt depiction of the character from Spotlight: Kup).

The power booster rod was a tool used to life heavy objects seen in issues #26 and #28 of the Marvel The Transformers comic; it was stolen by the human thief known as the Mechanic, who used it to expand his criminal operations.

The "Onyx Triptych" is based on Onyx Prime's Triptych Mask, introduced in the 2013 guidebook The Covenant of Primus, three masks which, when fully combined, allowed Onyx Prime to see across space, time, and the dimensions. It was called the "Onyx Triptych" in issue #46 of IDW Publishing's The Transformers. Its appearance here is new; the top mask, Farsight, is styled after an eagle; the middle mask, Predator, is styled after a lion; and the bottom mask, Mournsong, is styled after an elephant. This is in homage to the three-man Maximal combiner Magnaboss from the Beast Wars toyline, formed by the eagle Silverbolt, the lion Prowl, and the elephant Ironhide, who also formed in this order. The listing claims it "grants sight beyond sight," referencing the Sword of Omens from the 1985 cartoon series ThunderCats, which could grant "sight beyond sight."

Buddy Bracelets were seen in the Rescue Bots episode "Buddy System", devices which kept two people close together with a magnetic charge. The artwork depicts the 1990 Micromaster Combiners Stonecruncher and Excavator, members of the Decepticon Constructor Squad.

The seven O-Parts were Cybertronian artifacts from the 2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon which, when all collected, could be used to reactivate Fortress Maximus (or Brave Maximus, his Japanese Car Robots name by which he is referred to here).

Papa Galvatron's Patented Time Jump Mechanism is based on the time-jump trigger device used by Galvatron in the Marvel UK The Transformers comic (specifically drawn as the device from issue #101). Galvatron used it to escape to the past after being hurled out of Unicron by Rodimus Prime in 2006. He was targeted by Rodimus Prime's Autobots from the future, the freelance peacekeeping agent Death's Head, an original character created by Simon Furman and Geoff Senior (from issue #113 to #120; the term bounty hunters is probably meant to have a strikethrough, as Death's Head hates being called that), and his former master Unicron in issues #146 to #151. Galvatron displaced the Autobot Skids to limbo in issue #101 when he returned to the past, where he would remain for several years before eventually being freed by Galvatron's destruction in #205. Limbo parasites (creatures introduced in issue #100) were seen infesting him in issue #204, and after he was freed, his long-lasting stay in limbo caused several parasites to follow him back to reality, as seen in issues #219 to #222. Eventually, Galvatron's prolonged stay in the past indirectly caused a time rift to occur, first seen in issue #187, which was revealed to be the result of Cyclonus and Scourge using Unicron's time portal, which by-passed the Limbo substitution method. It was rendered uncontrollable when Cyclonus was killed by a clone of Megatron decades before he would be created in issue #189, before eventually threatening to consume Earth and Cybertron in the issues #199 to #205.

Stasis cuffs were introduced in the Animated cartoon, and they're drawn here as they were depicted in the show.

The invisible telephone was an invention of Doc Greene's from the Rescue Bots episode "Christmas in July", It's seen here being used by Generation 1 Swerve, specifically the talkative version from IDW Publishing's More than Meets the Eye comic.

Mini-Con panels stored the small Transformers in the Armada cartoon, hiding them away as energy until an Autobot or Decepticon eventually found them and brought them back online.

The Inspiration Counter was an invention of Doc Greene's that counted how many ideas whoever wore it had come up with, seen in the Rescue Bots episode "Road Trip". The numbers on the counter are in Maximal Cybertronix (the language seen in the Beast Wars cartoon) is 42; 42 is the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, as seen in the 1978 radio series and 1979 sci-fi comedy novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by British writer Douglas Adams.

Space sprockets are from the 1962 animated sitcom The Jetsons, where main character George Jetson worked at Spacely Space Sprockets Inc.

The items up for the 0.88 Cyber Planet Key Super Sale include: the Phase Bit, a device allowing objects to phase through one another, created by Doc Greene and first seen in the Rescue Bots episode "The Griffin Rock Express"; the anti-gravity patch, a device seen in the Rescue Bots episode "Switcheroo"; the Deep Earth Scouts, R2-D2-like drones created by Woodrow Burns, seen in the Rescue Bots episode "What Lies Below"; a Masterbrace from Super-God Masterforce, which turned their human users into living metal, becoming Headmasters or Godmasters and connecting to larger transtector bodies; the Tornadon't, a tornado-dispelling device created by Doc Greene from the Rescue Bots episode "Changes"; the Boil Coil, a water-heating device created by Doc Greene from the Rescue Bots episode "Movers and Shakers"; an Autobot Energon Star, a power enhancing device from the Energon series.

The fax number for Swindle, Swindle, and Swindle-L17L6363-is the prisoner number of the character Darrow O'Lykos from the 2016 sci-fi novel Morning Star, the third part of the Red Rising trilogy by American writer Pierce Brown.

Epilogue: Deca-cycles are unit of time first mentioned in the Animated episode "A Fistful of Energon". We learn that Lord Imperious Delirious downloaded a copy of himself into the Predacon shuttlecraft...

On the back cover, we have a "series blurb" summarizing the events of the story. The top of the page reads "A Journey into Mystery..."; Journey into Mystery was a Marvel comic book published in the 1950s and 1960s. It is most famous for introducing the Marvel version of the Norse God of Thunder Thor in issue #83 in 1962, as created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, and Jack Kirby. The ISBN number, 19-6509-17, corresponds to the birthday of Japanese video game programmer Yuji Naka (September 17th, 1965), who was the head programmer on the original Sonic the Hedgehog video games. Likewise, the barcode number, 19921124, is the North American and European release date of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, November 24th, 1992. I can't tell if the US price ($9.95) or the Canadian price ($12.50) are also Sonic the Hedgehog references. Hit me up if you know!