Lug (IDW)

This article is about the treasure hunter. For the Nebulan Headmaster, see Lug (G1){{#switch:{{#sub:Lug (G1)|-1}} != .= ?= .

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Lug is a Transformer from the Generation 1 continuity family.
At first she was essentially Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.

A geologist born on Cybertron, Lug and her Conjunx Endura, Anode, did not stick around for the war, and instead began adventuring the galaxy, their treasure-hunting leading them to places such as the Terralese Acid Wastes, the Nightmare Spires, Killtopia, and Caminus, all of which Lug deems less dangerous than Cybertron. Being the much more cautious of the two, Lug often tries, and fails, to stop Anode from leading them to danger. But such is the life with Anode, and Lug wouldn't have it any other way. She transforms into a backpack, which allows Anode to carry her around, and stores multiple tools for archaeology in her chest. She likes mood pipes.

Fiction

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2005 IDW continuity

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First appearance: Lost Light #1

Lug of Celestica Tetracornacapria This Machine Kills Fascists was born on Cybertron before the war, and was friends with the blacksmith Wipe-Out. At some point of time, Lug met Anode, and Anode met Lug with the two eventually becoming Conjunx Endura. Like everyone else on Golden Age Cybertron, the two were born assigned male. An Axe to Break the Ice She was one of the many 'bots to abandon the planet due to the Great War and swore never to return. Some Other Cybertron While travelling the stars, the two met several alien races with both male and female genders and came to realize they were more comfortable as "she". While Anode had her body rebuilt into a more feminine form, Lug opted to keep her old body. An Axe to Break the Ice

During their travels Lug and Anode met many dangers together, but they got separated when Anode went on to train in her profession at a Camien medical facility. Some time later, Anode left Caminus and came back to Lug. Anode told her that she missed her too much, and that's why she quit. Lug would come to feel tremendous guilt for the event, thinking that she had ruined Anode's career. Bad Moon Rising

I just give up. I'm an old backpack vendor. I give gifts.

Five hundred years ago, Lug and Anode travelled to Luna 2 at the request of their mysterious client, the "Grand Architect", to retrieve a metallic snowflake-like object. They found themselves being attacked by a Decepticon Cybernought; although Anode successfully deployed a forcefield, Lug was still convinced they were going to die. The time-travelling Necrobot arrived, attempting to rescue them both from what would have been their presumed deaths (as was his habit).

After recovering from the time jump in a stasis capsule, Anode awoke on the Necroworld, and suggested to Lug that they'd been rescued. They were informed of recent events they had missed by Ultra Magnus. After this, the two were met by Swerve, who asked them some nonsensical questions under the guise of "background checks". After Anode was alarmed by hearing Velocity's name uttered by Swerve, the duo attempted to leave by way of the teleporter, but were stopped by Rodimus and Drift.

When Rodimus and a small group of Transformers decided to use the teleporter to head back to Cybertron to pick up another ship, Anode stayed behind with the other time-displaced Cybertronians. Some Other Cybertron After repairing diplomatic relations following Anode's insulting of Ultra Magnus, Lug sat by the Memorial to the Disappeared and played some music to relax before Anode tracked her down. The two discussed their plans for the future and whether or not they owed the Autobots anything, before Fangry interrupted the discussion by being violently thrown into the memorial by Tailgate. When Anode tried to calm the minibot, he backhanded her, sending her flying, and to be impaled on a piece of debris. Panicking, Lug called for help and Kaput soon arrived. Lug was by Anode's bedside when she awoke and watched as Velocity tried (and failed) to perform a citizen's arrest on Anode for stealing from Caminus before the medic demanded to discuss the Lighthouse. Anomie

Anode explained she was a blacksmith and the "snowflake" recovered from Luna 2 was a piece of sentio metallico, but that she hadn't stolen any as the records said. She'd falsified them to have a pretext to leave the planet. Realizing that she'd been left in the dark about this, Lug rushed out of the room, A World Misplaced and fled back to the memorial. Anode followed her back and Lug confessed her feelings of betrayal as she'd always believed she was the reason that Anode had abandoned her apprenticeship. Anode revealed the role she'd played in the death of a protoform and faked a theft as an excuse to flee despite her co-workers being understanding and sympathetic. Lug believed that Anode needed to feel hated for what she'd done. Anode offered an apology but when she looked up, Lug was gone...Bad Moon Rising

...because Lug hadn't ever been with her on Necroworld. She was just a hallucination that Anode had developed as a result of timesickness; a look at the security camera footage showed Anode exiting her stasis pod alone and talking to thin air. A despondent Anode checked the names on the Memorial to the Disappeared and mournfully concluded that Lug had not survived the explosion the Necrobot had saved her from. Modes of Production

She lives, she dies, she lives again!

A disheartened Anode was taken by Kaput, Nautica, and Velocity to where Lug's memorial flowers grew on Necroworld, and Kaput, having made a hobby of studying Censere's archives, explained that after saving Anode he had returned to find Lug barely still alive, allowing him to perform the Rites of Transition on her. Anode's explosive fury at the violation of her friend's lack of religiousness was cut off by Kaput's continuing: when the Necrobot found someone before they died, he would transfer the last flicker of their actual Spark into one of his flowers...a flower Kaput now offered to Anode. It only took a moment for Anode to realize the possibilities this and the sentio metallico, returned to her by Nautica, opened, and she bolted for the Necrobot's fortress.

Reaching a laboratory, she recruited Kaput into helping her transfer the Spark-flicker into the sentio metallico to create a protoform, noting that in principle it was no different than an assisted birth. The process seemed to go smoothly, until the new protoform's temperature began to precipitously drop, reminding Anode of her past failings at her calling—failings she determined not to repeat, as she desperately worked to save/revive her friend...successfully, as later she showed off her "new backpack" jubilantly to the returning Roller. This Machine Kills Fascists After Lug regrew, Anode confessed the truth about the Lighthouse to her. After the two made up and shared an embrace on the field, Lug went to make friends, leading her to play with Roller. She was later part of the group that left Necroworld aboard the deceased Skip. After Megatron

These two would do well to take Koholint Island off of their list of anniversary travel options.

When the Rod Squad took a stop at Troja Major's Howling Town, Lug and Anode joined Velocity and Nautica in traversing the town. Nautica found them irritating, complaining how Lug's and Anode's detours slowed them down. Lug was complicit in Anode stealing mood pipes from a Rust Giant. After fleeing for their lives, she received the stolen item as a survival gift from her conjunx, and was successfully enamored. Lug commented on how much the market had changed in the past five centuries which Velocity explained was due to a spiritual ley line the market was built on, leading Troja Major to a rebranding as the bereavement capital of the galaxy. After Nautica shooed away a Catharsian merchant praying on Lug, she followed Anode on the trail of some sentio metallico.

The couple found a newborn mech (with a coffin alternate mode) before they were ambushed by the Black Block Consortia. When Anode refused to step aside however, Lug tackled her to safety which allowed the Consortia a clean shot at the newborn, killing him. As Anode grieved, their old friend Wipe-Out made himself known and spirited the two away to a bar where the three of them could compare notes. After the femmes explained their new genders, Wipe-Out explained the seeming hunt for blacksmiths and who the Black Block Consortia was. When the trio concluded the Grand Architect was on their tail again, they tried to cheese it only for his troops to teleport into the bar. An Axe to Break the Ice After Anode had thoroughly embarrassed herself thinking Flame was the Grand Architect, she turned to jet mode and flew Lug and Wipe-Out to safety. Returning to the funeral compound where they'd found the mysterious mech, Lug stood off to the side while Wipe-Out realized the mech had been able to turn into virtually anything before they got a call from Velocity. When the trio arrived, Nautica's super-sized alternate mode burst out of the building before the group made a brisk getaway. Chasing the Infinite

Back aboard Skip, Lug helped Anode engage in a prank war with Swerve by repainting herself and pretending to be Swerve's biggest fan, saying she would start "Swervecon", and she witnessed Swerve's retaliation when Velocity called Anode in for a medical exam to inform her she had a "second head" in her rear armature. Anode, furious at the false scare, thus upped the ante. Lug chatted with Rung while the two held a datapad, but she had to help pull a magnetized Anode off Ultra Magnus's front as the hijinks conflict continued, so Lug had to pull her off with all her might. This act threw herself to the ground and her beloved into a grief-stricken Cyclonus, who attempted to cut her down where she knelt. Anode managed to somersault out of the way, so the blade cut across Rewind's chest instead. The ship erupting in chaos, Lug also had a moment of pause when Ten unexpectedly spoke. Sardines

On Ten's instructions, the crew modified the ship so they could jump through "compressed space" and get to a Mederi center so they could save the ailing Ratchet. However, as Skip was contracting in on them as his body returned to regular size, Anode and the others were forced to abandon ship and were subsequently exposed to compressed space, seemingly killing them and bringing them to the Afterspark. Metastasis Not entirely concerned or convinced that they were dead, Anode and Lug went straight to stealing soft ununtrium from a temple, which earned them a scolding from Nautica. The couple then went for the giant Matrix floating in the Afterspark's sky to see what they could pillage from it. The God War What they didn't realize however was that the "Afterspark" was in fact the original Mederi center, designed by the Omega Guardians to euthanize its patients by generating illusions that made them happy and ready to "ascend". As Anode and Lug gathered under the Matrix so they could "ascend", Rodimus and his group destroyed Mederi's power source, shattering the illusion. Before the team could figure out where to go from there, they were approached by an army of Sparkeaters created from the crews of the Lost Light. You Are Here

After Rodimus recognized the Sparkeaters as Lost Light crew, Anode questioned whether they were actually a threat. Discussion ensued as to what to do until Brainstorm was attacked by Sparkeater-Perceptor. When Grimlock was dropped from high altitude into the attackers to cut them down, Lug exclaimed to Anode that "this isn't normal!" After the group's subsequent retreat from the Sparkeaters and team-up with allies aboard Wipe-Out's Q-class ship, Anode and her Conjunx joined the armed boarding team, using said vessel to land on the Lost Light, and followed Rodimus off the ship into the Lost Light's shuttle bay. Almost immediately all the doors began shutting around them, cutting off Rodimus and Cyclonus from the others. Then the ship's oil reservoir poured on top of them, the ship's oil reservoir filled entirely with scraplets, causing Anode to have a panic attack. Lug tried reassuring her as those same Scraplets, merged into one, showed themselves. A Dance Before Dying

Anode feared that the scraplets were going to eat the team, but Ultra Magnus tried to reassure them by pointing out scraplets didn't actually have a digestive system. After Grimlock's attempt to slay the creatures didn't succeed, Anode, Lug, and Drift were grabbed by the scraplets, before they turned their attention on Whirl. As the scraplets turned out to be the adoptees of Whirl, they all survived and reunited with Rodimus and Cyclonus, just in time for space to tear itself a new one. Lūstrāre The rift sucked in the Lost Light, depositing it in what according to Lug's reading of the navicomp was the Benzene Cluster, now filled with duplicate Cybertrons. With the engines drained, the crew disembarked, and Anode used her metallurgical skills to analyse the planet, finding it "tasted" new. Almost immediately, several Black Block Consortia ships showed up, and the troops held everyone at gunpoint, ready to shoot them dead before some quick talking on Nautica's part got them transported to a cell instead. Their host insisted on Rodimus taking a small delegation, but Rodimus counter-insisted on taking everyone, Lug included. Lug pointed out Mederi had followed them through the rift, and remarked after Rodimus comment that the rift was resealing itself that perhaps it may not have been a rift, and instead a way of bringing Mederi to where they were now. From their cell, the team witnessed the end result of the Grand Architect's plan, which was to use five copies of Cybertron as a "God Gun" to drill through into another universe in order to fight an other-dimensional intruder. As everyone watched, a fleet of ships poured through from the Functionist universe, led by Megatron. Farsickness

As it quickly transpired, Megatron was not the enemy the Grand Architect had been preparing for. Rather, it was Functionist Cybertron, engineered into a representation of Primus himself, an alt-mode that Riptide pondered when Cybertron had ever had, which Lug uncertainly suggested was "since now?" Megatron explained over the phone to Rodimus that this Primus-like form had been an end goal of the Functionists, a homeworld, avatar, and galactic deathbringer for their genocide against non-Cybertronian life. As the alternate Cybertron destroyed the God Gun, Rodimus and Megatron bickered, until the Grand Architect revealed himself. Megatron had his ship shoot out the Worldsweeper's windows, sucking several of Team Rodimus, Lug among them, out into space, where Megatron had them pulled in. As Megatron exposited on what he'd been up to, the Magnificence chimed in with its proposal, that they destroy the Functionist Primus, prompting Anode to point out how selective it was being with its interjections. However, Megatron revealed a complication: They couldn't destroy the alternate Cybertron, since it was still populated. The Return of the King

As everyone rejoined onboard the Lost Light, the Magnificence spoke up again, revealing there was a way to defeat the Functionists; have Rung create three Matrixes and unleash them inside the fake Primus' brain, cog and spark chamber. Cyclonus, not willing to sacrifice Tailgate to this plan, vetoed it, so an alternative plan was suggested, of using more Matrixes to overload Vector Sigma, purging the Council entirely. Anode suggested using Cybertron's Hot Spots as the attack sites, and Lug asked if it was even possible for Rung to make that many. However, the Magnificence objected to this plan, revealing itself to be the voice of the Omega Guardians, wishing to use the false Primus's destruction to return to the corporeal universe and devour it. Then Nickel crushed the Magnificence, shutting them up, and leaving the Lost Light crew to save the universe themselves. The Unremembering

All set for a tête-à-tête with a rad brunette.

Part one of that involved finding a way to get the fake Primus to turn back into a planet so they could access the Hot Spots, a problem fortunately solved by the timely arrival of Luna-1 hitting it in the back of the head. With one of the twelve Matrixes provided by Rung in his last act, Anode and Lug (and Wipe-Out) went to Sansaw Sanserre, where the Functionist Council's goons were waiting for them. Facing them down, the two exchanged a kiss and a mutual declaration of love. However, a new problem presented itself, as the Matrixes refused to open. Rodimus gave the teams a pep talk as they were besieged from all sides, which proved enough to get Lug to open her Matrix as Anode watched. With that, the Council were annihilated and the universe saved. A Spark Among Embers

Therapy is one hell of a drug.

In the aftermath, Anode and Lug joined the Lost Light crew on their "victory lap", before the ship was to be decommissioned. On the way, Brainstorm, Nautica and Perceptor conducted an experiment to duplicate the ship in another universe, where they would be free to explore forever. In "Swerve's", the two sat at the bar and talked with Bluestreak, before Anode suggested what to do next: Settle down on Luna 1 and raise some kids, to which Lug clinked her glass with Anode's. As everyone departed, Lug called out to everyone to keep in touch, before she and Anode made their own way.

Despite Lug's promise, however, neither she or Anode attended Ratchet's funeral in the far future, after he died of age-related burnout.

Meanwhile, in another corner of the multiverse, the experiment produced a duplicate Lost Light, with its own version of Anode and Lug, ready to set off into the unknown. How To Say Goodbye And Mean It: Part 2

2019 IDW continuity

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Lug worked with Grapple when they instructed the newly forged Gauge about their efforts in architectural design. Arcee/Greenlight: Run

Games

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Transformers Roleplaying Game

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Lug, an Autobot xenogeologist, mirthfully accompanied her spouse Anode, acting as her toolkit and pack. She was an expert in the risks of Cybertronian regions and had a die-hard dedication to the safety of Anode and to science. Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook

Notes

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References

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