Time case

The time case is a time travel device created by Brainstorm. There's nothing particularly conspicuous about the small, sturdy, golden briefcase that its inventor owns, beyond the fact that whenever anyone else sees it on his person outside of his lab, it's always safely handcuffed to his wrist. Brainstorm takes delight in teasing anyone who asks about its contents with a mixture of bizarre facts that make it impossible to tell if anything he's ever said about it is true.

Fiction

2005 IDW continuity

Brainstorm took his time case to Room 113 to plead another case for his Unmentionables before the Ethics Committee. When he passed Ironfist and Skyfall on the way, they asked about the case, and Brainstorm gleefully laid out the details of the "Malevolent Counterintuitive Pathogen" it contained which would be released if the case was ever opened. Skyfall dragged Ironfist off to the Exit Rooms before he could find out whether Brainstorm was joking. Bullets

Brainstorm brought a time case with him when he joined the Lost Light, justifying its exemption from security checks by Red Alert with the "almost certainly serious" claim that if it was opened outside of a controlled environment, it'd be the "end of the world". How to Say Goodbye and Mean It When a Sparkeater got loose aboard the ship soon after its departure from Cybertron, Brainstorm used his briefcase as a shield against the beast, and it coincidentally decided to leave him be. The Chaos of Warm Things

Later, Chromedome claimed he'd heard that Brainstorm opened the briefcase on Hydrus 4 and "the sun went out", to which Brainstorm replied that was a filthy stinking lie: It was actually Hydrus 5. Rules of Disengagement Stories like that made the briefcase something of a legend on the ship; when a disbelieving Swerve saw that Brainstorm had brought the case to a funeral for the ship's fallen crew, he decided that someday, somehow he would open it to see what would happen. The Gloaming

On Luna 1, when a bemused Rodimus asked if Brainstorm was going to put a "Point One Percenter" spark in the briefcase, Brainstorm remarked that he hadn't considered it, but that the prospect blew his mind. The Fecund Moon A short time later, during a battle with Tyrest and Pharma, a stray laser blast from Pharma severed the handcuff holding the case to Brainstorm's wrist. Arm the Lonely Swerve took this chance to sneak open the briefcase, but found it seemingly empty and gave it no further thought. The One Where They Go to Earth Brainstorm was subsequently among those sent into convulsions by Tyrest's killswitch; after recovering, he reclaimed his case, but became suspicious that someone had opened it while he had been unconscious. He requested that Swerve keep an ear out for any chatter regarding this, with the grim warning that opening the case when he was not around was not a wise thing to do. The Sound of Breaking Glass

When a few crew members discovered the remains of a quantum duplicate Lost Light, Nautica and Nightbeat found the time case abandoned in a lift in the lower levels of the ship. Over Nautica's protests, Nightbeat opened the case, only to find it empty. Despite the pair's baffled conjecture as to where the contents might have gone, neither noticed local space/time warping around them as the case lay opened. slaughterhouse

After the "real" Lost Light was reinstated, they found time case was the only thing that refused to dissipate besides the ship's sole survivor, Rewind. Upon Brainstorm's outing as a Decepticon plant, he calmly walked into Swerve's and opened his time case, activating an electro-sensitive poison in Swerve's Engex supply and causing everyone on board—save teetotalers Rung and Ultra Magnus—to collapse. The Road Not Taken After Brainstorm's incapacitation of the latter and subsequent escape, an examination of his lab by Perceptor yielded several startling revelations about his briefcase—or rather, briefcases. His perennial arm-candy turned out to be but the control case for an entire system of interconnected cases tapped into the Lost Light's quantum generator, which altogether functioned as a grandfather paradox-exempt time machine, allowing him to travel in time and space and rewrite history. Megatron theorized that the scientist planned to kill a young Orion Pax so that the Decepticons would win the war, The Custom-Made Now though the veracity of his theory was called into question when Brainstorm instead used the time case to travel to the mining outpost on antebellum Messatine, where the young Megatron was stationed. Births, Deaths, and Interventions

Rodimus led a team in pursuit, utilizing the recovered quantum-duplicate time case. All Our Parlous Yesterdays Realizing that Brainstorm intended to kill Megatron, not Orion Pax, Stet the team traveled to the time of Megatron's construction, successfully apprehending Brainstorm and ensuring Megatron's existence. Brainstorm proceeded to explain that he had invented the time machine in order to save his unrequited lover Quark from dying in Decepticon captivity though he later revised this goal to talking Megatron out of starting the war. After he was repeatedly thwarted (it turned out that the Lost Lighters' journey through time was part of history and was always meant to happen), Brainstorm defaulted to killing Megatron before he could be born. However, Brainstorm could not bring himself to pull the trigger on an under-construction Megatron's spark. Predestination: An Expert's Guide

History was safe, but the team's time case was out of power. Rodimus and Cyclonus then traveled to a secret facility in Unitrex for the first interstellar starships. At Perceptor's instruction via time phone, they turned an experimental generator into a quantum generator in order to recharge the time case (not realizing that the facility was in fact the under-construction Lost Light and that they completed its quantum engines), and the Lost Lighters returned to the present. The next day, Perceptor explained to Rung that the alternate timeline only came about because he tampered with the time machine's paradox locks and further theorized that it may exist as its own parallel universe. Predestination: An Expert's Guide

Later, after Brainstorm's disciplinary hearing, all the time cases were burned by Rodimus and Perceptor... save one, which was secretly recovered by Ravage for Megatron. Our Steps Will Always Rhyme

Swerve's exposure to the time case had the side effect of creating a time loop in his holomatter systems, granting him the power to recycle his own energy flow and create otherwise impossibly large holomatter constructs, such as a replica of Earth. The One Where They Go to Earth

Megatron ultimately dismissed the idea of changing his fate through time travel and buried the final time case on the Necroworld. There it was discovered by Censere, who used it to travel through time and retrieve "disappeared" Cybertronians, those whose fates had previously been recorded as unknown. The use of only one case to time travel was less stable, however, and left his rescuees suffering from "timesickness" that took some time to recover from. On awakening after Censere's death, Roller returned the case to the Autobots, allowing Rodimus to use it as a teleportation device to save Megatron from an antimatter explosion. Do Not Go Gentle

Many years after the Lost Lighters' climactic battle with the ascended Functionists, the briefcase would be converted into a portable life-support unit for Brainstorm following his laboratory accident. How To Say Goodbye And Mean It: Part 2

Ask Vector Prime

The time-travel misadventure fundamentally altered the nature of this particular universe, changing it from a single deterministic reality stream into a universe with multiple offshoot realities, including Primax 1114.26 Gamma Ask Vector Prime, 27/5/2015 and Primax 208.15 Gamma. Ask Vector Prime, 22/8/2015

Notes

• The naming "time case" was first given in More than Meets the Eye #37.