Outlier (group)

This article is about the fictional biology concept. For the unrelated comic story, see Outlier (comic).

To Me, My O-Men!

Outliers are Transformers who possess abilities that have no apparent connection to their alternate mode. Persecuted in the Functionist era of Cybertron, some were hidden away within the Jhiaxian Academy of Advanced Technology, spending their time learning to control their extraordinary powers to protect the world that hated and feared them.

Known outliers include:

• Carnivac, whose sonic powers can debilitate other Cybertronians.
• Damus, better known by his aliases "Glitch" and "Tarn", an empurata victim with the ability to render sentient machinery non-functional, previously able to touch non-sentient machinery to disable it.
• Hubcap, who possesses a mastery of electromagnetic signals.
• Mindwipe, who has telepathic powers.
• Ragnarok, who can bud identical copies of himself.
• Skids, who can quickly perfect any new skill he wants to. Later underwent a stress-induced secondary mutation, the effect of which is unknown but could be harnessed to temporarily supercharge others.
• Skywarp, who can teleport.
• Soundwave, who has hearing so strong he can pick up thoughts.
• Tailgate, who suffered a stress related mutation and developed enhanced strength, speed, and durability. This was later reversed.
• Thundercracker, who can create super-loud sonic booms.
• Trailbreaker, who can generate forcefields.
• Windcharger, whose arms act as magnets.

Fiction

2005 IDW continuity

Senator Shockwave opened a school known as the Jhiaxian Academy of Advanced Technology, Shockwaves where Cybertronians could not only study science, but outliers could go to live safely and develop their abilities. Skids joined the academy as a trainee theoretician Patternism and Shockwave soon began to suspect he was also an outlier. An Intimate Beheading Constructed cold Transformers could not normally have outlier powers. All Our Parlous Yesterdays

Senator Shockwave and Captain Orion Pax would call on the aid of Windcharger, Glitch, and Skids to help steal the explosive fake Matrix housed in Nominus Prime's corpse. While they succeeded, Shockwave's patronage of his "outlier army" would be discovered in the process, and he was subjected to empurata and mind-warping "shadowplay" as a result. An Intimate Beheading

After a hot spot ignited in Alyon, the Senate attempted to induce outlier-hood in the newborn sparks by bombarding them with radiation. The experiment was forcibly concluded by Orion Pax, who destroyed the platform they'd been using to irradiate the hot spot. All Our Parlous Yesterdays

Millions of years later, continuous exposure to quantum radiation turned the Lost Light's entire crew into latent outliers with super strength and invulnerability, but whose powers would only "activate" following an intensely traumatic experience. Tailgate was the first to discover this new power. These activation events had the side effect of turning everyone around them into outliers for a short time. Speak, Memory! (Part 2) Rage, Rage

Ask Vector Prime

Ragnarok was an Outlier whose body could sporadically undergo an involuntary budding event. Unlike the normal process, his copies possessed both CNA and memories identical to those of the original Ragnarok. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/06/25

Swindle, Swindle and Swindle had a Transmetal driver software patch to deal with uncontrolled Outlier abilities. Swindle's Spiel, 2015/10/04

Notes

• Nautica is named as a suspected outlier in More Than Meets The Eye #31. Conversely, Thundercracker's profile in the Hasbro Heroes Sourcebook #3 describes his sonic boom ability as so minor that it might not even qualify as an outlier power.
• In answer to fan speculation that Skywarp, Thundercracker, and the other Seekers would have been constructed cold (like Starscream), James Roberts gave a possible explanation for their outlier abilities (ostensibly unique to Forged Cybertronians) by suggesting that they were the eventual result of the Senate's attempts to artificially induce outlier abilities (first seen in issue #36 of More than Meets the Eye). However, these fan speculations were largely born out of the belief that Thundercracker and Skywarp's bodies always resembled Starscream; later stories would show this was not the case, and that the pair had been alive prior to the Senate's attempts to create artificial outliers.
• In the 2019-2022 IDW comic continuity, several characters with unique abilities (such as Skywarp and Mindwipe) are described as "prodigies", although the full meaning of the term, and whether it's merely another name for the same phenomenon, was never made clear.