High Noon (SG)

This article is about the text story. For the Western film, see High Noon (film).

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"High Noon"
Publisher	Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published	March 14, 2016
By	Andrew Hall
Illustrations by	Hayato Sakamoto and Tomoya Hosono (uncredited)
Continuity	Shattered Glass, GoBots
Chronology	2015
Page count	16pp

What a surprise! The spatiotemporal challengers encounter a challenge!

Synopsis

With Path Finder, Bad Boy, and Man-O-War having gone the aerial route to the Autobot Ironworks base in Oregon, the rest of the GoBots take their time traveling the roads of this strange new world, hoping to arrive by the next day. Small Foot is, for the first time in a while, optimistic about their mission. Road Ranger, meanwhile, complains about having to carry around the tarp-covered Treds on a trailer they've found, since the heavy Guardian's alternate mode would raise suspicion. Rest-Q suggests that they stop for the night and get some rest, and Road Ranger, feeling inexplicably tired, agrees. Finding a patch of farmland, the GoBots position themselves behind a barn so that they can initiate auto-repairs and get some rest. Small Foot admires the natural beauty of the planet, so far removed from what GoBotron has become, and Road Ranger agrees, feeling much closer to humanity than the Transformers they've disguised themselves as. However, when he begins drifting off mid-sentence, Rest-Q performs a quick diagnostic check on him, finding that Road Ranger's fuel tank had been punctured at some point on the road. Using his special regenerative abilities, Rest-Q accelerates Road Ranger's auto-repair, and tells him to take it easy. All the while, the group's sole Renegade, Buggyman, stares off at a forest in the distance, and waits for the others to fall asleep...

Asleep, Small Foot finds herself in a dream, floating in front of a dark abyss, an unknown entity full of malice and hunger. Small Foot sees her friends, familiar yet in new forms, being sucked in by the dark entity, including the man who inspired her to become a Guardian, Leader-1. Small Foot tries to call out to Leader-1, but her voice is drowned out by distortion, as the entity makes a massive smile at her despair. Waking up from her nightmare, Small Foot is relieved to see that the others are okay...but then notices that Buggyman has wondered off. Small Foot follows his tire tracks, suspicious of the Renegade, but finds something else instead: a strange yet familiar ball of light, which greets her, so different from the evil entity from her nightmare. Despite not knowing what the light is, she feels reassured as he explains that he has been searching for her and her friends, also on a journey to save his friends. Merging with her, the light shows her his home: inside a star, where he and his fellow beings of light shared a consciousness, having evolved from their Transformer ancestors into a peaceful society...one that has now grown dark, threatened by the darkness of the same entity Small Foot has seen, threatening their extinction. Small Foot wakes up at the camp once more, seemingly having had yet another dream...and yet, it still feels so real.

Several miles away, Buggyman has found what he is looking for: a patch of land where the metallic content of the soil is enough to amplify R-Navi's transmission, reporting to his secret commander: Zero, the once and future leader of the Renegades. Having sabotaged Road Ranger's accident earlier, Buggyman drops his creepy act, and informs Zero that their sleeper agent is already in place, ready to eliminate the Autobots and take the Ironworks base for them. Buggyman tells his commander that everything is going to plan; the others suspect nothing, and he has evaluated their strengths and weaknesses. Zero informs his underling that, should he and the others fail to complete their mission in the next three days, he will be joining him on this Earth. Buggyman promises him that he will be ready for the purge, promising that the Renegade legacy will live on even without GoBotron.

The next day,

Featured characters

(Characters in italic text appear only in a vision.)
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Guardians	Renegades	Evil Autobots	Good Autobots	Others
Small Foot (1) Road Ranger (2) Treds (3) Rest-Q (4) Leader-1 (7)	Buggyman (5) R-Navi (9) Zero (10)	Tracks (11) Stepper (12) Nebulon (13)	Cliffjumper (14)	Unicron (6) Solarbot (8)

Quotes

“Let me tell you, Stepper, what it means to ‘be a man.’ It’s a human expression. I’ve spent some time with humans and they’re courageous. They’re capable of compassion, even to opponents. What isn’t a man is a dirty killer who revels in unprovoked violence. That’s what you are and you make me sick.”

—Road Ranger giving a good 'reason you suck' speech.

Notes

• Characters mentioned but not seen include: Path Finder, the sleeper/fly, the hawk, Cy-Kill, Bad Boy, Man-O-War, Ironworks, Classics Hot Rod, Tic-Tac and the components of Puzzler, Shattered Glass Optimus Prime, Classics Optimus Prime, the Engineer, and Drift.
• Characters who appear only in illustration include: Hans-Cuff, Scooter, Turbo, Flip Top, and Staks.
• Presumably for legal reasons, none of the expanded GoBots cast appears in their original, Bandai-produced toy bodies. Zero is obscured and mostly off-panel with a new, non-Bandai body available in case he makes a full appearance later on. Small Foot even managed a dream sequence where her friends were suddenly in new, Hasbro-approved toy bodies for the duration.

Errors

• While Sakamoto is credited as the sole artist, both the images of the Buggyman contacting Zero and Stepper confronting the GoBots were drawn by artist Tomoya Hosono, who goes uncredited. The only image by Sakamoto is the cover illustration.
• The previous installment of the Spatiotemporal Challengers story was referred to as "Part 1", and the next two will be "Part 3" and "Part 4", respectfully. However, this installment is not labeled as "Part 2", but instead as "Chapter 2".
• Frankly it has been done so many times no one really cares anymore, but the GoBots are referred to a few times in narration as "robots" when they are cyborgs, not purely mechanical.
• On Page 11, "In one hand..." is mistyped as "In on hand..."
• In one instance, the Buggyman's name is spelled "Buggy Man".

Continuity notes

• Treds refers to the Renegade drone combiner Puzzler from the Challenge of the GoBots episode, "Auto-Madic". Treds does not remember Puzzler's name exactly, however, only recalling that Puzzler's components shared names of board games.
• Zero tried and failed to overthrow Cy-Kill in the Challenge of the GoBots episode, "The Third Column". At the end of that episode, he failed, escaping and swearing revenge.
• In keeping with "Withered Hope", in which Path Finder and Bug Bite have never heard of Unicron, Small Foot does not know the identity of the entity in her vision. It is yet unclear how Unicron factors into this storyline, but The AllSpark Almanac II noted that the Unicron of these GoBots' home reality, Gargent 984.08 Alpha, was somehow dimensionally displaced to Primax 703.02 Gamma, the G.I. Joe vs. the Transformers continuity, wherein he played a major role.
• A 14 May 2015 entry of Ask Vector Prime noted that many inhabitants of Gargent 984.08 Alpha had embarked on a Diaspora.
• Ironworks Base was the main setting of the BotCon 2012 comic story "Invasion".
• The Autobot personnel data Small Foot studied apparently did not include that Hot Rod had changed his name to "Rodimus" by the present century.
• Nebulon's destruction in a confrontation with GoBots was first mentioned in BotCon 2015 Stepper's bio card.

Transformers references

• The reconfigured Cybertronian-style bodies of the Guardians in Small Foot's vision and this story's cover art are all based on Combiner Wars toys: Hans-Cuff is Streetwise, Scooter is Groove, Turbo is Breakdown, Leader-1 is Air Raid with Quickslinger's head, Flip Top is Alpha Bravo and Staks is Optimus Prime, mistransformed to leave him headless. Phew! Meanwhile, Unicron's silhouette appears to use his Gaia Unicron design.
• Remember, kids: purple is the color of the evil guys. Therefore, Autobots with purple insignias are from the EVIL alternate universe. Don't make the same mistake that these lame GoBot guys did!
• The Hot Rod/Tracks mistake comes down to the Turbo Tracks toy from BotCon 2012, which is not just a red sports car but gives him a Roddish fiery hood deco.
• R-Navi detects that Tracks is not an ordinary native Cybertronian because his energy signature is different. Way back in the first Shattered Glass story, it was explained that Shatteredverse Cybertronians' sparks, or rather "embers", operate on electrons rather than positrons.
• In one of the languages Rest-Q spouts words from, "Gregevor" is apparently the word for "drone".
• Zero's Super Voyager body appears to be a triple reference.
  • First up, the Voyager size class of toys.
  • Secondly, the Super GoBots size class.
  • Thirdly, the Beast Wars II theme song "Super Voyager".

GoBots references

• Challenge of the GoBots was a lighter cartoon with no death, hence Treds being so horrified at the idea he might have actually killed an enemy in battle.

External links

• Spatiotemporal Challengers Chapter 2: "High Noon" at The Official Transformers Collectors' Club