High Noon (SG)

« Transformers Timelines text story » Spatiotemporal Challengers Chapter 2 Shattered Glass
"High Noon"
Publisher	Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published	March 14, 2016
By	Andrew Hall
Illustrations by	Hayato Sakamoto
Continuity	Shattered Glass, GoBots, Classics
Page count	16pp

What a surprise! The spatiotemporal challengers encounter a challenge!

Synopsis

The GoBot ground force heads for the Oregon state line, or would except Road Ranger has to pull them over: he's sucking up too much fuel hauling Treds's tank form around (and loudly wants you to know about it and how stupid a tank form is). Rest-Q advises they should all take a break and the team prepare to go into auto-maintenance for the night. As they park, Small Foot and Road Ranger enjoy how peaceful it is on Earth, something that feels like home.

Oh, Road Ranger had a small fuel leak all along and nobody's sure how it happened? That's probably not important. Nor is the Buggyman staring into the dark.

In auto-maintenance, Small Foot sees a malicious force that devours space and leaves pure nothing. It tears its way through the GoBots' realities, driving them not just to extinction but erasing the future they should have had.

And it smiles at her.

Small Foot wakes up with a start and realizes the Buggyman has gone AWOL. She drives off looking for him and in the process, a little whisper in her head telling her to carry on leads her to a ball of light, one that talks to her in a reassuring voice. The entity claims it has been searching for her and, like Small Foot, is on a mission to help its friends. As it agrees they need to head back to the GoBots' base camp, she sees a vision of its home—a pure and unsullied harmony of light, surrounded by the malicious dark—and she finds herself back at the camp, with far less time passed than it should have.

Meanwhile, the Buggyman is miles away and talking to himself. Talking to himself in an abnormally calm and normal voice, about a sleeper in place, that Road Ranger's 'accident' had been timed to ensure they stopped near an "Oregon emplacement", and that sinister plots are afoot. And by "himself", we mean that he's secretly using the metallic soil content in this part of Idaho to chat with his co-conspirator Zero on Gobotron, a trans-dimensional chat no other GoBot knew was still possible! Zero has a Super Voyager prepped for use and the two villains are prepared that even though Gobotron may be doomed, their race can be started again by them... and the Buggyman's 'team-mates' will die from turboworm poison either way!

The next morning, Path Finder signals that her aerial team have found the Autobot Ironworks Base. The road-bound team, driving off to rendezvous, also meet their own Autobot when a red sports car catches up with them. Not just any Autobot, it's the famous Hot Rod! His Autobot insignia is a bit darker than they expect but that's definitely him!

Not according to the BuggyMan, who snaps that they need to pretend to be regular cars as that's not a local Autobot. (Tracks, annoyed the cars won't get out of his way, converts his car mode to a flying car and zooms past) This guy had no "spark" like they're supposed to and there's at least five people with similar energy signatures in the general area that the BuggyMan's drones are picking up.

The GoBots also realize they haven't heard anything more from their allies, which raises questions. Questions that get confirmed when they reach Ironworks and the locals, Stepper and Nebulon, open fire on them unprovoked and from behind! They plead they're looking for Optimus Prime but he sneers that Optimus Prime is not the one they probably meant. The team tries to get the drop on them with their hand lasers, banking that Stepper won't realize they're actually armed, but his gaudy Golnium coating shrugs it off. Small Foot only has time to fear her early optimism has just made them vulnerable...

...when the entity from before steps in, granting her a shield that absorbs Stepper's shot in the same way his armor did theirs and informing that they need to use the weaponry of this world. And that means hard projectiles. Like, say, the shells from a tank form.

The shot is more destructive than Treds intends, killing Nebulon and seriously wounding Stepper. Road Ranger has to keep a shocked Treds together, even as Stepper pleads for him to kill him next too, and subdues the enemy without killing him. To Treds's utter relief, it also turns out "Nebulon" was just a regular drone and Stepper was just a ventriloquist with delusions. So, everything's now fine--

And then Drift shows up.

Featured characters

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

Guardians	Renegades	Evil Autobots	Others
Small Foot (1) Road Ranger (2) Treds (3) Rest-Q (4) Leader-1 (7)	Buggyman (5) R-Navi (9) Zero (10) Some guy floating in a tank (11)	Tracks (12) Stepper (13) Nebulon (14) Drift (15)	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 who are not referred to by name but appear on the cover art include: Hans-Cuff, Scooter, Turbo, Flip Top, and Staks.
• Characters mentioned by name but who do not appear include: Cy-Kill, Path Finder, Bad Boy, Man-O-War, Hot Rod, Tic-Tac and the components of Puzzler, evil Optimus Prime, heroic Optimus Prime, and the Engineer

Errors

• The previous installment of the Spatiotemporal Challengers story was referred to as "Part 1", whereas this installment is labeled as "Chapter 2" instead of "Part 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.

Continuity notes

• In keeping with "Withered Hope", in which the GoBot team has 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.
• Ironworks Base was (or rather in-universe, will be) 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 decade.

Transformers references

• 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!
• 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 positrons rather than electrons.
• In one of the languages Rest-Q spouts words from, Gregevor is apparently the word for "drone".

GoBots references

• 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, which he looks poised to execute now. Hmmm. As if that has historically turned out well.

External links

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