Censere

Censere is a Transformer from the IDW portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

You... rang?

They say that a mute Neutral known as the Necrobot travels the battlefields of the Great War, administering posthumous rites to fallen Cybertronians. They say that he can determine the cause of death just by letting his shadow fall on the corpse and that he has devoted his life to recording the fate of every last Transformer. Whether there is any truth to these stories is unknown to most, but they persist.

In truth, he is an ordinary Cybertronian more properly known as Censere, who has dedicated himself to the recording of every Cybertronian death.

Fiction

IDW Generation 1 continuity

Censere of the High-Ceilinged Manifold was a census office worker named in the ancient times before the war of the Thirteen Tribes. When he left the census office to retrain as a forensic pathologist, he drifted apart from a friend and co-worker named Tusk; when Tusk died, it went unreported, and Censere did not find out about it until years later. His friend's death moved Censere to begin a lifelong mission: chronicling the deaths of every Cybertronian. With the destruction of his hometown in the First Cybertronian Civil War, Censere relocated to a "scorched and forgotten" planet that Tusk had told him about, where he set up a base of operations filled with complex machinery that allowed him to keep track of spark signatures, and quantum technology that let him teleport all around the universe to record every fatality. He transformed the blasted world on which he dwelled into a beautiful garden, filled with holographic statues of every living Cybertronian, which he would switch off when the Cybertronian died. Around the bases of the statues, he planted flowers crafted from the residual spark energy of whoever the statue's real-life counterpart was responsible for killing. The Not Knowing

Swearing an oath of non-interference, Censere eventually became a figure of myth and legend among Cybertronians, glimpsed on battlefields across the cosmos silently recording deaths. Dubbed the "Necrobot" by the religious and/or superstitious, he was also known as the "Gatekeeper", or the "Mute Neutral", and was believed to be an envoy of Primus, charged with ferrying departed sparks into the afterlife. The Not Knowing Conversely, skeptics like Ratchet dismissed his existence as a fairytale, attributing supposed sightings of him and his "portable apothecary" to visual glitches caused by freshly-constructed Cybertronians' senses "trying to run before [they] can walk", like the Shimmer or seeing Primus's face in a mushroom cloud. Twenty Plus One Trailbreaker shared his lack of belief, comparing stories of the Necrobot to Sparkeaters and the Seething Moon. The Chaos of Warm Things

At some point, Censere got mixed up in some weird stuff, with mystery 'bots that liked a strange cog design and doing odd organic experiments. Censere had fifty to sixty organic beings stuffed in his basement, in stasis pod comas. The Sun in Flight

"Arthur Dent? Arthur Philip Dent? You're a jerk, a complete arsehole."

While on the planet Clemency, itself littered with the bodies of dead (and occasionally not-so-dead) Transformers, Misfire would periodically catch sight of what he believed was the Necrobot. He would then "chase it" for a few seconds before "losing sight of it" again, as observed by Krok who was not himself a believer. Rules of Disengagement One and a half years later, however, the Necrobot did indeed arrive on Clemency to add Flywheels to his list of dead Cybertronians, which also included several members of the Lost Light crew. Who's Afraid of the DJD?

A selection of the crew of the Lost Light visited his planet of operations, the location of which was revealed by an info bullet from Agent 113. Alarmed to see that multiple Transformers whose deaths he knew he had unambiguously recorded were alive and walking around in his garden, the Necrobot slammed the door to his complex shut, but when one such 'bot, Nightbeat, stood outside the door and refused to leave, Censere gave in to his curiosity and invited Nightbeat inside so he could explain his and the others' continued living (Nightbeat, he soon learned, had been revived by the properties of the Dead Universe, while the others had never died - the deaths he had recorded were those of their quantum duplicates, created through a quantum generator accident). Censere went on to explain his true nature and how he carried out his work; though Nightbeat was dismayed by this revelation, having wanted to believe that the Necrobot was a mystic figure and proof that higher powers existed in the universe, Censere reminded him that his not being 'magic' did not mean the Afterspark did not exist. The Not Knowing

Plot details for The Dying of the Light Part 6: Do Not Go Gentle follow. Spoilers have expired, you may remove this tag

He would take Nightbeat's words to heart when he found one of Brainstorm's time cases buried by Megatron. By linking it up to his teleport chamber, he was able to go back in time, recovering the Transformers on his list of the disappeared. The time traveling took it's toll on the passengers though, so he put them in comas and disguised them as organics to keep them safe from other Cybertronians. He was halfway down the list when the D.J.D showed up. The Dying of the Light Part 6: Do Not Go Gentle

When Getaway launched his mutiny on the Lost Light, he informed the Decepticon Justice Division that Megatron and his alleged sympathizers would be getting marooned on Censere's planet. Key to their plan was a fabricated distress signal, intended to lure the group there. However, Censere altered the signal minutes after it was sent, turning it into a psychic bombardment of the intended recipients' worst fears in an attempt to warn them off. The Division duly arrived, butchered Censere, and left his body with flowers stuffed in exit wounds for the Autobots to find. How Bright Their Frail Deeds While the Autobots were distracted with the ongoing siege, Censere, due to his great age, dissolved into sentio metallico.

Left behind was the key to his stasis pod room. After the Autobots discovered it, they were unable to use Censere's teleport chamber to escape for fear of leaving the organics to die. The Sun in Flight

Notes

• In the individual-issue printing of "Who's Afraid of the DJD?", Misfire stated that "[Flywheel's] ludicrous search for the Necrobot ends unfulfilled", yet in the previous issue, it was Misfire who was looking for the Necrobot. James Roberts admitted that he'd confused the two Scavengers; in the trade, Misfire's "ludicrous search" line was cut out.