Censere
- The Necrobot is a legend from the IDW portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.
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, but they persist.
Fiction
IDW Generation 1 continuity
The Cybertronian who would become known as the Necrobot began life as a census office worker named Censere of the High-Ceilinged Manifold, 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
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
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.[1]
