Point One Percenter

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When sparks are harvested from a hot spot they tend to be a pale blue in colour, but perhaps as few as one in a thousand are green. These sparks, and subsequently the Transformers that are forged from them, are commonly known as "Point One Percenters" and possess special qualities.

Fiction

IDW Generation 1 continuity

Before the Great War, Point One Percenter sparks were greatly valued by the Functionist Council. When the spark that would go on to be Overlord was discovered at the Thymesis Energon mining facility on Luna 2, their Authenticator Three-of-Twelve collected it and reclassified the supervisor Momus as alt mode exempt—a high reward in Functionist society. Remembrance Day

After war broke out, the Autobot Tyrest developed a suit of armour that resembled the late warrior Ultra Magnus. Secretly recruiting a series of Point One Percenters capable of wearing the armour, he created the Duly Appointed Enforcer of the Tyrest Accord, an apparently immortal lawman whose succession would continue until after the war ended. The Divided Self

In the meantime, the Decepticons devised another role for the Point One Percenters amongst their troops; when the scientist Rossum perfected the process of rendering a Point One Percenter nigh-on indestructible by bonding ununtrium to their endoskeletons, Megatron formed these supersoldiers into his "Warriors Elite". Despite a series of failsafes built into them by Shockwave, many of them rebelled against Megatron in the later stages of the war after they were reformed into "Phase Sixers"—with Overlord and Black Shadow even ending up on the Decepticon Justice Division's List. Remembrance Day

Following the end of the war, the crew of the Lost Light (re)discovered the long lost Seething Moon, which they found was teeming with perhaps a billion unharvested sparks. Among them, a Point One Percenter attracted Brainstorm's attention and he attempted to extract it before being surprised by Lockdown's Titan Hunters and forced to retreat. The Fecund Moon He succeeded in retrieving the spark and secreted it inside his chest compartment until he was back aboard the Lost Light, The Sound of Breaking Glass where he locked himself away in his laboratory to work on it. This Calamitous Life Storing it in a cavity within himself, Brainstorm carried the spark with him on his time-traveling journey to attempt to kill Megatron; when the original Matrix-derived spark in Megatron's body was extinguished by Rewind, it was replaced with the Point One Percenter spark by an only slightly hesitant Whirl. Predestination: An Expert's Guide

Known Point One Percenters

• Black Shadow
• Blockus
• Datum
• Dominus Ambus
• Fortress Maximus
• Grimlock
• Heretech
• Megatron
• Minimus Ambus
• Optimus Prime
• Overlord
• Ramp
• Roller
• Scorponok
• Shockwave
• Sixshot
• Suture
• Tarn

Beast Wars: Uprising

Protoform X and Transmutate were Point One Percenters. Kindred

TransTech

After returning to Axiom Nexus, Vector Prime and the TransTech government discovered that that he was a Point One Percenter, possessing a latent potential for trans-reality scanning which fewer than one in a thousand possessed. With his "singular" cyber-biology and his experience with transdimensional physics and organics, Vector Prime was thus assigned to travel to Nebulos, where he could monitor the foundational universal stream Primax 984.0 Gamma. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/11/01

Notes

• Point One Percenter sparks are inherently dangerous before harvest—the two miners who found Overlord's spark were caught in its "first flash", which was indicated to be rapidly fatal.
• Three-of-Twelve described the term as "a grave misuse of statistics" and noted that Overlord's spark was the "first in ten generations", suggesting the actual percentage may be lower.
• There appear to be different types of Point One Percenter. In "The Divided Self" Minimus Ambus classed himself, Datum, and Suture as "load-bearers" as opposed to "heavyweight class" 'bots like Roller.
  • Impactor was also originally called a "heavyweight class" Point One Percenter, but his inclusion here was in fact an error, as it would contradict Tyrest's whole point if one of the key Aequitas defendants was forged. This was corrected in the trade paperback, replacing his name with Grimlock's.
• Animus may have been a Point One Percenter; when he was killed by the Sparkeater in "The Chaos of Warm Things" his spark was shown to be green and it was established that the Sparkeater was drawn to the "brightest" sparks on the Lost Light.
  • Additionally, in the later issue "The Road Not Taken", it was revealed that on an alternate version of the Lost Light where certain events played out differently, Animus was used as bait for the Sparkeater, as it was attracted to his Spark, further implying that he had the brightest Spark on the Lost Light.
• Other potential Point One Percenters include Rung (who the Sparkeater went after next) and Killmaster (another member of the Warriors Elite).
• While Megatron and Grimlock were not confirmed as Point One Percenters when the concept was originally presented, "Chaos Theory Part 1" did feature a line of dialogue stating that Megatron had an unusually bright spark. James Roberts later confirmed the characters on Prowl's list of "once-a-generation bots" were Point One Percenters. Grimlock would later be listed as a Point One Percenter in trade, his name replacing Impactor's. Megatron would later be explicitly established as a Point One Percenter hybrid.