Sunrise

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"Sunrise"
サンライズ
Publisher Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published January 7, 2016
By Andrew Hall
Illustrations by Hayato Sakamoto
Continuity Shattered Glass, GoBots
Chronology 2015
Page count 12pp

A team of GoBots surveys Earth.

Synopsis

On Shatteredverse Earth, at the fancy Dancitron, Soundwave loudly regales Blitzwing with the Solarbot encounter he had. Who could these six Ember-lacking 'bots Solarbot wanted be? Ha, get this, Slugfest thinks they must be cyborg alien invaders, what a putz!

Meanwhile, on a Gargent universe's Gobotron, the cyborg alien GoBots are informed that the protections put in place by the Beast Sage have failed and the Cataclysm has returned to destroy the universe. Worse, some major dimensional shift is cutting off contact with the reinforcements they sent and the Guardian leadership think they can only trust in their allies. Cy-Kill thinks that's a load of crap! They need to evacuate now! Even as the Guardian leader speaks fine words about trust and spending the last time with your loved ones, Cy-Kill knows they have three days, seven hours, eighteen minutes, and four seconds to go...

Back on Classicsverse Earth, the GoBot specialists are cautiously checking out Utah in the hope of finding what on this world is damaging theirs. Tension is up as they have to keep two factions together and Bug Bite keeps disappearing to do who knows what, leaving remaining Renegade Bad Boy on edge. Their reinforcements arrive in the form of Man-O-War, Rest-Q, and... some other dude, all in local guises (battle-ready on the assumption it was a search-and-rescue), but the meeting goes sour when Man-O-War hears about Bug Bite's vanishing acts. Treds already has bad history with Man-O-War, and seethes as he's berated and rank is pulled on him, before Path Finder tries to calmly turn things back to the mission and finds herself slagged off for planning to talk to the local Autobots.

That's when the third reinforcement reveals himself to be the utter weirdo, the Buggyman, a Renegade navigator whose bug drones have IDed the Autobots' base. This allows Path Finder to pull off her plan, while Man-O-War assigns himself to an advance aerial unit for diplomatic reasons (and totes not to avoid dusty roads). The GoBots hit the road, splitting into two groups.

Which they probably wouldn't do if they knew they were being watched...

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Heroic Decepticons Guardians Renegades

Quotes

"Earth, again? Honestly, human names... why not go for something patriotic, like 'Peopletron,' or something?"

—Treds finds Earth names to be stupid.


"The Buggyman is master of not just insects... I have metal maggots, turbo-worms, and botspiders, too... You will love them!"

—Buggyman


“That means you’ll be the one in charge of the ground team’s safety, Treds. You sure the perilous wilds of Potato won’t be too much for you?”
“I’ll get them to the Autobot base safely, or I’ll turn in my Guardian badge.”
“I’ll hold you to that, soldier.”

—Man-O-War and Treds

Notes

Errors

  • Soundwave misparses the Spanish phrase "mano al mano" when it should be "mano a mano" or possibly "mano a la mano".
  • The term "stream" in "Gargent universal stream" should be "cluster".
  • This story refers to Doctor Go while "Withered Hope" referred to "Herr Fiend". It is uncertain if this is a correction from "Withered Hope" or an error in coordination.
  • While it's often difficult to tell how a cartoon character's name is supposed to be spelled, the Buggyman's name was parsed as "BuggyMan" in the Renegade Rhetoric iteration of Ask Vector Prime, whose author consulted GoBots model sheets.

Continuity notes

  • This delves into the long fallow GoBots plot of the Fun Pub stories. Noticeably:
    • The Cataclysm was the reason the GoBots were turning up since waaaay back in "Games of Deception". That plot was quietly wrapped up in, of all things, The Complete AllSpark Almanac, which said the events of 2012's "Invasion" had ultimately sorted it. Now we get to see how the relevant characters are dealing with everything.
    • This story follows on from the end of "Withered Hope", where the team is on Earth and reinforcements are picked up, which happened in 2008.
    • Path Finder states that "the string of natural disasters that occurred after our arrival here" delayed the rendezvous with Man-O-War's forces, referencing the events of "Invasion". Despite many in-universe years having passed and several Classics stories having occurred after "Withered Hope", "Sunrise" begins after "Invasion" and "Solar Requiem", with Classicsverse Earth already in the Shatteredverse. The inordinate time gap between "Withered Hope" and "Sunrise" is intentional; the author acknowledged the need for suspension of disbelief in regard to this story's temporal setting. To be fair, this phenomenon is not without precedent.
  • This story also follows up on the previous Shattered Glass story "Solar Requiem", which Andrew Hall was also involved with. The inclusion of the Shatteredverse is foreshadowing a GoBot incident mentioned in Stepper's BotCon 2015 profile card.
  • Lio Convoy was noted to have visited Gargent 984.08 Alpha in a 14/5/2015 Facebook entry of "Ask Vector Prime". Vector Prime also noted in another entry on the same day that the ultimate fate of Gargent 984.08 Alpha would be addressed soon.
    • These references were made possible by collaboration between Andrew Hall and Jim Sorenson.

Transformers references

  • Soundwave's reference to Solarbot going "Super Seibertron mode" references the classic Japanese name for the planet Cybertron. It is unspecified what "Seibertron" means in this English-original continuity.
  • Soundwave name-drops a six-bot team named the Seacons, which presumably includes versions of Overbite, Seawing, Snaptrap, and Tentakil from "Shattered Expectations".
  • Blitzwing also name-drops a Shattered Glass group called Vehicons.
  • Rest-Q's "foreign vocoder syndrome" that leads him to speak in Antillian comes from his Generation 1 counterpart.

GoBots references

  • Small Foot refers to a previous fight with Buggyman from the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon.

Real world references

  • "Super Seibertron mode", discussed above, is also likely a reference to the "Super Saiyan" concept from Dragon Ball Z, in which the characters "power up" into a form with glowing golden hair and auras.

Other trivia

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