The Custom-Made Now - An Elegant Chaos Prologue

Continuity notes

• The Custom-Made Now is the third part of a trilogy of flashback stories, following Chaos Theory and Shadowplay.
• We are not informed that the opening scene is set in the present day until it ends, when More than Meets the Eye's standard is to establish time periods through captions at the start of such scenes. Before this revelation, there's enough going on in the scene to make us think that it could just be set in the pre-war era, but there are also some clues sprinkled in: Minimus has been away for two million years, for instance, and as the pre-war era was at least four million years ago, that would place Minimus's departure at six million years ago, in Nova Prime's era, and he's not that old. Mention is also made of how the intellectual class has been outlawed, and how "knock-offs" (Transformers who were constructed cold) have been deported, scenarios incompatible with what we have seen of pre-war Cybertron in the past.
• Broadly speaking, the alternate timeline that Brainstorm has created is not one in which the Decepticons won the war, but one in which the war appears to have never even broken out. The Functionist Council was then subsequently never disbanded, and instead "unseated" the Senate and took complete control of Cybertron. We'd learn more about just how all this went down in issue 3 of Lost Light.
• With no war, Pharma never went bonkers, and he and Ratchet are still friends, as they can be glimpsed chatting on page 3.
• Also, Dominus never vanished in this timeline, so the alternate Rewind doesn't wear a head-mounted camera.
• In the alternate timeline, the "Black Box Consortia" have purchased Luna 2. They are this timeline's version of the Black Block Consortia, previously mentioned in issues #34 and #24.
• "Laser pointers" are among the decommissioned disposable class 'bots; laser pointers were mentioned in the same breath as data slugs when the disposable class was first discussed back in issue #12. Chromedome and Rewind had a friend who was a laser pointer named Shimmerstick.
• The "old" Rewind bought a souvenir replica of Hedonia's "Raging Prism" from a gift shop on the planet; the Autobots visited Hedonia in issue #13, and the prism was mentioned in both that issue and in issue #22. The gift shop appeared in issue #13's back-up prose story, "Signal to Noise", and if Rewind's description of the souvenir is anything to go by, we saw Chromedome attempting to throw it away back in issue #16.
• Someone has placed a Rodimus Star in the deceased Trailcutter's hand; his desire to earn the award was part of the story of his self-titled Spotlight issue.
• It just seemed like a passing remark back in issue #30 when Brainstorm noted he "always carried [his] own" drinks, but it takes on a whole new meaning with this issue's revelation that he's been spiking the proverbial punch bowl!

• The executed protester is a female Transformer, which stands out since in the regular timeline, Arcee was the only female 'bot known to exist before the Camiens came onto this scene. Though a point of intrigue at the time of this issue's publication, a few years later, Lost Light #8 would introduce the idea that a small number of male-to-female transgender Transformers did exist on Cybertron, indicating that this protester is one such 'bot.
• Meanwhile, her clear resemblance to Rung and allusion to him in her bellowed rhetoric ("All hail the Useless One"), will be explored later in this multi-part story.
• Dominus has been assigned to work on the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy; Rewind is clearly alarmed by Dominus's task of incorporating the "lesser species" into it. Given what we later learn about Dominus, this off-hand remark is actually a bit of deep foreshadowing.
• We previously met Functionist Authenticator Three-of-Twelve in issue #14. We now understand the meaning of his name, as he is the third member of the twelve-'bot Functionist council.
• The long-standing secret of Brainstorm's briefcase, the "masterpiece" he alluded to in issue #7, is revealed: as was hinted by the disruption of time that occurred when its quantum-duplicate was opened in issue #32, it's the control unit of a time-machine. Presumably, the paradox-defying component of the time machine played some kind of role in how the duplicate case and duplicate Rewind survived the erasure of "their" Lost Light.
• Rodimus gripes that he is "not allowed to take an interest in magic"; as we know from issue #28, "magic = science that Rodimus doesn't understand".