Paranoia
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| "Paranoia" | |||||||||||||
| Publisher | Fun Publications | ||||||||||||
| Published in | Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #56 | ||||||||||||
| Writers | S. Trent Troop & Greg Sepelak | ||||||||||||
| Pencils | Naoto Tsushima | ||||||||||||
| Inks | Naoto Tsushima | ||||||||||||
| Colors | Evan Gauntt | ||||||||||||
| Letters | Jesse Wittenrich | ||||||||||||
| Managing editor | Pete Sinclair | ||||||||||||
| Continuity | Beast Wars: Uprising | ||||||||||||
| Chronology | Circa 2384 | ||||||||||||
Protoform X, seemingly all alone, tries to fight the madness.
Synopsis
On board a ship transporting prisoners, Protoform X is dragged to cell, and sealed inside. Clawing at the door proves of no use, but salvation soon comes when the ship is mysteriously destroyed, sending Protoform Xplummeting into the atmosphere of a nearby planet. All the while, Protoform Xknows that no matter how much the pain, he will survive. He always survives. Upon impact, the skeletal Protoform X pulls himself out, beginning to regenerate; having been unable to kill him any other way, Protoform X believes his jailers are trying to starve him. But to his surprise, Protoform X realizes he isn't the only one one the planet when he senses something familiar...
A whole day passes by until Protoform X is near fully healed. Paranoid and insane from years of torture, the mad Cybertronian begins yelling at himself for consuming so much energy, trying all the while to convince himself he's in control. Seemingly spotting a figure out of the corner of his optics, begins firing off his cannon, every shadow and rock appearing to be a Maximal. As the figure he spotted watches him from the distance, Protoform X is nearly consumed by his rage, until he spots a groove in the ground. Believing it to be vehicle-mode tracks, Protoform X is delighted, transforming and declaring that he is now the hunter...
Featured characters
(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)
| Others |
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Quotes
"Come out, Maximals! I am the horror you have birthed, your greatest sin given form!"
- —Protoform X
"You stalk, you torment, you spy... but you cannot run! Now I become the hunter!"
- —Protoform X
Notes
Transformers references
- Protoform X is depicted as having a regenerative healing factor, emerging as little more than a skeleton from the wreckage of the ship, regenerating over the course of a few hours. This is not a new concept, but it's one that only showed up briefly before; in the Beast Wars episode "Deep Metal", Rampage (the name given to Protoform X by Megatron) had part of his chest ripped open by Depth Charge, exposing his spark. A few scenes later, the torn metal on Rampage's chest warped back together and fixed itself, a healing ability that was never seen in the cartoon again.
