User:Locoman/Sandbox/Protoform

Fiction

Generation 1 continuity family

Beast Wars cartoon continuity

2006 IDW Beast Wars continuity

"I'm melting! Oh, what a world, what a world!"

Protoform technology has its roots in the transmatter experiments conducted by Cicadacon and the other members of the Tripredacus Council in the twilight of the Great War between the Autobots, Decepticons, and their successors. This volatile mixture combined Cybertronian matter with Swarm energy and Unicron's ability to instantly reformat Cybertronians into new bodies; when applied to their test subjects, the Tripredacus Council discovered that it dissolved them into a "quantum state" and reshaped them into a "purer" form fashioned after the first generation of Cybertronian life. From their secret base inside Unicron's head, the Tripredacus Council detonated a transmatter bomb that would rain the substance across the planet and wipe the slate clean by instantly transmuting everyone on the planet into a primordial shape. However, the passing Axalon wound up deflecting the brunt of the blast, and the bomb only wound up affecting a small handful of Cybertronians. To cover for their embarrassing failure, the Tripredacus Council explained the incident away as a dead man's switch released by the recently deceased Galvatron, and the victorious Maximal government wound up taking custody of the afflicted Cybertronians. A negotiated amnesty let the true masterminds behind the attack walk free, and the Tripredacus Council began experimenting with transmatter-based weaponry, confident that they'd taken the first step towards the prophesied day when "all would become one". Dawn of the Predacus

In the years that followed the end of the Great War and the ratification of the Pax Cybertronia, resource shortages prompted both sides to adopt protoform technology, a cheap and convenient method of creating new Cybertronians in a post-war world. Beast Wars Sourcebook Sophisticated nanotechnology allowed protoforms to directly integrate organic material into their physical construction through a process known as "nano-regeneration". The Gathering #1 Both "sparked" and "blank" protoforms were mass-produced in "Matrix" and "Pit" facilities, which respectively manufactured Maximals and Predacons; some surviving Autobots and Decepticons, most prominently Ravage, Prowl, Silverbolt, and Ironhide downsized into protoform-based bodies to better guide the developing post-war civilization. Beast Wars Sourcebook

Tasked by the Tripredacus Council with apprehending Megatron in where Ravage had failed, Magmatron made a secret plan to gather an army by reprogramming the remaining protoforms from the Axalon into Predacons via a shell code in an activation signal sent to each pod by a transmitter array. After the protoforms had each scanned a compatible lifeform template, their protomatter began to coalesce, their sparks integrated, and their reanimator plugs fired. However, this plan was only partially successful as undercover Maximal Razorbeast sabotaged the shell signal to allow some of the protoforms to retain their Maximal allegiance. The Gathering #1 Later, Magmatron's team recovered Ravage's intact spark and implanted it into a blank protoform, which had already been affected by the Transmetal driver. The Gathering #2

After the Beast Wars ended, the Vok revived Airazor by giving her spark a new, Transmetal body by utilizing a blank protoform. Beast Wars Sourcebook #1

Classics

Scylla, Autolauncher, and Autojetter were stored as protoforms in stasis pods aboard the Graviton but were ejected when the ship crashed on Earth of an alternate universe. The Autobots tried to retrieve the stasis pods, but Megatron beat the Autobots and converted the trio into Decepticons. Shattered Expectations

Beast Wars: Uprising

At some point during the Great War, the Vector Sigma supercomputer responsible for creating new Cybertronians was destroyed. When the war ended, Cerebros turned to the triumphant Human Confederacy in the hopes that their advanced civilization could grant his dying race some kind of future; in returned, he obtained an energon matrix, which the Builder Assembly used to manufacture millions of protoforms. Head Games Their creations, the Maximals and Predacons, became known as "proto-formers" or the "proto-races" as a way of distinguishing them from the archaic "Builders", who did not use protoforms to reproduce. Broken Windshields By the time of the Grand Uprising, the Builders kept the remaining protoforms under heavy guard inside the Grand Mal. Four years into the war, there were but one hundred and seventeen protoforms left, two-thirds of which were blanks.

During Megatron's attempts to graft mechanimal physiology onto Cybertronian anatomy, his collaborator Leatherhide reasoned that testing the process on a new protoform would be easier than attempting to reconfigure a fully-developed Cybertronian. Megatron hired the eccentric Bisk to break into the Grand Mal and grab one; Leatherhide's prediction proved correct, and the creation of Formikon allowed the pair to refine the process and learn how to safely convert other Cybertronians into mechanimal-based beast modes. Not All Megatrons

Wings Universe

Protoform technology remained in use many centuries after the Great Transformation and the reformatting of Cybertron into a technorganic utopia; when Apelinq was a protoform, he was told stories about Alpha Trizer’s previous adventures. Land Powered's King Atlas for Protoforms was a prominent 30th-century reference text. Apelinq's personal logs

Aligned continuity family

The Covenant of Primus

In the years that followed the Great Cataclysm, new protoforms arose from the Well of All Sparks, where they gradually scanned the world around them, developed a name, identity, and potential alternate mode for themselves, and finally emerged as a fully-formed robot. In this delicate prenatal phase, however, their minds could be corrupted and even stunted by outside forces, as was the case during the Age of Wrath, when the static, orderly society imposed by Quintesson occupiers caused young Cybertronians to emerge from the Well as dull, mindless robots without names, only numbers.

The end of Cybertron's Golden Age marked a second period of regression--the stultifying caste system imposed by the Cybertronian government meant that young protoforms would scan a dull, impoverished world and simply find nothing to aspire to. Senators like Soundwave found the trend concerning, and wondered if their own austerity measures had instigated a species-wide devolution into a race of mindless automatons. The Covenant of Primus

Aligned novels

Protoforms were created by the AllSpark in the Well of All Sparks. In the past, newborn protoforms engaged in a rite of passage where they would pass through the dangerous Underworld on their way to the Cybertronian surface, but by the era of the caste system, the custom had fallen out of favor. Instead, protoforms were harvested directly from the Well of All Sparks, where they would be taught to transform into their alternate mode and put straight to work. "Protoform" remained the standard name for one's robot mode. Transformers: Exodus