To Start Anew…

A Transformers Fanfic
By Darth Tenebrus

When they came, they brought their war with them. Alien mechanoid beings from someplace called Cybertron, split into two distinct factions, they came looking for the source of their existence. For the Autobots, their task was to locate it and either bring it home to rebuild their war-torn, nearly dead world, or to destroy it as a last resort. Their leader, Optimus Prime, had decided that he would rather destroy it, sacrificing himself in the process, rather than see their ancient enemies, the Decepticons, get their manipulators on it and build a new army with the machines of Earth. And it had been destroyed, but not in the way that Optimus had expected, for one of the humans of this world, an unlikely and reluctant hero by the name of Samuel Witwicky, had chosen to take the Allspark and plunge it into the chest of Optimus's greatest enemy, his brother and the onetime Lord Protector of Cybertron, Megatron. The fusing of the Allspark with the Spark in Megatron's chest created a power feedback loop that surged through the ancient Decepticon's systems and placed him forever in stasis lock. To the eyes of everyone, Megatron was dead.

Two years later the ancient Decepticon menace was joined by the progenitor of them all, one of the thirteen Primes that had been the true creators of the Transformer race, and one who, through selfish motives and secret designs, had fallen from the greatest grace of all to the depths of evil and was thus renamed the Fallen. A shard of the then-believed destroyed Allspark had imbued Sam Witwicky with its knowledge and essence, slowly driving him mad, whilst another piece of that greatest and most ancient and powerful artifacts of Cybertron's distant past was stolen from a human naval base by a Decepticon scout and used to revive their fallen leader. Megatron then joined with the Fallen, who later revealed the secret of the Transformers' presence to the entire human world. After a brief battle with Megatron that had wounded Optimus and put him in stasis lock, a secret joint human/Autobot response team retrieved the body of the fallen Prime and joined with the Witwicky boy in the deserts of Egypt, where they fought a desperate battle with Decepticon newcomers and the duo of Megatron and the Fallen.

During the battle, Megatron caught up with the Witwicky boy and fired on him. It seemed as if the last hope of the Autobots had died along with Sam, but in an apparent dream while the human military forces were attempting to revive him, the ancient Primes appeared to him and granted him the power to wield the Matrix for one purpose…

When he awoke, Sam rushed to the body of his friend and, with all his heart and soul, he plunged the dagger shape of the Matrix into Optimus's Spark, reviving him in time for the final battle with the Fallen himself. It was the sacrifice of Jetfire that allowed Optimus to gain the needed strength and power to defeat the Fallen at last.

Four years afterwards, a discovered part to a long-lost Autobot vessel led Optimus and his team to make an excursion to the Moon where they expected to find the Ark and its pilot Sentinel, the former Prime of the Autobots. What they weren't ready for was the backlash that followed, for when Sentinel, after a cleverly laid deception, shot Ironhide dead (as in truly dead; a blast from a weapon that fired a rust-acid compound literally dissolved the ancient Autobot warrior to almost nothingness) and retrieved the Ark's secret cargo from the NEST base, and then joined with Megatron, with whom he had long ago made a bargain on Cybertron to restore their world to its former glory, the Autobots and their human allies tracked the Decepticons to Chicago, where they fought a no-holds-barred battle. Sentinel's secret cargo was eventually revealed to be a revolutionary Autobot technology that folded space, and he and Megatron together planned to use it to bring Cybertron itself into Earth orbit and enslave humanity to work on the restoration of the Transformers' homeworld. When the Space Bridge's control pillar was finally destroyed, Cybertron returned to its former place in the cosmos, after which Sentinel and finally Megatron were both killed by Optimus Prime. Peace, finally, was restored to Earth and its two dominant races. The damage, however, was done.

In the years following the Battle of Chicago, humankind eventually turned on their Autobot allies in fear, forcing the few who remained to scatter across the planet. In Texas, an inventor named Cade found Optimus and revived him, bringing the wrath of the US government on them both. Optimus then summoned the remaining Autobots to his location with a distress signal and, together with their new friends, they eventually discovered the heart of the US operation to produce and harvest what was called Transformium by the American government. Returning to the Windy City, the remaining Autobots discovered the remains of an old friend as well as an old enemy reformatted with a new identity. While Galvatron, aided by a Decepticon bounty hunter, captured Cade and his family, Optimus and his friends revived a group of ancient Legendary Knights. With their aid, the Autobots then got revenge for the death of their comrade Ratchet, and the US Transformer program was shut down for good. It did not, however, assuage the humans' mistrust of their Autobot friends.

Nearly a year later the Autobot Registration Act was passed by a nearly unanimous vote of the full Congress, and the Presdent of the US had wholeheartedly signed it into law. Autobots were now required to register their identities and their alternate forms with federal authorities, and to prominently display the Autobot shield on their alt-forms whenever they chose to use them. This naturally led to gradual distrust of US central authority on the part of the affected Cybertronians as well as humans who were painfully reminded of the lessons of World War Two. Between the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and the US internment of Japanese-Americans, the period between 1939 and 1945 was filled with hostility and paranoia, which did not lessen with the rise of Soviet Communism and McCarthyism in later years. A vast portion of Americans found some disturbing parallels in the aftermath of the Autobot-Decepticon War, but it was not enough to stem the tide of paranoia in the government. Tired of all the fighting both on Cybertron and on Earth, the remaining Autobots chose not to incur the wrath of their host species, and began complying with the provisions of the ARA, some even deciding to find gainful employment in order to better assimilate into human, and especially American, society…

Transformers – To Start Anew

Skids had found himself in the tenth small town so far, and had been fired from nearly as many jobs in his sojourn on Earth thus far. He had heard of Earth, of course, and the opportunities it presented for a young Autobot to live, learn and grow. He was about five hundred breems old now, just barely out of his formative period. The humans called it 'childhood', whatever that meant. It mattered little to Skids now; he was a 'bot on a mission, and he had long ago accepted that he was no longer a sparkling.

Cybertron and the Allspark were gone, the former a barren wasteland of a planet, and especially after having suffered the rigors of Space Bridge travel; the latter was now no more than a deeply hidden memory file. His home was Earth, and humans were his people as much as his fellow Autobots were. Though he had lately had little contact with the latter, his relations with the former, he was surprised to discover, were vastly improved. It was the reason he had been hired nine times, the most of any Autobot that had chosen to embrace the ARA. The others had long been working at their new jobs for at least a year, which didn't say much for Skids, as that meant he had been fired from more jobs than any Autobot on Earth. With his termination from his last job, Skids swore to himself and to Primus that he would be a self-employed 'bot from that moment on.

A number of jobs had made themselves aware, unbidden, in his processor. He had imagined himself as a parcel courier and also as a taxi car, but neither one ever really panned out after a thorough simulation study; humans nowadays were far too paranoid to ever trust themselves with an Autobot in his or her alt-form, and he couldn't very well carry around large packages as an independent courier, all because a few radical Muslims decided they wanted Americans to be fearful of each other and the world at large. The lesson of 9/11 had hit home rather too well. No, Skids realized, he wouldn't be very well-suited to either one of those jobs given the political environment. Nor could he commit himself to the service of one or two people as their personal conveyance…or could he? The question, again, was trust, and to date he hadn't found a human worth his trust, not like Optimus or that Bumblebee chap.

Skids liked them both. Optimus was a good leader, as good as they came, and Bumblebee was a fierce friend. It was just that they had been too long involved in the war; they were warriors, Optimus perhaps had been one since the beginning, and Skids was not. Despite all that he wasn't, though, Skids was still an Autobot, and that meant he would never hurt another living being that he could help, and that he would lend a manipulator or a wheel where he could. And though he couldn't trust any humans that he had come to know so far, that didn't stop him from hoping that one day, one cycle, one breem even, he might find one that would not be fearful of him and would trust him, likewise earning his trust as well. Perhaps by starting small, he might find a starting point for helping to restore mutual trust and faith between humankind and Autobot-kind. For example, Skids ruminated with some small measure of self-amusement, he might start by delivering groceries….