Prologue
Out beyond the stratosphere of ancient Earth, several Maximal protoform stasis pods slowly orbited the planet. Occasionally one of the stasis pods would make its decent and usually crash landed on the planet's surface. Whenever that happened, usually one if not both of the grounded space ships on the planet would detect the stasis pod's trajectory and inform the ships' inhabitants of a possible incoming new member of the Beast Wars that was currently happening on the planet. By all technicalities, the resulting protoform would become a member of the Maximals, although there had been a number of times where the Predicons had reached the stasis pod first and altered the core coding to cause the protoform to become another member of their nefarious group.
One such stasis pod landed on the planet without either faction initially finding out about it. Why it happened, no one was quite sure. Perhaps neither ship had any bot on board when the signal was detected. Or perhaps a rogue solar flare interfered with both ships' sensors. Whatever the reason, after the protoform stasis pod landed, the sensory antenna went up, scanned the local and picked a nearby elephant herd as the most suitable organic form for the Maximal within.
At first sight of the emerging Maximal, the herd backed away in nervous concern. Even when the Maximal transformed herself into her beast mode, they kept their distance, though they appeared to be less skittish.
Time would be the only teller as to whether the herd would accept this robot-in-pachyderm-disguise, to say the very least.