@stormshot-prime made a joke about Erector’s name that I decided to take seriously.
“He who builds things tall through precise work”. Not all of them are as poetic as others.
But then I got to thinking about some other characters.
Bulkhead and Lugnut share in base glyphs when they were first named as low-caste, “Load-bearing connection”, because they ones who’d named them were terribly unoriginal, but Lugnut wasn’t the only one who’d renamed himself. Bulkhead rewrote his glyphs to mean “a steadfast support no matter the hardship”.
Arcee’s name was first derived from a serial number, R-C. She was small hesitant and very much unlike herself when she asked Optimus for a proper name. Optimus first wrote her glyphs as “the steadfast courage song of the lonely and lost”, which because of a quirk of alien language made the phrase’s initials ARCEE. Optimus swore up and down that it wasn’t intentional, but they both know it was.
Bumblebee, born to war and toil and hardship, was picked up out of the rubble of Tyger Pax. The medic who revived him was hesitant as he explained there were enough complications from the wounds he’d suffered to ensure he would never speak again. Bumblebee has two glyph roots even when written the same way, one meaning “a buzzing annoyance to break with great force”, and the other meaning “a herald of fragile life and beauty”. The decepticons sneer his name, the glyphs on their tongue meaning the first. The autobots he sends in stitches laughing mean the second.
Ratchet is one of very few survivors of his home planet, scattered to the stars or left dead on the grimy battlefields. His name, he ponders with a distinct mix of old horror and irony and, sometimes, with a hint of humor. “The cause of something to irreversibly rise or fall”, when he was one of the last to speak with Megatronus and Orion Pax before they went before the council chambers? He doesn’t like thinking about the implications.
Alpha Trion was the one to name Smokescreen, so long ago. Optimus knows something is odd when he writes his name glyphs as “The sweet lie whispered behind a curtain of haze”, to have such a backhanded insult for a name, but he’s a bit busy with the Iacon Database, and he leaves the matter for when he isn’t so busy. When he comes back from the decepticon warship, he knows his mentor was a lot more cruel than his rose-colored memories might have suggested a month ago.
After all, he’d also been the one to name Orion Pax; “Peace be your shadowed prey, hunter of the underworld”. He’d taken it so many years ago to mean that Alpha Trion was hoping he would find peace. He wonders now if it was a curse in his mentor’s optics.
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