Something about Altered Loyalties CYLAS just really makes me want to include him in the first place but also makes me really really REALLY think that with the more supernatural elements of AL based off of the original TFP pilot (or just first episode/s?) that CYLAS as a ‘dead man walking’ would actually let him stay around longer AND also be a very significant contributing factor to Megatron’s downfall in Decepticon favour!
Of course it’s not as if I have the pieces of the TFP rewrite au firmly put into place, CYLAS in canon shows up just over halfway into season 2, and many of my most established changes occur in the first like… including all the parts of ‘Darkness Rising’ 8 episodes of season one; I have no idea if the environment CYLAS presents himself in is the same one canon CYLAS does.
But with the dubiousity between s1 e8 all the way to s2 e19, I’ll establish the basic context… I think in story mode maybe…
Looking at the general timeline for the Aligned Continuity, it says that the first contact of cybertronians on Earth is dated to about 500 years before the show, give or take a decade. I’ve been listing Skyquake’s little EHP pitstop to have existed at least 50 years before the war reached our planet, but what if I pushed it all the way back to 500; if a vorn is 83 years, that’d be about 6 years on an entirely different planet not knowing truly if your twin is going to make it, a planet which by the way presently has no established radio systems that it’s horrifically quiet for a terrestrial environment.
That means that Skyquake’s EHP Comms Array has been transmitting a signal long before humans had developed radio, which also means that what might’ve been blatantly an anomaly in the system if discovered 50 odd years previous to 2012 (which would’ve been in the 60s give or take which would not have been good in the literal middle of the cold war era) has been going for centuries because it had always been there, there is no anomaly because it is a signal that has existed ever since humans were able to manipulate radiowaves into sending messages and translate them into detectable noise. It helps that cybertronian language and code (both code lang and like literal programming code) is a system unknown to humans developing their own language.
And you may be asking, why did I divert this post from talking about CYLAS and how he’d outlast his canon alternate to radio shit? Well, if you were a paramilitary organisation who is pretty good at erasing signals and you discovered a signal that has been actively running for the entirety of human radio has suddenly been silenced, what would you begin to suspect at that?
Aliens may potentially be a stretch but MECH didn’t just name themselves after the cybertronians fighting war on their planet, and once the cybertronian conflict touched down on Earth, the Decepticons hadn’t a need for an intergalactic communications array and in fact was specifically instructed to switch it off in an effort to prevent the Autobots from using it. That would’ve been about maybe 6 years ago for the show (wow just enough equivalent time to match what Skyquake felt he spent grounded to one radio tower look at that) and though MECH would not encounter their first cybertronian until ‘Convoy’ (haha wait that’s s1 e9 the next ep to cover - if necessary - for Altered Loyalties lmao), they would’ve had 6 years to find that missing signal and stumble across some very definitely alien technology.
That is one of the reasons why the rewrite of ‘Masters and Students’ which is less masters and students focused - rather the point is Skyquake, a team of Nemesis stationed vehcions and Starscream investigate the comms array and set it up manually - why the radio tower wasn’t switching on from a remote position.
The other reason was because the Guardian unit stationed at the comms array - the very ones that had accompanied Skyquake all those stellar cycles ago - had gone missing. Why?
Because of Megatron’s flagrant use of Dark Energon.
Points 1 and 2 listed above leads to the explosion of the comms array, the death of Skyquake, and MECH either being alerted to the point of alien contact or just in general going to the site for more study only to find a dead specimen. After the discovery of the Autobots with the body of Skyquake, MECH begins their initial study and dissection of cybertronian physiology, though without a live subject they couldn’t exactly see what parts function in what way, especially the t-cog.
The discovery of Skyquake led to the discovery of terrorcons which lead to the discovery of how to take down a cybertron and how to take it apart without it screaming. MECH would learn the programming of a cybertronian through vehicon terrorcons since, even with DE corruption, their processors are still somewhat being maintained. While probably not able to access memories (they are fickle things, memory centres, easy to damage storage or to corrupt files) there are still systems responsible for pain and other more processor based responsibilities that aren’t centred in a physical organ that reads in fine print it’s function.
Breakdown being MECH’s first fully functional living mecha for their study is so exciting for them (even if Breakdown is very much less enthused) because they can put what knowledge they’ve pieced together to be far more efficient with their time and focus on the elements they could not decipher from either corpse or zombie and potentially try and prod at Breakdown’s brain for some cohesive coding. Good think Bulkhead still shows up when he does even with Breakdown walking away with the dreadful thought of ‘how the hell do these fleshies already know so much’ boring into his head… mainly through the optic that was still drilled out-
Whether or not MECH needs to get another living cybertronian to get caught up in their understanding of the biomechanics of them (aka would 'Operation: Bumblebee' take place as it does) or they skip right onto making a remote control Prime having gotten a headstart on their knowledge and scaring the scrap out of any bot unlucky enough to be unconscious around them, eventually Silas gets smooshed and MECH scientists are reliant on their alien dissections to get the human puree back to the land of the living.
I'd assume that this was the case in the original since if Silas' biomatter was able to be collected from a pile of robot drone induced rubble the RC truck would've been able to be recovered as well, but MECH discovers that using Nemesis Prime as a lifesupport system does not work given all it's functionality is focused on visually replicating another cybertronian, rather than using it to create life. There's a lot of parts and systems to a cybertronian's biological ecology that wasn't put into consideration for a mimic toy that prove detrimental to creating a suitable ah... skin suit essentially for Silas' blood pudding, but MECH has an abundance of corpses ready and raring to be used just so long as they piece them back together again.
Amid MECH's collection would no doubt be a mass of vehicon bodies - some untouched by energon others taken down explicitly by MECH because they were terrorcons - some terrorcons made up from the bodies of the previous conflict pre-show (and not just a hypothetical ancient war, but explicitly the conflict that culled a lot of Autobot and Decepticon officers amid the show expected vehicon death), and the very first cybertronian sample they started studying, Skyquake himself! Being at the origin of the blast at the EHP Comms Array he wasn't kept in perfect condition for one, the arm he loses as a terrorcon in the Shadowzone is still lost - it's been buried under rubble after being severed with radio tower pieces - and the monochromatic glass over his optics has long since been shattered so you can see the 'pupil' aka sensor, but seeing as how CYLAS makes Breakdown's corpse somehow look worse than what Airachnid left it as MECH probably has to suture that fucker back up because there's not way his organs have been left untouched!
And once CYLAS has been successfully integrated into his new cybertronian shell (some sort of arm, either being a loaner from another corpse or straight up just one MECH invented, it could even be a copy of the missing arm but where's the fun in that) instead of getting all high and mighty about 'being of a superior species' Silas actually bloody thinks on MECH's plans going forward. With a literal army of paramilitary personnel, from the scientists that melded human flesh with cybertronian wires to the average grunt soldier fighting between the battles of iron giants, CYLAS has something that Megatron (at least the Altered Loyalties Megatron I have written previously) has wanted from the start of the series...
For as large as cybertronians physically are their numbers can never match the scale of humanity, I can't remember if the books mentioned only thousands of the dead or up to a million over the course of like... a long fucking time but, that's not even the number of the human population if you're caught up with the number (nearly 8 billion alive today). And with the dead of previous battles already roaming the Earth, in a world where Megatron still being only like one dude can't command a planet wide population of zombies, the only reason he doesn't turn his blade to the weakest denominators of his forces in his plagued state is because their conscious decision to serve him is worth more than mindless servitude.
CYLAS introducing himself and MECH as a solution to this issue, and providing a show of bountiful body horror, makes not even the Decepticon high command quite as safe as they had been; not that it's been proven to be safe standing by Megatron's side given his track record of wanting his SiCs beaten or killed but...
The fact that CYLAS just so happened to have given and then promptly brutalised Dreadwing's hope that Skyquake may have been actually alive, just severely damaged (and, bond weakened from distance and prior injury, clinging to the last shreds of 'my spark didn't kill me with him' reasoning) and broke him out of the spell of blind loyalty to his once great leader.
CYLAS in this version has a little bit more longevity to his existence within the Decepticon forces, not actually a Decepticon soldier as the canon CYLAS pledged himself as but 'The Human Factor' the episode so calls itself akin to the way the American government and the human children are to the Autobots, but being able to physically go toe-to-toe with cybertronians. Megatron might be a little tired of dealing with independents after Airachnid's escapade (I do intend to make her more into a poacher/torturer type character than another Starscream so she might act out a little differently), but Silas isn't one for licking boots anytime soon and as CYLAS, Megatron is no different; you'd think he wouldn't have even done that in the first place given he's already an ex-military 'take-no-nonsense' bitch, but the Breakdown in him probably made him a lapdog...
Anyway that's a whole big post about Altered Loyalties CYLAS... or at least the in depth reasoning behind why he could still integrate himself into the story and why he'd probably have more opportunity to lasting- i prommy it's not bc i like torturing skyquake likers *wink*
I guess this is now a canon event or at least I'll try to make it canon ;)
