Dear Vector Prime, what would have happened if Dinobot 2 had survived and joined the Maximals on their journey back to Cybertron?
Dear Sempiternal Saurian,
In one reality, Optimus Primal was able to successfully rescue the cloned Dinobot from the Nemesis and carry him to safety, moments before Rhinox’s shuttle obliterated the ship’s bridge and foiled Megatron’s final gambit to win the Beast Wars. Initially, the jubilant Maximals believed that their old friend had somehow returned to life, but were dismayed to find that this was not quite the case. While this “new” Dinobot had indeed inherited some jumbled memories of his genetic template, he also bore the scars—both literal and metaphorical—of serving Megatron throughout the last third of the Beast Wars. Worse yet, he still carried the spark of Protoform X, itself a failed attempt to mimic Starscream’s immortal spark. Suffice it to say, the second Dinobot was a traumatized, empty shell—a living weapon bereft of purpose, forced to work alongside the same ‘bots he’d been conditioned to hate, and perpetually at war with himself as competing instincts vied for dominance. The Maximals quickly learned to give their nominal ally a wide berth, and none of them were particularly enthused when he declared that he would join them on their voyage home, in the hopes that he could find some kind of new purpose on Cybertron.
As in many of the timelines you know, Megatron slipped his bonds during their voyage back to Cybertron, conquered the planet with an army of mass-produced Vehicon warriors, and infected his captors with a paralyzing transformation virus. Thanks to his Transmetal 2 body, Dinobot resisted the virus, but was forcibly devolved back into a simulacrum of his genetic predecessor. Soon enough, Optimus Primal found him, Rattrap, Blackarachnia, and Cheetor; guided by Primal’s supernatural visions, the five ‘bots fled into the depths of Cybertron, and eventually encountered the mysterious Oracle. Dinobot emerged from the computer with a new, technorganic beast mode: a crimson Guanlong with steel-grey plumage, his teeth and claws could easily penetrate Vehicon armor. As he had never truly “known” Cybertron before the Vehicon apocalypse, Dinobot fought not for any kind of higher ideal, or to rescue the populace of Cybertron, but merely to survive; when the Maximals learned that Megatron had engineered the entire disaster and taken control of the planet, Dinobot decided that he hated Megatron more than he hated the Maximals and grudgingly stuck by their fledgling resistance movement, defiantly wearing a modified Predacon insignia for no other reason than to incense his creator.
Already torn between so many states of being, it should come as no surprise that Dinobot struggled to master the art of transformation. Because of this setback, however, the Rattrap of this timeline—who’d already taken a very real dislike to the “cut-rate knockoff”, and could now look down his nose at someone even worse at transformation than himself—never faced the same kind of crisis of conscience that many of his alternate selves struggled with, and learned how to transform by himself. When Dinobot found that “emotional still point” and unlocked his robot mode, he was a mighty warrior indeed: not only could his optics project a wall of telekinetic force to cover his allies and send enemies flying, but his mighty two-handed claymore could also open tectonic fissures and create localized earthquakes. Tormented by his own demons as he was, however, those moments of emotional lucidity were fleeting at best, and Dinobot spent most of his time trapped in beast mode: in his worst moments, the other Maximals had to physically restrain him as his old Transmetal instincts overwhelmed him and he reverted to a feral state of being. Even while trapped in beast mode, Dinobot proved an ambitious and cunning warrior, and he and Cheetor repeatedly butted heads over the position of leader while the Maximal leader was indisposed.
In this timeline, Dinobot’s warrior instincts and animalistic thirst for vengeance helped push Optimus Primal, already convinced that his mission was to revert Cybertron to its primordial organic state, further and further down the road of extremism. Thanks to his influence, by the time that Tankor’s true consciousness reasserted itself and made a play for power, Optimus had already discovered the Plasma Energy Chamber and used it to send an ultimatum to Megatron: leave the planet now, or perish. This time around, it was Megatron who had to go on the defensive; despite these minor changes in the timeline, the end result was largely the same—the clash between the Key to Vector Sigma and the Plasma Energy Chamber resulted in near-deaths for both Optimus Primal and Megatron. The other Maximals realized that their comrade had played a major role in Primal’s death and turned their back on him. While the other Maximals eventually revived Optimus and dealt with the strange Savage/Noble creature, a grief-stricken Dinobot, convinced that he had permanently killed the first being who had ever treated him kindly, buried his higher functions beneath his animal instincts and turned feral, indiscriminately roaming the empty tunnels and savaging any wayward Vehicons who deviated from their patrol routes.
Finally, after many cycles of exile, Optimus Primal—who had dedicated all his time to meditating in front of the Oracle and casting his own sensory net across the planet in the hopes of finding their most troubled comrade—finally reached Dinobot’s sleeping mind and pierced his layers of mental armor. In this shared dreamscape, a jumbled nightmare world of Transmetallized bones and a burning valley—Dinobot admitted that he had no idea who he was. Was he a warrior or a monster? A beast or a robot? A Maximal, a Predacon, a Decepticon? Would he forever toil in the shadow of his progenitor, desperately trying to live a life he’d never known? Or was he nothing but a freak of nature who concealed his monstrous nature beneath the veneer of an honorable warrior?
Inspired by his own recent voyage through the Matrix, Optimus offered his own opinion: just as the Matrix had chosen them to bring nature and technology together into a single, harmonious whole, so too was Dinobot more than the sum total of his origins. He was not the original Dinobot, nor was he Rampage; he was himself, a loyal ally and just as much a part of the Oracle’s grand plan as the rest of the Maximals.
It would take time before the Predacon warrior learned to channel Primal’s sense of balance into his own fighting style as he rigorously trained in private—aided by Primal’s occasional remote coaching sessions—and longer still before he worked up the courage to rejoin the Maximals. When he did, however, he returned not as Dinobot, but as his own ‘bot—he was now Preditron, a courageous and honorable warrior who combined his bestial instincts with the experience of two lifetimes lived. Preditron fought bravely alongside the Maximals in subsequent campaigns, stood by as they welcomed Botanica and Silverbolt into the fold, and made a courageous stand in the final battle against the Vehicon hordes.
Many centuries in the future, long after the Great Transformation that saw Cybertron reformatted into a technorganic utopia, young technorganic Cybertronians still whisper tales of the reclusive Last Predacon, whose immortal spark burns forever. When all else fails, it is said that the Last Predacon will emerge from his secluded jungle home to take young Cybertronians who struggle to master transformation under his wing, and teach them to find the balance within, as he once did himself.
