You HAVE to tell us more about your tf au. I'm begging you
I’d love to talk about the au! It’s also @captainofthestars‘s au, so don’t forget that you can ask him questions too! We’re each handling about half the characters; some of the ones he’s in charge of are Blurr, Metroplex, Spike Witwicky, and Perceptor. We both love getting questions!
In the meantime, I guess have some scattered trivia??
We have a list of the main ‘teams’ to keep track of what characters go where. Some of the main ones on earth are Team Optimus (Optimus, Ratchet, Bumblebee, Prowl, Bulkhead, and Omega Supreme) the Rod Squad (Hot Rod, Wheeljack, Rung, Whirl, Arcee, Tailgate, and Byte) and the Rescue Bots (Heatwave, Chase, Boulder, Blades, and Wreck-Gar) plus their various human friends and (eventually) cybertronian visitors. One other team is... unique, and we still have to figure out how they line up together.
Minicons here are a little more common than in TFA, but nowhere near as common as, say, the trilogy. They’re loosely defined as any bot who falls within human size, so around seven-eight feet tall or smaller. Swerve, who’s right at eight feet tall, and Prowl, who manages to hit nine with heels, both barely escape the label on a technicality. Since there’s such a big range of sizes, though, we’ve been thinking about having a lot of different size classes. We’ll have to think on it more before we can get you guys anything solid, though.
Sentinel Prime is Here and surprisingly, having both of his conjunx die and one of them going down with Megatron and ending the war has maybe made him like..... a tiny bit less of a jerk than normal, just slightly. He handled Optimus’s death a lot differently. More on him when we manage to design him, though.
Black Arachnia is in space as Strika’s main scientist, but Strika trusts her like... not at all. Blitzwing also hates her, after she turned him into a triple changer. Her voice and a lot of character beats have been borrowed from GLaDOS to add to her TFA characterization, and she has a cute little lab assistant named Antagony.
Wheeljack and Perceptor are long-time conjunx, and one of them might be amica with Skyfire. Jetfire and Jetstorm have been under their care since they were sparklings. Things might have gone downhill after Wheeljack was pulled away to go into the war effort, and then declared dead. Those five will probably be able to expand on that later in their bios, especially Percy’s.
One part of Cybertronian anatomy is an energon converter, roughly named. it might be able to be considered roughly analogous to like... a stomach before the more obvious fuel tank stomach. It converts edible energon and other fuels like gasoline into a more uniform state that cycles through the body. One quirk of it is that it converts different colors of energon for different bots; blue and pink are the most common, but other colors like yellow or green are seen a lot too. The color is generally reflected by optic color, but that color can change if someone decided to get tinted optics rather than clear ones.
Longarm assigned Punch to spy on the Decepticons as Counterpunch before the war ended. He’s been in deep cover long enough that it’s dangerous, but there’s still no word from Longarm for when he should return.
There are a few different mutations that can happen to protoforms. One of them is obviously outlier abilities, powers that a Cybertronian manifest that go outside of their initial design or intentionally made upgrades. Bumblebee’s stingers don’t count, Ratchet’s EMP generator doesn’t count, but Hot Rod’s overheating ability counts. Flight frames and aquatic altmodes are both considered mutations, and generally result in bots who are much larger than usual after several significant growth spurts late in development; immobile altmodes are another one, but generally result in smaller bots. One mutation resulted in a deformed t-cog that occasionally caused problems during transformations; through experimentation on Blitzwing, Black Arachnia discovered that bots with that mutation could become triple-changers with just minor adjustments.
Byte is the smallest character we have, at an inch tall. Windup and the Cassettes are the closest to that, at around six inches tall.
Cybertron used to circle a star, allegedly, but it doesn’t anymore. The two moons, at least, continue to circle the planet. To imitate the old day and night, the core of Cybertron is illuminated on a schedule, dimming for one solar cycle and returning to full brightness for the next solar cycle. It’s generally expected for citizens to follow the imposed schedule, but it’s debatable if they actually do.
Swerve and Blurr are friends. Like, actually for real friends. Really.
