The Moderation (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} the_moderation) wrote,@ 2008-02-08 10:10:00 |
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Covenant of Primus
| The Great War that had reigned the Autobots and Decepticons for millennia upon millennia was finally over, Galvatron defeated. A peace accord known as the Pax Cybertronia was constructed, enforcing a new standard of equality and nonviolence -- on the surface. In reality, it placed the Autobots in firm control of Cybertron and her resources and established the Decepticons as second-class citizens. Despite malcontent among the Decepticons, peace ruled the planet for many years, eventually leading to new advancements in technology that allowed transformers to downsize to more energy-efficient forms -- beginning the lines of Maximal and Predacon. Further advancements allowed for the scanning of organic life forms as alternate modes, and as time passed and Cybertron turned more and more towards space exploration, Autobots and Decepticons fell to wayside, making way for the new generation. Optimus Prime himself eventually passed away, as did many of the Autobot and Decepticon war heroes. Some opted to make the difficult conversion to Maximal or Predacon, either hiding away from the public eye or working towards the new future. But it couldn't last forever. About 300 stellar cycles after the end of the War, a Predacon rebel calling himself Megatron broke into the Cybertron Archives, deep inside the Citadel of the Council of Maximal Elders, and stole both a valuable ancient relic and a battleship with a transwarp drive. The only other ship nearby with a similar drive was the Maximal exploration ship the Axalon, and they were ordered to pursue. Both ships disappeared into time and space and were not heard from again. Less than a vorn had passed after Megatron's theft of the golden disc before Cybertron was faced with the Predacon rebel once again. But Megatron had come back a wiser tyrant, having learned from the Beast Wars that while patience might not be a virtue, it could certainly help you get what you wanted a little easier. And what he wanted was all of Cybertron, under his lone rule. The treacheries of beings like Ravage, Tarantulas, Terrorsaur, and Dinobot II had brought him to the conclusion that he could rely on no being other than himself, and so he concocted a plan that would, eventually, leave him in sole control of all life on Cybertron. He lay low long enough to construct a horrific virus, one that would lay waste to all Cybertronians and leave him the only one standing. Affecting anything inorganic, the virus began by scrambling memory circuits, leaving transformers disoriented and amnesiac. It then moved on to attack the transformation protocols, trapping the transformers in their alt modes -- any attempt to change back to robot mode was met with fried circuits, stalling parts, and an incredible amount of pain. Then the infected transformer progressively lost functionality, until at last they were left offline. Megatron, safe in his organic dragon form with the only antivirus, had only to wait it out. But he was not idle, nooo. During the first stage of the virus, while chaos reigned across the planet, Megatron hacked into the aerospace records for all of Cybertron and wiped the drives of each and every craft, leaving everyone stranded on the planet with no chance of escape. And then, in the middle of it all, he used the recycled bodies of fallen transformers to construct and release his army of Vehicon drones. The population of Cybertron was dying by the thousands. But amidst all the terror and panic, a tiny sliver of hope reared its head. There were some few transformers, mostly explorers, who had opted to keep their organic alt forms from planetary missions they had been on. Affected by the first two stages of the virus, they hadn't seemed to have escaped its effect at first -- but although it left them trapped in beast mode, it never progressed far enough to offline their systems. Realizing that the organic alt modes must be the cause, some of them hid so that Megatron wouldn't notice they had escaped the virus; others attempted to warn the rest of the population and convince them to acquire beast modes. The latter was only met with moderate success: many transformers wouldn't believe that something as simple as a beast mode would save their lives . . . until it was too late. Those that did believe had to somehow acquire a beast mode, and quickly. Luck was with them. Despite Megatron having disabled all spacecraft, a few small groups of survivors were able to reach the exploration ships before they were physically destroyed, and a varied array of DNA samples was rescued and stolen underground. These were rationed out and used for acquiring beast modes. The samples were all from other planets, however, and much of the informational data on them was lost, leaving some samples a mystery as to what animals they contained. The known samples were used first, and the groups driven underground began to band together: Predacon, Decepticon, Autobot, and Maximal alike. By now, Megatron had begun using his Vehicons to harvest sparks from the fallen, and he selected the most useful to be implanted in new Vehicon bodies as generals under his control. Drones, while directly controllable, were weak and prone to falling before more intelligent opponents. His generals were intelligent, powerful, and loyal to him thanks to the shell programming embedded in their systems -- and once all of Cybertron was conquered, he would remove their sparks and unite the planet under his singular consciousness, a planet devoid of all free will except his own. He never told them about that last part, of course. Megatron also seized control of all of the energon supplies on the planet's surface, forcing survivors to make dangerous raids or starve to death. Many transformers formed an "every bot for himself" mentality, perfectly willing to steal the reapings of another group's raid. Others joined forces and resources with other survivors in order to pull off more effective raids. As the situation grew worse, and hatred for Megatron mounted, these expanding groups began calling themselves the Resistance, creatively using their beast modes to carry out small terrorist attacks on facilities like drone production plants. So far they have been largely ineffectual -- Megatron is just too powerful, he and his generals maintaining strict control over the entireity of the planet's surface. The organization is small, and many groups have yet to even hear of the Resistance, or merely think it a suicidal group of hotheads, determined to earn Megatron's wrath. Certainly a number of its members have already fallen to the Vehicons. The survivors have been forced to move down, down, far under Cybertron's surface, into the labyrinthine sewers and canyons of the planet's mantel, where Megatron's Vehicons cannot follow for more than a few quadrants. Jungles of pipes and the deteriorating remains of forgotten cities litter the area, lined with empty buildings and buckled streets, ghosts of Cybertron's ancient past. These pathways have been neglected for megavorns, and can be terribly dangerous. They are rife with sudden drops and dead ends, and while some of the ruined cities are still lit by the remains of dusty generators, many more receive only what faint blue glow can be had from chips of energon in the surrounding stone. Many a survivor has escaped beneath the surface only to meet a lethal fall, or to starve to death after losing their way. Groups that have survived map out their respective "territories", and use the terrain to their advantage, but much of the underground remains unexplored. Organic matter is incredibly rare and found only in the form of weak plants, located at a great depth underground. Those very few who have discovered these plants carefully, possessively cultivate them as an alternate food source, a buffer against those times when the energon raids fail. And now, less than a vorn after Megatron's return and conquest, another ship returns to Cybertron, only to be shot down into this new world of terror and strife. A ship captained by Optimus Primal and his crew . . . |
