ENERGON ARCHIVE (7)

Here’s the second of this week’s trio of Energon Archive updates, taking us through the first half of the outline for Transformers Energon #34’s ‘Armageddon part 3’:

With great ceremony, Councillor Avalon launches the Initiator, an ancient Quintesson artefact designed to create a chain reaction in space/time and open an epic-scale portal to an alt. universe Quintessa. There, a massed invasion force waits — ready to attack the unsuspecting Cybertron (its infrastructure destabilised, its defences below par). Next, the ‘Conduit’ must be moved into position, and that means the lowering of Earth’s defence shield. As if on cue, Unicron’s Four Horsemen (Death, War, Famine and Pestilence) start blitzing the Autobots’ Mars base.

On Earth, Megatron notes the attack on the Mars base, convinced that Alpha Quintesson is finally making his move. Megatron’s ten-year stretch as a disembodied fragment of Unicron’s Spark gave him a unique insight into Alpha Quintesson’s intricate machinations. On the surface, the alien appears loyal to Unicron (and vigorously dedicated to restoring the chaos-bringer to full operational status), but Megatron can smell latent treachery a mile off. Whatever schemes he was hatching in secret are now coming to fruition, the endgame begun, and Megatron doubts that’s good news for any of them. Megatron orders his agents on Cybertron to be extra-vigilant, while knowing deep down in his troubled spark he needs answers now — and there’s really only one place to get them!

Avalon, meanwhile, has used his High Council authority to divert one of Ironhide’s ‘seismic-shock’ warheads to a secret (deserted) location on Cybertron, where an alien-tech spacebridge portal has been assembled. However, this action has raised a red flag on the monitoring station of fellow Councillor Levitacus, who took it upon himself to personally oversee (hush up!) the decommissioning programme, aware that general knowledge of the existence of such doomsday weapons could cause mass panic. Rather than log an official report, and maybe embarrass Avalon (and thereby the rest of the Council), Levitacus investigates in person, off-the-record.

Within Unicron, the constantly beleaguered and on-the-run Optimus Prime — fighting increasingly impossible odds — is starting to piece together the bigger picture. Earth, he realises, was a (massive-scale) diversion. While they were allocating resources and troops to fortify Earth, the main Terrorcon forces were overrunning/ransacking Nervissa. Prime realizes he must take a desperate leap of faith and hope that someone on Cybertron knows he’s here and is actively searching for him. He has to try to get a message out — but that will necessitate total exposure. He’ll have a window of nano-kliks! Prime plots a course for the surface of Unicron and considers a prayer or two…

On Mars, the outpost’s considerable defences finally buckle under the sustained and ferocious assault of the Horsemen…
((MORE SOON))