The character bios below were written for the Transformers fan club newsletter, as a companion to some of the comics featured here on my site. These bios were a great opportunity to dive deep into fairly obscure characters in a medium focused on the adult fan audience. I didn’t have to pull any punches here, and as a result I got to build on (and in some cases, create) some characters that remain fan favorites.
Nemesis Prime
Allegiance: Spawn of Unicron
"The warrior's path is paved with the scraps of the fallen."
BIO
The last thing Prime remembered was Megazarak telling him the Matrix would be left to slowly corrode in his ruined chassis on the shores of the Rust Sea. Then his core processor was torn out, and there was only darkness.
After a time, light came into the darkness. Light and pain. For an eternity he dwelled in the darkness, with nothing to look forward to save the coming of the light, a shadowy, green pinprick that illuminated nothing. Always with the light came the pain, until he began to prefer the pain to the nothingness of that black death in which he floated, bodiless, voiceless, helpless.
The Transformers have no word for Hell, but Prime knew enough of Earth to know that this was Hell. This light was a god, come to punish him for his failure. He grew to worship the light; to hate it so intensely that his hate became a form of devotion, a dedication every bit as total as his dedication to the Allspark had once been. He prayed to the light for even greater pain, for absolution, purification; for forgetfulness of that Dead Matrix that lay rotting on the surface of a desolated Cybertron.
Then, the light spoke to him. It told him his purification was nearly complete. Soon, it said, he would once again be freed into the universe, this time to serve as the light pleased. One thing only remained; and suddenly, for the first time in an age, Prime awoke to sensation. All of his suffering to date had been nothing to this, as his cloned body was fitted with the Dead Matrix and pumped with agonizing life.
Freed from the shackles of the cloning chamber, Prime beheld finally his new master – the dark god Unicron – and immediately dropped to his knees in abject worship. As he groveled, Unicron reached out and laid a single, great finger upon his back. Every sensor in his body rebelled at the touch of the Great Destroyer, the Heart of Darkness, and he was transported once again into an ecstasy of infinite suffering – agony so great it became indistinguishable from pleasure.
A voice so deep it was more feeling than sound thundered through Prime's head. "You are Nemesis Prime," it said. "You are mine. Forever."
WEAPONS/ABILITIES
Any discussion of Nemesis Prime's capabilities is fruitless without first addressing the Dead Matrix he carries in an armored housing in his chest. The result of millions of years of experimentation by Unicron, the Dead Matrix was once an Autobot Matrix of Leadership. Left to rot in the body of a fallen Prime, the energy held within the Matrix slowly degraded over time, until only the barest vestiges of Primus' power pulsed in the reaction chamber.
Using Nemesis Prime as a conduit, Unicron was able to access the multidimensional coding of the Matrix and inject a portion of his own Spark into the Matrix, creating a weapon capable of killing Primus should it ever be brought into his presence.
Nemesis Prime himself is a highly mobile killing machine. His primary weapon, accessible in both robot and mammoth modes, is an over-under plasma pulse cannon and semi-automatic fusion rocket launcher. Housed within his forearms is a pair of retractable, flash-suppressed 20mm machine guns capable of firing up to 1500 armor-piercing, explosive rounds per minute each. A pair of variable-frequency lasers designed to defeat most energy shielding is mounted at his hips.
Above his Matrix Annex are a pair of smoke dispensers, and a pair of high-intensity spotlights. Over his shoulders sit ten independently fire-controlled grenade launchers with a range of up to six miles. Mounted on the his lower legs is a pair of spring-launchers that can be used to fire his Energo-sickles short distances, though he prefers to use them for hand to hand combat.
In mammoth mode, a specialized stealth coating renders him almost totally transparent to most sensors, a property he retains in somewhat diminished form in robot mode. Complementing his stealth capabilities is a unique system of interlocking gimbals and waldos that cause his movements to be nearly sound and vibration free. He is protected from physical attacks by overlapping trinnium6-titanium alloy armor plates, and his internal systems have been hardened against electronic attacks and backed up to multiple redundancies.
WEAKNESSES
If Nemesis Prime has a weakness, it is his lingering sense of honor. He revels in the challenge and chaos of combat, and therefore eschews surprise tactics in favor of frontal assaults. He prefers his fights to be as evenly matched as possible, and he never retreats. That said, if it serves his purposes, he does not hesitate to slaughter a planet-full of innocents, simply to lure one powerful opponent to his doom.
Vector Prime
Allegiance: Defender of Cybertron
"For honor! For glory! For Cybertron!"
BIO
It is impossible to encompass all that Vector Prime is. One of the very few truly unique creatures in all the Multi-verse, he has walked the time stream from its raging headwaters to its muddy, struggling ending, where it bleeds out into the ever more infinite sea of entropy that marks the passing of every totality. His vision is limited only by the borders of space-time, but that there is yet more beyond he has no doubt.
Created by Primus at the very beginning of its struggle with Unicron, when most of the newborn universes were little more than swirling clouds of ionized hydrogen, his was the most complex task of all the original 13. Drawn from the sublime material of a multiverse at the far end of entropy, he is the very soul of order. At his heart thrum the subtle mathematics that govern the movements of quarks, the slow spin of galaxies. Before his eyes run the lines of force that tie all things back towards their center, back towards Cybertron.
Vector Prime's might has dwindled over the years, his boundless energy taken up in the never ending task of maintaining the Gordian mechanics of space-time. As the multiverse has run down its inevitable course, so has Vector Prime aged — his systems shutting down piece by piece, code that once ran at the forefront of his mind forgotten, files fragmenting, memory sectors burning out.
As he aged, and as the weight of Time built up within him he found himself less and less engaged in the linear universe. With both Primus and Unicron dormant — their endless conflict for the moment ended — he withdrew from the flow of time, submerging himself in a dimension of probability, in which all moments and all possibilities exist concurrently.
He emerged occasionally to correct serious disruptions in the ordered flow of events, but he did not return to Cybertron until called by Vector Sigma — the vast, interdimensional mainframe that connects all aspects of Cybertron to one another. Now, he has returned home to find the multiverse he was created to protect in danger of being torn apart at the seams.
WEAPONS/ABILITIES
Any discussion of Vector Prime' abilities would be fruitless without first mentioning his sword, Rhisling. Extraordinary for its properties as a tool as much as for its powers as a weapon, Rhisling is the means by which Vector Prime interacts with spacetime.
Forged of ethereal supermatter, its edge is fine enough to slice through the very fabric of reality, allowing Vector Prime to move from dimension to dimension, or alter time itself. The heat of the blade can be used to heal any damage it inflicts. Wielded by a master swordsman such as Vector Prime, there is no finer weapon in existence.
Vector Prime's sensory equipment — housed in the bottom section of his vehicle mode — is capable of detecting objects and energy signatures at a distance of 12 parsecs, and is fine enough in its resolution to pinpoint a subject within only a few meters. He also has a temporal mechanics analyzer that allows him to generate a potentiality schematic starting at a specific point in space-time, thereby predicting likely courses of action. This essentially gives him a nearly complete knowledge of every event, past and future, within his sensor range.
His sensory cluster is protected by a quartet of Gauss cannons that fire short bursts of armor-piercing, nuclear shells, delivering a series of EM shocks to stun any mechanical target they strike.
His most formidable weapon in vehicle mode is a single probability torpedo, house in a reinforced launching tube in his nosecone. In addition to a significant conventional detonation, this weapon disrupts causality in a localized area, yielding a variety of effects, all of which are inevitably disastrous for the target. Vector Prime rarely uses this weapon, as its effects always result in more work for him after the conclusion of battle.
In both modes, Vector Prime's armor is enhanced by several hundred microscopic dimensional vortices that capture and redirect part of the energy of every attack made against him to the heart of the larger of Cybertron's twin suns.
WEAKNESSES
Despite his unique perspective, he is nonetheless a linear thinker, locked into the concepts of cause and effect. As a result, he is not particularly imaginative, which limits his ability to use the vast amount of data available to him. Sufficiently unpredictable enemies have often outwitted him.
Internal inhibitors prevent him from creating a paradox by appearing in two places at the same time. As a result, he is occasionally forced to expend a great deal of energy seeding himself throughout time, thereby giving the impression of omnipresence.
Finally, though he is a consummate swordsman, his reflexes are sometimes slowed by his internal data structure. When about to engage in combat, he prepares by shutting down a number of sub-processors, enhancing his thinking speed, but decreasing his significant intelligence and ability to predict the actions of his enemies.
Ramjet
Allegiance: Herald of Unicron
"Annihilation is ecstasy.”
BIO
Once Unicron's most dangerous lieutenant and herald, Ramjet found great joy in his role as the vanguard of the chaos-bringer's assault on reality after reality. His skill as a warrior twisted by the corrupting energies of the dark god into a deep love of cruelty and destruction, Ramjet grew ever apart from his fellow Decepticons into a creature as unique as any in the multiverse.
Granted obscene might through a direct, inter-dimensional link to Unicron, Ramjet was free to vent his twisted desires on the inhabitants of the dimensions to which he traveled, often torturing and destroying the populations of entire planetary systems as a means of announcing the imminent arrival of Unicron. Despite his chaotic nature, his greatest fear was the failure of the Unicron-empowered guidance systems that allowed him to punch through the fabric of realities and navigate the vertiginous nowhere between dimensions. Always a servant of annihilation, and ever one step ahead of it, Ramjet loved and hated his lord Unicron.
His worst fears were realized when Unicron's physical form imploded near Cybertron during the Powerlinx Battles, imprisoning the god's essence within a vast new black hole created by the catastrophic collapse of local space-time. Ramjet, traveling to his lord's aid, was cast adrift between dimensions.
Ramjet found himself lost in a kaleidoscopic madness of swirling anti-matter, a timeless non-space in which atomic cohesion and ordered mathematics are nonsense. He quickly found himself losing physical cohesion as the environment converted his material structure to scattered energy, and he became for a moment a small, bright star in a sea of chaos. But worse, as his core systems began to fail, he found that he was not alone.
There were things here. Beings of ancient, indescribable power; monsters of a cold, alien evil that dwarfed even Unicron. They invaded Ramjet's being, recreated and destroyed him a thousand times, toyed with his Spark like a cruel, dangerous child might toy with a neglected pet. It was an eternity of torture that negated every aspect of Ramjet's being, until eventually, bored or satisfied with what they had done, these ancient gods cast Ramjet out of their domain, back into the Universe.
WEAPONS/ABILITIES
Ramjet's most impressive ability is his capacity to generate quantum fields intense enough to collapse space-time in upon itself, creating semi-stable extra-dimensional wormholes from one reality to another. The creation of these wormholes is extremely energy intensive, and it can take some time for Ramjet to generate sufficient distortion fields.
Destroyed and recreated over and over during his imprisonment, Ramjet's corporeal form is constructed from highly radioactive, unstable antimatter, held together by the force of his will. As a result, he has access to nearly unlimited energy. The interaction of normal matter with the surface of his skin causes him to be surrounded by a constant halo of matter annihilation, the energy output of which is harvested with startling efficiency by subdermal energy collectors. His own anti-atoms are replenished constantly via inter-dimensional bleed from non-space.
He is able to channel part of his physical form into focused antimatter blasts, which can destroy almost anything they hit. Overuse of this capability weakens him considerably, however, so he rarely uses it, preferring instead to employ his more conventional plasma pulse cannons, and high-energy shock blade.
Defensively, Ramjet is accompanied constantly by a swarm of mini-cons that have devolved over time into little more than mindless drones, devoted to protecting their master. More formidable is the fact that his mere touch can destroy most opponents in a violent matter/antimatter reaction.
WEAKNESSES
Aside from the fact that he's as crazy as a Quint in a Sharkticon pit, Ramjet's weaknesses are few and difficult to exploit.
Chief among them is the fact that he holds his atoms together through mere force of will. Even a momentary lapse of concentration could cause him to fly apart, and he has no idea how long it might take him to re-coalesce.
Though he is highly intelligent and a clever strategist, he is not subtle, and his slavish devotion to Unicron can cause him to lose sight of the big picture. He has been outmaneuvered on more than one occasion.
*Special thanks to Rob Gerbracht for source materials