Expansion
From Transformers Wiki
Able to survive on a variety of different worlds unaided, the Transformer race is nothing if not adaptable—and that adaptability has led great waves of migration, colonization, and outright conquest in the name of Cybertronian hegemony: a great diaspora that has been termed the Expansion. However, this historical Age of Expansion is generally not without major issues—chief among them that the architects behind these great initiatives do not always have the best interests of the galaxy in mind... or, indeed, the Cybertronian species.
Contents |
Fiction
Generation 1 continuity family
2005 IDW continuity
| “ | The Expansion is upon us. No one can stop it. Not you, not I. | ” |
The Expansion had its origin over 6.7 million years ago, during the reign of Nova Prime. Confident that the Transformers were the highest form of life, Nova believed that they should expand their influence across the cosmos. He commissioned the Ark under the pretense of exploration, secretly planning a conquest. Spotlight: Optimus Prime In anticipation of this conquest, he began artificially boosting the population of Cybertronians by drawing sparks from the Matrix. The Divided Self However, following the Ark's departure, Nova Prime discovered a portal to the Dead Universe in the Benzuli Expanse and had the ship enter so that he could conquer this new realm as well. Dark Dawn The full truth of their time there is unknown, but the Ark crew was driven to a state of living death, and Nova became the fearsome being known as Nemesis Prime. Spotlight: Galvatron More significantly, the Cybertronians were only able to venture to the "living universe" for a short amount of time, or else they would die. The only one able to avoid this effect was Galvatron, and they did not know how he was able to, let alone replicate the process. Spotlight: Cyclonus Needless to say, this added a wrinkle into the Expansion.
As such, Nemesis Prime modified his plan, creating a new form of Expansion that would merge the Dead Universe with the living universe, allowing him to return to his own realm and bring order to it. Spotlight: Hardhead For this purpose he wielded the Darkness he had acquired in the Dead Universe, unaware that his new power was actually an aspect of the D-Void, an evil entity that was manipulating him into merging the universes so that it could consume all life on the other side. Genesis
Millions of years later, after Cybertron was laid waste and Optimus Prime became leader of the Autobots, Nightbeat traveled to Gorlam Prime, where he was apprehended by Galvatron and others. Nemesis decided that it was time to prepare for the Expansion, having Straxus[1] place a device in Nightbeat's cerebral chamber. Spotlight: Nightbeat He ordered Jhiaxus to prepare the Nega-Core, which would play a significant role in making the Expansion come about. He also sent Galvatron to retrieve Thunderwing from Hound's unit on Cybertron, killing Leadfoot in the process. Spotlight: Galvatron After this, Galvatron was dispatched to Earth to prevent the Reapers from destroying it, as Earth was part of the Expansion. Devastation #6
When Jhiaxus finished the Nega-Core, Nemesis Prime dispatched Cyclonus to prepare it for activation, using Thunderwing as its guardian. Learning that it was almost ready, Nemesis Prime ordered his minions to prepare for the Expansion. Spotlight: Cyclonus Activating the implant in Nightbeat's head, Jhiaxus revealed to Hardhead that Gorlam Prime was part of his experiments in converting organic species to the Cybertronian form, as well as preparing them for the harshness of the Expansion to come. The resulting event was to be a merging of the existing universe with the strange lifeless realm of the Dead Universe, after which the Cybertronian elite would govern all. Spotlight: Hardhead
Prompted by Dealer, Hot Rod recovered the Magnificence, which gave the Autobots much-needed information about the Expansion. However, Nemesis Prime used the Darkness to strike down Optimus Prime, who needed to be gone before the Expansion could occur. Spotlight: Doubledealer
Using the information gained from the Magnificence and technology Bludgeon had developed to control Thunderwing, the Autobots who underwent polydermal grafting managed to steal the Nega-Cores from their guardians. Nemesis Prime, who found that the Darkness wished to take Optimus Prime, was killed by Galvatron, who offered to take the Darkness from Optimus. He agreed, but the Autobot leader then hurled the fully possessed Galvatron into a solar pool. With control breaking down, Jhiaxus was attacked by his former creation Arcee, and was chased through Gorlam Prime. Hound's team on Earth went for Grindcore and Straxus, with Sideswipe managing to take them both on. The grafted Autobots managed to push the three Nega-Cores into the Dead Universe, and get out before they exploded, sealing the Dead Universe. This caused every Dead Universe Cybertronian in the world of the living to immediately die, with the exception of Jhiaxus, who was near the portal on Gorlam Prime. However, Hardhead, who was now a resident of the Dead Universe himself, blocked Jhiaxus' escape, allowing Arcee to decapitate him and kill him for as long as she wanted. With Nemesis Prime dead and the Darkness seemingly destroyed with Galvatron, the Expansion had come to end. Spotlight: Sideswipe
Galvatron would later turn out to have survived and retained the Darkness, though he showed no inclination towards continuing the Expansion, Heart of Darkness #1 the D-Void instead using him for a different plan that would have the same results. Genesis Nemesis Prime also persisted and continued his attempts to return from the Dead Universe, but cleansed of the D-Void's influence, he returned to being Nova Prime and made no mention of the Expansion. Dark Dawn
2019 IDW continuity
An era of prosperity, exploration, conquest, and colonization, the Age of Expansion was considered the heyday of the Cybertronian race. The Age owed itself to the work of various mines all across Cybertron, their output fuelling the limitless machine that was the Cybertronian race. The Change In Your Nature Part Three During the Expansion, Sixshot was a solo assault team, wrecking an entire fortified asteroid and freeing hostages in the Dremden system. The Change In Your Nature Part One The Titans played a key role in this era, fighting several wars of conquest and colonization. Codexa bore witness to the great deeds of the Titans during this time and wrote about them in The Way We Were, by One Who Saw It. The Change In Your Nature Part Five
The prosperous age soon came to an end thanks to Exarchon; "corrupted" by parties that existed "behind the barrier of quintessence" who sought to silence Cybertron's expansion; War's End Part Three plunging Cybertron into the War of the Threefold Spark. When the war was won, Nominus Prime elected not to pursue further colonization efforts, ordering the shipyards to be dismantled. The Change In Your Nature Part Three Among the binding terms of the Nominus Edict was a restriction on the development of new colony worlds which caused the Age of Expansion to be viewed in a negative light. Among other reasons, this caused the great visionary Termagax to abandon society and live in isolation. The Cracks Beneath Your Feet Part Two The Change In Your Nature Part Three
Animated cartoon continuity
Following the First Cybertronian War and the start of the Golden Age, some six billion stellar cycles ago, the Cybertronians developed space travel and colonized their solar system but isolationism prevented any further expansion. Following the Third Cybertronian War, 750 million stellar cycles ago, the nascent Autobot faction rose to power and advocated leaving Cybertron's past behind them in a bold new era of expansion. With the Autobots as the brains and the Destrons as the brawn, the Cybertronian race colonized hundreds of worlds and laid the foundations for what would become the Autobot Commonwealth in what became known as the Age of Expansion. This era came to end however following several borders skirmishes with the Quintesson Pan Galactic Co-Prosperity Sphere, some 300 million stellar cycles ago. With the colonization efforts over, the Destrons opined they had been doing all the work for too few benefits. These tensions eventually led to the rise of the Decepticons and the start of the Great War. The AllSpark Almanac II
Cyberverse cartoon
During the Age of Expansion, many Titans left Cybertron to explore and colonize the stars. Those Titans that carried Cybertron's conquering armies were known as the War Titans but all of their number, save Iaconus, perished during the age. When the Expansion ended, the colonizers returned to Cybertron. The Citizen
Games
Transformers: Devastation
During Cybertron's Golden Age, a group of Autobots and Decepticons alike were recruited to serve aboard the Proudstar, an advanced Cybertronian vessel, on the Mission of Cybertronian Expansion. These included Nova Prime, the ship's captain and leader of the expedition, scientist Jhiaxus, and crewmember Kranix, among others. Their objective was twofold: the first was to preserve a record of Cybertronian history and culture, with the entirety of the Colonnade of Cybertron being stored on the ship's supercomputer, the Ferrotaxis. The second was to use a swarm of Insecticons, controlled by the Ferrotaxis and powered by plasma energy from the ship's Plasma Core, to cyberform any uninhabited planets they might find on their journey, making them hospitable for technologically-based life forms and allowing them to become new Cybertronian colonies. The crew of the Proudstar was eager for the opportunity, thanks in no small part to the pride and enthusiasm of Nova Prime, who truly believed in the mission and in sharing what Cybertron had to offer with the rest of the universe.
For several millennia, their journey continued unabated, seeding many worlds such as Lithone to become new homes for Cybertron's people. Eventually, they stopped for supplies on a strange uninhabited planet they found to be much like Cybertron, already capable of supporting Cybertronian life. While gathering their supplies, they felt as though some unknown entity were watching them the whole time. Only two cycles after they had left the planet, the crew started to become more aggressive and exhibit darker urges. Nova Prime become more egotistical, driven less by righteousness and more by a need to prove himself right. Jhiaxus developed paranoia, convinced something was forcing its will onto all their sparks, and began forcing other members of the crew to be test subjects for his experiments.
The millennia of searching for planets both uninhabited and with enough base material for cyberforming wore on everyone, and they began to turn on one another. In time, they became so maddened in their quest to spread Cybertron to the rest of the galaxy that they began to cyberform inhabited worlds, wiping out the native life forms to make way for their own. The guilt weighed heavily on Kranix, their noble mission having been corrupted into a twisted shell of its former self. Disgusted by what the crew had become, he decided to stop them before they could destroy any more inhabited worlds, sabotaging the Proudstar's navigation to drive the ship into the nearest planet's surface the next time the Ferrotaxis's cyberforming protocols were initiated. Kranix finished setting his trap just as the ship approached another populated world, one he considered ill-suited to cyberforming due to the presence of many materials difficult to convert, such as rock and water. As disgusted as he was by the native life, he believed it nonetheless didn't deserve extinction. As the crew began to initiate the cyberforming controls, Kranix prepared to escape, planning to return to a now-developed Lithone, the last place he remembered them all feeling happy and proud in their purpose.
As Kranix had planned, the ship crashed into Earth's surface, forcing its crew and the onboard Insecticons into stasis. Lying dormant beneath the surface, it would not be found again until millions of years later when the ship's systems were involuntarily reactivated, leading to its rediscovery by the Autobots and Decepticons of the present day. Devastation
Notes
- Expansion was also the name for what would have been the six-issue miniseries set after the (originally six-issue) Revelation miniseries, and would have extended the storyline of Nemesis Prime and Jhiaxus's schemes. Unfortunately, IDW Publishing canceled Expansion and truncated Revelation in favor of All Hail Megatron.
Foreign names
- Japanese: Expansion (エクスパンション Ekusupanshon)
See also
References
- ↑ According to the script for Spotlight: Hardhead.