by Jaw Crusher » Sun Jan 29, 2012 6:42 pm
- Weapon: Mace
Well, OK, I suppose I should probably provide a clearer idea of what I was talking about.
TRANSFORMERS: MASK
It is sometime in the near future. The Autobot-Decepticon war that spread from Cybertron to Earth has ended with the Autobots and their human allies victorious...yet old hatreds and hostilities refuse to die that easily. A cult of Cybertronians who have come to perceive organics as the bane of the universe - blaming Optimus Prime and his devotion to their protection for the ultimate, permanent loss of their homeworld - lured the Autobot leader to a distant, primordial world several months earlier with a false distress signal. When a detachment of Autobots and humans led by an older, larger, more experienced (and more vocal) Bumblebee and a twentysomething scientific prodigy, Dr. Matthew Trakker, show up on this primitive world attempting a rescue after having discovered the faux nature of the signal, they make a couple of critical discoveries:
1) The cultists, led by a coldly intellectual, well-refined Ra's Al Ghul-type calling himself Skybyte, are using this world outside of charted territory to engage in horrific experiments in bio-chemical weaponry and bio-mechanics, their purpose being to purge organic life from the universe and shape it anew;
2) This planet that they intend to use as their initial testing ground also happens to be host to a colony of refugees from the alien world Nebulos, who shunned technology when their own advances in that field helped accelerate the loss of their homeworld, and by extension most of their species, through warfare, and;
3) Optimus Prime and the few Autobots he had with him...are all dead.
That last point proves to be particularly significant because, as the Autobots learn, while Skybyte's Decepticons did shoot Optimus' ship down, they're also still looking for any trace of it...meaning they don't know yet that they've actually succeeded in killing the venerated leader of the Autobots (either that, or they're aware of how notoriously difficult he is to permanently kill). What's more, given their anti-technological stance, and the fact that the Autobots themselves are walking, talking technology, the Nebulans refuse to yield to any of their ranks EXCEPT Optimus Prime, for whom they've gained an abiding respect just out of the spread of his legend across the cosmos; they won't even listen to the advice of Trakker and his fellow humans. So what's a seasoned Autobot espionage director to do?
Answer: reformat, pass himself off as the big guy a la G1 Punch/Counterpunch or Animated Shockwave/Longarm Prime, and hope he keeps the charade up long enough to get the Nebulans to evacuate.
But even after "Optimus Prime" makes his triumphant "return", the situation threatens to become even more complicated. While the Nebulans by and large seem to trust in "Optimus" to protect them from Skybyte's forces, they refuse to abandon their new world. Also, Skybyte actually relishes the apparent fact that the Decepticons' greatest enemy has survived after all, and devises to counter by resurrecting the one Decepticon capable of going toe-to-toe with him...a plan that goes great, except for the fact that, unknown to all, the brain inside Megatron's patchworked new body ISN'T Megatron's. Not to mention that certain higher-ups above even Dr. Trakker - specifically Earth's military liaison, General Miles Mayhem - have taken a marked interest in learning more about Skybyte's "experiments"; or the fact that cooperation with the Autobots is creating tensions among the Nebulan colonists, especially the scientific leaders, themselves. And on top of all that, a near-death experience during a surprise attack on the Autobot's Moonbase orbiting Earth in which Optimus is seen among the deceased Autobot leaders of the past, and the revelation that Optimus himself is apparently alive but hasn't bothered to check in, leads to suspicion amid Autobot Command as to just whether or not this red-and-blue 'bot on New Nebulos really is Optimus Prime...
Yeah, the use of MASK in the title is more symbolic to Bumblebee's impersonation than it is to all the homages to Mobile Armored Strike Kommand, but the homages would be there nonetheless...not really a crossover in the conventional sense. But the whole thing is basically meant to address things like "There's too much of Bumblebee in the TF franchise!" (by having him split his time between being 'Bee and pretending to be Optimus) or "They better not kill Optimus again!" (by having him already dead when the show starts). Plus, since the Nebulans in this iteration have rejected advanced technology, there's no futuristic vehicles around and thus nothing for the Autobots to reformat into from their Earth-based modes (which I suppose would be no more futuristic than, say, Armada) - the 'Robots In Disguise' aspect of it would be centered mostly on the Optimus who isn't really Optimus and the Megatron who isn't really Megatron.
