Safe Spaces

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"Safe Spaces"
Publisher	Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published	December 19, 2016
By	David Bishop and Jim Sorenson
Art by	Christopher Colgin (uncredited), Bill Forster (uncredited), Matt Frank, Gonçalo Lopes, and Josh Burcham
Continuity	Beast Wars: Uprising
Chronology	Circa 2390
Page count	27pp

Cheetor and Preditron are forced to confront the worst excesses of the growing Resistance, as a new, hidden threat reveals itself in their midsts.

Synopsis

It's six stellar cycles into the Grand Uprising. The Builders were already holding less territory than the Resistance and now the Maximal Nation breakaway state of Tagon Heights has gouged them and the Tripredacus Council’s "Independent Predacus States" have straddled from the Rust Sea up to the Nation. The front line cuts through the Rad Zone and major cities like Kolkular. The Gung-Ho has recently blown up the satellite network and now coded shortwave radio is the name of the game. While the Nation and Predacus States claim neutrality, the latter has no clear borders and has constant spats with Builder forces. Even though it’s heavily industrialised and mostly undamaged, the Builders have just a third of Cybertron and falling fast.

Somewhere on the planet, Roadhandler and his Race Car Patrol are routing a Decepticon team in a replica of their old Earth wars, but Skyhopper flies for it with a pun and a storm of bombs. In a strafing run, the Decepticon suddenly is wracked with a coughing fit and Roadhandler shoots him down.

At a Resistance rally, Cheetor ramps up the troops in preparation for storming Valvolux. Neither he nor Preditron are happy that Lio Convoy won’t let them lead the charge, instead keeping the "First Resistor" and the ‘first Predacon’ restricted to propaganda boosts. They depart in disgust to a flight (on the lobotomised Builder transport Star Dasher) to the logistics base Safe Zone Alpha Two in Protihex (a rare city the Resistance captured without damage), making sure to avoid "Rageland", as the gangster and warlord Rage is calling her turf. Fussy Ikard greets them there, gushing about them and how proud Preditron must be about a whole nation of Predacons—Preditron, who believes the Council stole his factionless manifesto for their own power, is decidedly not and the tension hangs over them.

The squid moves on to business: quite glossy, explosion-heavy footage of Roadhandler's battle. The front? You wish. Ser-Ket arrives and casually mentions that this is actually footage of a Game playing at the Protihex Arena, where Builder prisoners are being forced to fight to the death as a ‘morale boost’ for the troops! Ikard and Ser-Ket don't get why Cheetor and Preditron are so sick. Why, they're here to open the final game of the Buzzclaw Memorial Games, are they not entertained? The old Predacon threatens them to stop it, now, if they don't want Lio Convoy to hear about this, but Ikard tells him Lio Convoy already knows.

On their way out, consumed with rage, Preditron advises Cheetor to contact Resistance Command to learn exactly who's in charge while he checks thing from another angle. Unfortunately, Cheetor can't get through to Convoy while the Tesarus campaign is on. Just because it's Cheetor asking, Drill Bit digs up Blackarachnia. The spider is not impressed with being asked about a bunch of Builders and less with being told this was what they were fight against, and tells him that the troops are tired, weary, in need of the bread and circuses that he and Preditron and, yes, the Games will give them. Her ends-and-means speech slips up at the end though, implying by accident that this isn't something she's actually told Lio Convoy about.

Preditron's ‘other angle’ is to seek out Ser-Ket directly and knock on her door. To her surprise, he doesn't knock because he's concerned about the Games but because he's concerned about her. He says he recognises her as a true Predacon—ambitious, seeking out honourable combat against worthy foes—and knows neither of them are having much like finding honour in this war. Neither has he. Unable to lie to the founder of her race, Ser-Ket comes clean about the truth of the raid that freed Preditron and Cheetor, and how Buzzclaw was set up to die, and how she went back to the Resistance as there was nothing much else and Ikard suggested she could use her old friendship to help set the Buzzclaw Memorial Games up. Since him winning a match is the only thing true that anyone knows about her dead friend, she accepted and, to her shame, admits it was too easy to get sucked in. Preditron comforts her and says she reminds him of an old friend, Maxima, the first Maximal, who helped him write his manifesto. Their works were taken from them to divide the proto-formers into feuding races but there's time to put it all right...

Cheetor, meanwhile, is visiting Ikard at his swanky home and tells him that he'll let the Games go for now—there'll be a full inquiry demanded once the war has calmed down—provided Preditron agrees as well. The little creep feels this is a good deal and Cheetor knows, even as he threatens it, there's little chance of the war ‘calming down’ for an inquiry for a long while. And on his way back to the Maximal, Predatron is jumped by a callow young Pred named Gaidora and forced into a beast-mode brawl! He handles himself well until Ikard zaps him from behind; once Preditron is neutralised, Gaidora has Preditron thrown in with the prisoners for execution. "Lio Convoy says hi," is the last thing Preditron hears Gaidora say...

Elsewhere, Ser-Ket can't bring herself to trust another legendary figure after Lio Convoy failed her and plans to bug out to the IPS once the Games are done.

Preditron awakens in the Decepticon Micromaster cell. They and the Autobots, despite having recently been allies, have too easily slipped into Great War divisions, feuding with each other even more than the former Resistance man among them. Some like Torque keep coughing too much. Preditron begins to talk them out of the spats and into remembering they fought together (smoothing over Whisper admitting they’d surrendered without ever firing a shot after being abandoned by their regiment). When the final Game comes, Preditron and the Patrols find almost the entire base and many civilians have come to watch... as well as a reluctant Cheetor, shocked to see his comrade in the arena. But the prisoners have all decided, at Preditron's command, to not fight at all. The crowds will be denied combat and will have to either see the Micromasters as people or forced to admit they really want a bloody execution. And beyond that, they just need to stay alive long enough for friends Preditron has on the outside to notice he's there and make a move. It's all in the timing...

Two such friends are meeting up when Cheetor tells Ser-Ket what's going on. She's going to rip Ikard in two for this betrayal but not if Cheetor beats her to it!

Fifteen cycles into the arena, Preditron is hiding out in what he assumes is a camera blindspot and where Roadhandler quietly died some time ago. Torque finds him, in pain and starting to reformat into a new shape.... And then, to Preditron's horror, Roadhandler's corpse sits up and changes too! Now he has to fight. And as the crowd roars, Ikard sneers at his antagonists as they rush his podium and asks them if it sounds like he can stop their Game. And telling Lio Convoy? Lio Convoy wants an army, and the Independent Predacus States have one, and the only thing preventing them from forming up with the Resistance is if their old rival Preditron is still alive and able to challenge their political standing. He's just following orders. So's Gaidora when she goes for Cheetor and Ser-Ket and swats them into the arena—now they're part of the show too!

Ser-Ket is able to save Preditron from the remnants of Torque, after she and Cheetor see two other drones and some dead Micros. The transformation and coughing fits are part of a new combat upgrade the Builders infected their troops with! But those drones don't just want to kill the combatants and, to the crowd's shock and horror, the drones start to come after them. Now the prisoners have to not only defend themselves but the crowd that cheered for their deaths!

The drones seem to be able to infect and transform dead Transformers into more drones. Ikard is infected, and calls out to be killed before he can change. Ser-Ket grants his wish while, to Cheetor's bemusement, Preditron roars that this sort of battle, fighting worthy foes with comrades in defence of the innocent, is what Predacons are all about. When Cheetor tells him that Lio Convoy ordered him dead, Preditron says he's suspected as much but with the horde spreading throughout Protihex, it looks like Lio Convoy is going to have some new priorities...

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

"This is it. This is what being a Predacon is all about. Comrades by your side, innocents to protect and a worthy foe to contend with."

–Preditron

Notes

• Characters mentioned but not seen include: Rodimus Prime, Lio Convoy, Fortress Maximus, Queen Rage, the Tripredacus Alliance, Psycho-Orb, Buzzclaw, the Pack, the Oracle, Maxima, and Primus.
• Characters mentioned in Star Dasher's profile include Cannonball III, the Star Seekers, the Nebulon, Devcon, Devcon's partner, Neurotoxin, Guillotine, Bilge, Tornado, Pillage, Slizardo, and Spratt.

Continuity notes

• The last story opened with a 1980s Sunbow-style flashback battle, which handily misleads us into thinking Roadhandler's fight must be another one.
• As of this story, the Uprising is now in its sixth year. The events at the end of the previous story are mentioned as having taken place one stellar cycle ago. By this point, the Builders control only a third of Cybertron.
• Cheetor and Preditron were prisoners of Fortress Maximus back in "Head Games", which detailed the Resistance's efforts to free them, along with Buzzclaw's, er, "heroic sacrifice" for the cause. Cheetor thinks the Predacon wouldn't have approved his name being used for the Resistance's gain, apparently not having been told the whole story about what went down during the breakout.
• Ser-Ket says that the only thing true anyone knows about Buzzclaw is he won a Game. Ironically, she says he won it fairly but we know Buzzclaw was worried it had been rigged in his favour.
• Rage was previously mentioned to have taken some territory for herself in "Head Games", and mentioned as turning her gaze to Perihex in "Not All Megatrons".
• Rumors were mentioned of Cybertron's south pole falling to the Resistance back in "Not All Megatrons", which is confirmed here.
• The Resistance is forcing Builder POWs to fight to the death, just as Ratbat, a Builder, was doing to Resistance POWs back in "Micro-Aggressions".
• Cheetor angrily notes Blackarachnia's visit to Iacon, as detailed in "Trigger Warnings". Cheetor seems to think she wasn't actually there on official Resistance business.
• "A Brush With Infamy–Prologue" stated that "The Nebulon" became a space pirate. This story reveals that he joined the Star Seekers. In contrast to Nucleon's fear that humans hunted him down, it was Cybertronians (or a crew containing at least one Cybertronian) who did it.

Transformers references

• Preditron's focus on Predacon honor and nobility harken back to Dinobot, who would often talk about such things, something no other Predacon in Beast Wars did.
• Calling Rage "Her Majesty" as a diss is a nod to her role in the Beast Wars Neo manga, where she is genuinely a monarch.
• In a continuing Uprising tradition, characters appearing in this story are repurposed versions of characters from other continuity families. In this case, Preditron is Predacon.
• The Tripredacus Council have usurped the "founder" of the Predacon faction, much as they did in another fan-club story, "Dawn of Future's Past".
• The Pack first appeared in IDW's The Gathering miniseries as a crack team of elite Maximal warriors. Drill Bit's brief description of their exploits in this continuity seem to fit that bill.
• The description of how Roadhandler's corpse turns into a Tank Drone, with his body glowing as it reconfigures, seems to be a twisted version of the transformation sequences from Beast Machines.
• Star Dasher is a repurposing of the Platinum Edition Astrotrain toy. Most of his fellow Star Seekers are taken from the Wings Universe version of the group.
• Star Dasher exploits included stealing aether crystals from Kolar, an alien race Shokaract's empire conquered in "Paradox", and fired Deathballs, a weapon of the week from Super-God Masterforce, at asteroids.
• The second mercenary that did in Star Dasher goes suspiciously unnamed but is implied to be a version of Death's Head: "Spratt", his Headmaster partner, has the same name as DH's unwanted sidekick in his solo series.
• Star Dasher's profile mentions the Inferno Creature, from the incredibly short-lived Animorphs toyline. His armor is said to be trobulum-laced, a substance from the Animated multipath adventure book "Web of Deception", and his gun is the Tech Wrecker, a device of the week from the Rescue Bots episode "Bots and Robbers". He's also got a small stash of Boomshakes, from the Angry Birds Transformers game.

Real-world references

• A safe space is a zone in an educational institution that is supposed to be free of discrimination, harassment, and hate speech against a marginalized class. Protihex, as the Resistance's main city, is officially such a place.
• Blackarachnia referring to "bread and circuses" is a well-worn line that comes from the Roman Empire's view of their gladiatorial games.
• The crude "landmarks" within the Protihex Arena include the Statue of Liberty, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower.
• Some of Ikard's mannerisms are taken from Star Trek: The Next Generation's Jean-Luc Picard. See what they did there?

Errors

• The map of Cybertron refers to the current date being stellar cycle "6.3.17" of the war, but the narration refers to the war being in its fifth stellar cycle. The map's date must be the correct one as "Not All Megatrons", occurring approximately two stellar cycles earlier, takes place four stellar cycles after the outbreak of the Uprising.
• According to "Broken Windshields", Glibax is said to be located on the equator, with Polar Claw's body-type being described as seeming more suited to the climate of the poles and his assignment in Glibax was probably "some cruel Builder joke". The map of Cybertron says that Glibax (which is also misspelled as "Gilbax") is located right on the border of the arctic circle, nowhere near the equator and where Polar Claw would not be out of place.
• On page 7 is the phrase "Then, after an comfortably short pause..." The word "comfortably" is presumably supposed to be "uncomfortably" instead.
• On page 14, one of the section breaks covers up the start of the paragraph that continues onto page 15. In full, it should read: "Cheetor sat and fumed, Blackarachnia had well and truly piston-blocked him. He didn't think it was just paranoia that he had never truly been able to get close to Lio Convoy. His potential cachet as First Resistor had put him in a difficult political position as soon as he was sprung from Fort Max. He didn't think Lio Convoy himself was insecure enough to worry about that sort of thing, but consciously or unconsciously he had people like Blackarachnia to handle it for him."
• At one point on page 18, Preditron is misnamed as "Predator".
• On page 21, the narration says Preditron goes "'round an enormous clock tower that turned to be merely a painted upright," which should either lose the "a" or have something following the "painted upright" statement.

Other trivia

• As with "Not All Megatrons", a Sourcebook-style profile follows for Star Dasher.
• Each scene break contains Predacon Cybertronix, that, when translated, reveals the short story "The Predacon Manifesto".

See also

• "Safe Spaces" Cybertronix translation: "The Predacon Manifesto"

External links

• "Safe Spaces" at The Official Transformers Collectors' Club website
• "Safe Spaces" annotations by Jennifer Alexis Carlo