Terrorcons

History[]

Ten million years ago, the Cybertronians overthrew their Quintesson masters who had enslaved them. In the wake of their exodus from Cybertron, they left behind an immense, unfinished ship capable of destroying planetary bodies deep beneath the surface. Knowing the Cybertronians would eventually discover it, they crafted a trap to ensnare any Cybertronians attempting to approach the ship. The device would emit radiation designed to slowly damage a Cybertronian's laser core, causing eventual psychological regression to more primitive thoughts to any within its proximity, leaving them too primitive to finish building the ship and too technologically backwards to destroy it. They set up a cloaking field around the device to prevent its accidental detection, and then fled with the other Quintessons.

Shortly after Megatron's rise to power among the Decepticons, a Quintesson named Vaevectus plotted to reach the ship and complete it himself. Building a false Cybertronian body for himself as disguise, he landed on Cybertron and approached an pacifist Autobot scientist named Wire. Claiming to wish to escape the war on the surface, he suggested the idea that the other pacifists who also wished to escape the violence of the surface could collectively begin digging a utopian city beneath the surface. Vaevectus knew they would eagerly aid him, and then he could complete the work on the ship while leaving the Autobots to their own devices. Wire agreed to the idea and gathered other Autobots to aid in the project as work began on the digging. Word of this project soon found its way to Megatron, who suspected the Autobots had discovered a new power source. Eager gain control of it before the Autobots, he sent out a overly large group of Decepticons to overtake the Autobots and steal the power for themselves.

Both the Decepticons and Autobots found their way beneath the surface of Cybertron and began creating their cities. The Autobot city of Pandoras was a larger distance away from the Quintesson regression device, so the effect upon their psyches was more gradual. The Decepticons, however, built their encampment almost directly above the regression device and its effect upon them was more pronounced. Once both sides had established their foothold, a tremendous battle took place. Two hundred of the over four hundred Cybertronians that went underground perished, but despite their loss of numbers, the fights continued until settling into an uneasy stalemate. Over the course of these battles, the regression device was accidentally destroyed before any of the Cybertronians even knew it had existed. Vaevectus faked his false body's "death" in the meantime and located the ship, disguising the access to it and beginning the long, slow process of finishing the battlecruiser. Occasionally, he observed the Cybertronians in secret to ensure they would not pose a danger to his work.

It had now been so long since they had begun their trek to the underground, that combined with the effects of the regression device the Autobots and Decepticons had long since lost any memories of the world above. With the tunnel to the surface sealed off by one of the battles between their surface dwelling kin, they had now become a separate subset of Cybertronians. The Decepticons had long since lost their technical abilities, regarding even firearms as strange mystic devices beyond their use. The Autobots managed to retain much of their technical expertise, but their personalities had degraded into a more primitive mindset. The utopian Autobot city of Pandoras quickly became a dark shell of its former glory, littered with street gangs and empty, broken buildings, where wars were constantly waged over the precious, rare resources that remained.

The Decepticons had degraded into a more savage tribal system. Loners and outsiders were not tolerated and rule was strict under a forced allegiance to the tribe. The tribal leader was determined by the one who could climb to the top of an underground mountain inside the enclosure called Angselik. As long as the Decepticon remained at the top, he would be leader. Wire, the Autobot scientist who so long ago helped begin this, was strangely unaffected by the Quintesson device. Watching the events that unfolded with dismay, he attempted to salvage what remained of the Autobots. Having long since concluded that the war on the surface had killed all those who were above, Wire sought an audience with one of the smaller gangs and began to explain to them what had happened and the history of their past.

Wire then related to the gang his plans to reunify the Autobots with their help, by rebuilding them into more efficient bodies. After a discussion with his second in command, Lightspeed, the leader of that small gang, Scattershot, agreed to Wire's plan. And so the ten Technobots were rebuilt into forms that were better armed and more suited to the underground environment and the five best and most powerful members were given a new combiner mode, an innovation of Wire's arrived at independently from the surface Cybertronians. Wire then began teaching the Technobots of the Autobot ideals and long history, the core things they believed in, and his plans to unite the Autobots once more. The Technobots, under Wire's guidance, began patrols of Pandoras, uniting the gangs under an organised council system, which divided tasks among all the individual Autobots. All who did their assigned tasks were given sovereignty over their territory. Those who broke the rules and neglected their tasks were punished by dispersing their gang and territory through a battle, the winner of which would gain the members and former area of the loser.

Vaevectus, during these events, realised that with the reorganisation of the Autobots came the prospect of the possible thwarting of his plans, and so, under the assumed name of Viral, he approached one of the Decepticon tribes with an idea of uniting the Decepticons, similar to Wire's plan. The Terror Horde, while not as strong as other tribes, was fiercely driven, a trait he deemed useful in his ultimate purpose. In exchange for their loyalty, he build the Terror Horde powerful bodies based on the trans-organic monsters which roamed the underground in order to allow them to overtake Angselik, and chose the five most powerful to bestow upon them the ability to combine to form Abominus, reverse-engineering Wire's breakthrough. Though they lacked the efficiency of the Technobots, they were given unique digestive systems to allow them to process matter into energy in order to counteract and balance out their greater energy consumption.

With Scattershot leading the Autobot Council and Hun-Grrr the undisputed tribal leader of the Decepticons, fighting quickly shifted from internal turmoil and returned to a battle between the Decepticons and Autobots that raged on for years. With Wire and Autobots otherwise preoccupied, Vaevectus now had the time to finally complete the ship. After his work was completed, Vaevectus now had only one remaining obstacle: the Cybertronians. Hun-Grrr, however, had grown accustomed to his leadership and refused to obey Vaevectus despite their past pact. And so Vaevectus waited patiently until the Terrorcons left Angselik to go hunting among the tunnels and wiped out Angselik and the Decepticons with the first test of the battleship's primary engines. When asked by Hun-Grrr what became of his kingdom, Vaevectus told him that Wire and the Autobots had destroyed it using an experimental bomb. Hun-Grrr was infuriated and plotted a scheme to exact his revenge.

Hun-Grrr invited Wire secretly to a peace meeting, knowing that the pacifist Autobot scientist would willingly come alone and helpless at the chance for peace. Wire informed Scattershot of the meeting, and left to meet Hun-Grrr. When Wire did not return, Scattershot ordered that the five Technobots form Computron and seek him out. They found Wire's body, decapitated and gutted of his internal circuitry on a pointed outcropping with his head placed on a pike like a trophy and a note attached, reading: Revenge. Rushing back to Pandoras as quickly as they could, they found that the city had been levelled and completely destroyed, with no survivors . . . the victim of Vaevectus' test of the battleship's primary armaments. The Technobots now blamed the Terrorcons for this genocide, as did the Terrorcons also blame the Technobots in turn. The situation had worked out perfectly for Vaevectus, who used the turmoil to test the now fully functional ship. However, one of his final tests had opened a tunnel to the surface, a development that would result in an unexpected variable.

The Autobots who had been dwelling on the surface discovered the tunnel, and a team led by Grimlock soon found themselves in the large cavern that had become home to over four hundred Cybertronians millions of years earlier. Discovering Vaevectus' plot as well as the Technobots and Terrorcons, the Autobots halted Vaevectus' scheme and prevented him from using the battlecruiser to open a large hole in the side of Cybertron and make his escape, disabling the Quintesson starship for good. The Technobots and Terrorcons were afterwards brought to the surface . . . and the rest, as they say, is history