Trigger Warnings

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"Trigger Warnings"
Publisher	Transformers Collectors' Club (online exclusive)
First published	September 2, 2016
By	David Bishop & Jim Sorenson
Art	Dan Perico
Cover	Christopher "IKY" Colgin
Continuity	Beast Wars: Uprising
Chronology	circa 2384
Page count	49pp

MaxCop Wolfang investigates a murder which takes him across Iacon.

Synopsis

Down on the mean streets of Iacon, depressed, cy-gar-ette addicted Maxcop Wolfang—his habit started to deaden his heightened olfactory senses—has found a murdered woman. Forensic coppers Lidar and Sitrep are officially taking over the body from him and preparing an autopsy, but he considers them subpar detectives and plans to look into things himself: he's got a few megacycles before the by-the-book duo confirm the victim is a Micromaster and this becomes a political case.

Wolfang 'borrows' her memory chip and looks at the last set of memories, and while they're degraded and focused on old emotions over memories, they tell him she had a paintjob recently. (They also leave him out of sorts, being so full of joy and life) Modshop owner Hotwire, who does all the mods for all the local gangs, points him to her assistant Lube, who only remembers the Jane Doe mentioned a friend at an upper east side dive bar, The Way Of All Things. That's a bar Wolfang knows and likes, as nobody bothers anyone there, and a bar that's mostly empty now the Grand Uprising has most folks too scared to go out and looking for boltholes to hide in. Only two bots are there. When the barman Monxo tries to evade questions, Wolfang plays the heavy until Monxo admits it was some out-of-towner called Twirl. But since when did Wolfang get this invested in a case, he wonders? The cop has no answer.

A stranger had been scoping Wolfang out while he was in the Way and the cop prepares to get jumped, but the stranger lands on him from the roof: this guy's a pro, who beats him down and demands he stop investigating. Wolfang's identification subroutines got nothing on him, which means this is a pro from so far out of town the MCSF have nothing. He limps home, dodging an angry message from his boss Aura, and crashes at the modest apartment you're stuck with if you live on an honest Maxcop salary. But the other stranger from the bar, a female Maximal, is waiting at home for him with a drink and the obviously fake name of "Venus". She claims to be a friend of Twirl's (one too recent to show up in memory engrams honest) and when Wolfang presses her that Twirl seemed innocent, Venus informs him that Twirl had been one of those rarest of Builders, a Neutral. And then she informs him that, even though it was a tragedy, he really should stop investigating the death "for all our sakes".

When Wolfang won't budge, Venus, claiming to be desperate, shares that Twirl was a refugee from Vos after the war came to it and being neutral stopped being possible. And she claims Twirl thought the Resistance were after her. When that gets no reaction, she kisses him; he knows this is a mistake but goes along with it, and is duly infected with a computer virus that paralyses him and means she can rifle through his memory.

That's when Wolfang transforms. He's secretly part of the Predacon Secret Police and while the virus disables all the safeguards and disinformation screens that keep him from his true form, it can't make much headway when it expected Maximal firmware. In his despair, he fights back against the transformation and both that, and the virus, knock him offline.

When he comes to, it's daytime, he has a punishing hangover, and he's worried Venus might blow his cover. He's stopped feeling particularly loyal to the PSP (or loyal to anyone, really) but doesn't fancy being blackmailed. First thing's first, however, is going through his missed calls: Aura worrying that he's died from injuries, Lidar asking how he wants his autopsy, Vampire the PSP "psychiatrist" reminding him about his "psych-eval", Wolfang's handler Onyx Primal wanting to talk case files, and... Venus, promising he's so getting blackmailed.

Keeping his cover, he goes to work as MCSF HQ and gets a brief chewing out from Aura before both admit that, with resources slashed due to wartime, it will just be him on the case. Worse, the Builders are infamous for 'taking care of' their own—no Maxie or Pred crim is going to kill a Builder for fear of consequences—which means either this was indeed Resistance or the Builders killed Twirl, which would mean they won't want the case investigated. Strongarm, the Builder at the heart of the HQ, ain't talking and that means no orders. Aura warns Wolfang to be careful, but the copper doesn't give a fig: that quiet memory hack got to him and he wants to bring in whoever killed her, not to mention the professional pride and the fact being 'warned off' by his attacker pissed him off.

That's when the HQ morgue is bombed. Wolfang gets there to find the room on fire, Twirl's body beyond salvage, and Sitrep dying in the corner, his last words being "exter". And Lidar isn't around and isn't picking up calls, making him a suspect. The bomb seems to be Resistance design and Strongarm's neural clusters were shredded, so it probably isn't the Builders after all, but if Wolfang can't find out who did this and bring them down, the Builders will likely shut down the department for this!

Wolfang heads for the Mandala, the Predacon Secret Police HQ. (There's an empty plinth where a statue of Counterpunch was removed after it came out he was an Autobot spy; Wolfang always found the Punch story insightful) The goth-as-hell Onyx Primal discusses the situation and, like Aura, wants it solved fast. Onyx also mentions they 'acquired' Monxo's CCTV and when Wolfang checks it, he sees Twirl in life, dancing on a table for the other barflies. Venus is in it too, watching Twirl intently, and so's the guy who gave him a beating, who Onyx identifies as high-profile Resistance soldier Fennec. Before Wolfang leaves the Mandala, PSP science officer Tarantulas—studying a partial holographic reconstruction of Twirl based on Wolfang's reports—tells him that Twirl is oddly missing from their intelligence reports and he'd be oh-so-grateful if the spy kept him in the loop.

The MCSF find the forensic lab's camera footage has been wiped and Sitrep's corpse clutched a note with only "ings post-forg" readable. The PSP's virus-analysing systems are more useful, telling Wolfang he was infected by a creation of a local software company, Sparks of Genius. He finds the company in a run-down dump of a factory, and a nervous possible-Builder named Overrun who tries to grab a gun when Wolfang starts asking questions. When the copper puts the frighteners on him—Wolfang doesn't usually bully for kicks but he's had a bad day—Overrun claims to have been told this virus was for 'self-defence' and that Venus told him her name was Elita. He also upgraded her stealth armour to make her nigh-untrackable unless you had the electronic signature for said upgrades, and quickly hands the info over. Wolfang sets his sensors to constantly scan for the femme fatale as he heads back to The Way Of All Things.

Monxo is intimidated into admitting he knows Fennec as a semi-regular but also reveals Elita (as he knows her) and Fennec don't know each other, which blows Wolfang's theory that they're part of the same plot. He also says Elita's likely Resistance and when Wolfang says Fennec is too, Monxo laughs his head off: Fennec's a Predacon supremacist in the Mayhem Attack Squad! Also he's right behind Wolfang now.

The two Predacons throw down but this time Wolfang can get the upper hand. Fennec spits out that Cybertron's "going to be ours" and that it wasn't the Mayhems who killed Twirl, before he goes into voluntary stasis lock to avoid an interrogation. That doesn't stop him being searched (and his money handed to Monxo to keep him from bitching) and the copper finds a political holo-card stating "Cybertron Is For Predacons" with map coordinates pointing to the Vos-Iacon border. Wolfang calls this in to Aura but not Onyx, concerned about the false info he was given.

Out near the border, the city is half-abandoned, the lights don't work too good, and neither police force bothers going. On his drive over, Wolfang's language probability matrix decodes Sitrep's note as "wings post-forged", meaning Twirl had a new alternate mode, meaning she'd disguised herself with the sort of mods Hotwire made. Once he reaches the assumed Mayhem hangout, his sensors pick up Venus/Elita coincidentally in a high-rise overlooking it. He heads over and catches her in the act of setting up a sniper nest! Surprised to be found out, and soon identified as Resistance bigwig Blackarachnia, she gets questioned: Wolfang suspects she was trying to recruit Twirl to the Resistance as a coup and is out for revenge after Mayhem killed her, and the morque was bombed to stop the MCSF getting close. An acid rain storm breaks on Iacon as he tells her she needs to come with him and when Blackarachnia threatens to blow his PSP cover, he tells her to go ahead.

Her bluff called, she gives up. She admits the Resistance had intelligence that Twirl was a surviving Targetmaster—a group thought made extinct near war's end in the Targetmaster Extirpation—and wanted her recruited, and the Mayhems clearly knew too. Wolfang realises Sitrep had worked out what Twirl was and had been trying to say "extirpation", but Blackarachnia claims she didn't blow up the morgue and Mayhem must have. And if Mayhem have schematics of Twirl's body and can replicate Targetmaster technology, Cybertron is screwed! He doesn't really want to work with Resistance but Wolfang knows Blackarachnia's right, and the two of them share a cy-gar-ette while they wait for the enemy.

The Mayhemists arrive in a convoy and are immediately shot up. Wolfang kills the helicopter escort while Blackarachnia lures off a truck-former. The cop pursues two remaining Mayhems into the warehouse and trades close-quarters shots, taking his own damage in the process. That's when he learns his foes are working with Tarantulas! With all the Mayhems disabled, he yells for the creep to come face him; Tarantulas doesn't but lets slip that the Mayhemists are just hired goons hoping for a place in "the new order", and that he planted the false info about Fennec. When Blackarachnia returns after slaying her foe, Tarantulas leaps from the shadows and attacks! Wolfang is easily knocked down while Blackarachnia is matched move for move in metallikato until she's knocked down. Tarantulas transforms his hands into surgical equipment and advances...

...but Wolfang was able to creep up on him and delivers the mother of all headbutts! With Tarantulas briefly stunned, Wolfang is able to use up-close brawling, hitting at all joints and giving the scientist no room to retaliate. Tarantulas goes down. But when Wolfang arrests him for his various crimes, Tarantulas laughs off the idea he killed Twirl: he likes his subjects alive. Blackarachnia violently demands to know who did do it then but Tarantulas casually says he thought it was the Resistance. Weary of all this, Wolfang tells Tarantulas that he'd been an eager little spy out to bring down the Maximals from the inside but over time he'd grown tired of the whole rotten mess, and decided he liked solving murder cases with his friends: what had happened to Tarantulas?

Tarantulas says he'd never given a crap about either faction to start with.

Calling in the Predacon Secret Police rather than getting MCSF questions (and the traitor-hating PSP will be nastier to Tarantulas), Wolfang takes a long, tired drag on his cy-gar-ette. Blackarachnia starts off saying he'd done all he could—but when he asks if her orders had been to kill Twirl if she wouldn't be recruited, and doesn't buy that Blackarachnia wouldn't have, she snaps at him for acting moral when he's playing 'good soldier' to two factions, and how long can that last once the Resistance reach Iacon? He tells her whatever side it is, he'll be fighting hers when they show up, which is an answer she respects.

Before Blackarachnia goes, something about her whole story nags at Wolfang and he asks her how she'd met Overrun. When she says Twirl had introduced them, that the Builders had been old friends, Wolfang — finding it suspicious a party girl like Twirl would know a techie shut-in — realises Overrun must be involved.

Once Tarantulas is in the can, Wolfang heads to Sparks of Genius: Blackachnia knows to meet him there and, while he wants the MCSF in the dark for a bit, arranges for nearby reinforcements just in case. Unfortunately, once he enters the warehouse he finds Blackarachnia captive and himself held up at gunpoint by Lidar. He's sickened when Overrun says he used the infamous Robo-Smasher to brainwash Lidar weeks ago to keep himself out of MCSF files and used him to bomb the MCSF. The Micromaster admits to having killed Twirl and Wolfang deduces that he's another Targetmaster, which is how he and Twirl knew each other: numerous clues, including that his name didn't fit his alt mode or job, gave away that Overrun was in hiding post-Extirpation and had got a new alternate mode off Hotwire.

A weary Overrun admits his real name is Surge, former Targetmaster partner to an Autobot leader, and that he'd kept enough contacts to be warned in advance of the coming massacre of Targetmasters, done as a precursor to the Pax Cybertronia. He also knew the real reason why: their power to take energy from sparks could be altered to drain Cybertronians of life by mere proximity! When Wolfang asks if that's the real reason the Resistance wanted Twirl, Blackarachnia won't answer. The talk has calmed things just enough that Wolfang can get the drop on Overrun, battering him to the ground (at the cost of a very bad gunshot to his chest) and demanding to know if Twirl died because she got too public. A distraught Overrun confirms it, declaring too many people were sniffing around and he did all those murders for the good of Cybertron, but Wolfang doesn't care about Cybertron outside of Iacon. He accuses Overrun of not really caring about the 'greater good' of Cybertron because he only killed Twirl and not himself, and when Overrun fights back with fury about what the leadership had done to his kind, Wolfang successfully guilts him into surrender by asking what his victims had done to them.

Now Wolfang has to work out what to do with this last Targetmaster. The decision is swiftly taken from him when Onyx Primal and a PSP strike team arrive, with a released Tarantulas: the creep has convinced them that there was a 'misunderstanding' and Wolfang is sheltering a Targetmaster, and without any evidence either way, Primal is believing the long-time member over the rule-bending spy. Wolfang has no choice but to send a MCSF distress signal, while opening fire so Overrun can leg it. As Aura and her boys show up to distract the Predacons, Wolfang rides Blackarachnia's jet mode in pursuit of Overrun, still unsure exactly what he's going to do when he can't let anybody get hold of a Targetmaster, and losing energon the whole time from his gunshot.

They pursue him into Vos, where Overrun has pretty much given up and wants to be left alone—not something Wolfang will do when he's still a murderer. That's when Blackarachnia pulls a gun on him, saying to give up Overrun and not to bother expecting the Micromaster to do the right thing. The situation gets more chaotic when Tarantulas arrives and Blackarachnia 'accidentally' broadcasts a Resistance comm so a nearby Builder garrison will mortar the mad Predacon. Now the street's about to become a major warzone and there's nowhere to go.

Overrun is tired and agrees to be taken out. Wolfang offers to cover him as he does it—and tells the wounded and fleeing Tarantulas that he quits the Secret Police. Blackarachnia, hit with remorse, offers to lead the Resistance away but Wolfang, knowing he's bleeding out, tells her he'll stay behind to ensure there's nothing left for anyone to find of Overrun. After she vanishes, he calls in for Aura to stay away from the street and, before mortar fire cuts her off, to just know that he was always Maximal Command Security Force to the core.

Wolfang dies drinking rough engex from a hip flask, noting his burnt-out spark smells like cy-gar-ette smoke.

Featured characters

(Numbers indicate order of appearance.)

Quotes

Notes

• Characters mentioned but not seen include: Sawtooth, Primus, Ptero, the Firestormers, Gnashteeth (aka Megatron), the Darksyders, the Oracle, Vampire, Strongarm, Soundwave, Megatron, the Decepticon Justice Division, Kaon, Tesarus, Counterpunch/Punch, the Triumvirate, the Titans, Lio Convoy, a purple Builder with enormous gold teeth on his chest, Prowl, the Builder killed by Lio Convoy, the Cyber-Ninja Corps, the Autobot leader, Hyperfire, Blurr, Haywire, Offshoot, Thunderwing, Apex, and Hi-Q.

Continuity notes

• The Targetmaster Extirpation was mentioned in passing back in "Burning Bridges" as a point of interest to Lio Convoy, with no elaboration beyond what it meant.
• Similarly, during that story, Wolfang made an appearance where his detached leg changed from the original toy's colour-scheme to that of the other Wolfang, which at the time just looked like a harmless reference caused by Stiletto's memory glitching out.
• "Burning Bridges" also made mention of the Mandala.
• Blackarachnia notes Twirl had wanted to move to the Crystal City, until some "Resistance fraghead" blew it up, a fact also established in "Burning Bridges".

Transformers references

• As with characters in previous stories, Wolfang's body is based on an existing toy; his Maximal form is based on the Universe Sunstreaker mold, while his Predacon form is based on that mold's Sideswipe retool, which rotates the upper torso around. This does, however, contradict the Beast Wars: Uprising lithograph sold at BotCon 2016, which instead depicted Wolfang in a body based on Generations Drift. Meanwhile, Lidar and Sitrep are "virtual" redecos of Armada Thrust, and Tarantulas utilizes the design of his BotCon 2016 toy.
• The former Powermasters, Headmasters, and Targetmasters are all referred to as Cyberdroids, a nod to the origins of their counterparts in Japanese Generation 1 cartoon continuity.
• Monzo the Headmaster's name was first spelled as "Monxo" for his Titans Return toy, whose bio also depicted him as a robotic Cybertronian rather than an organic Nebulon.
• Blackarachnia's first alias, "Venus", references her Beast Wars voice actress Venus Terzo, while her second, "Elita", references the previous identity of her Animated incarnation.
• When Wolfang is converted into his Predacon form, he is forced to use the trigger-phrase "Terrorize".
• Wolfang metaphorically refers to his knowledge of the case being "pretty thin Visco".
• The Builder in charge of the MCSF is the Uprising-verse version of Strongarm, befitting that versions of the character's law-abiding and rules obsessed personality, along with the MCSF's role in this continuity of enforcing ridiculously petty laws.
• You might think that Tarantulas working with the Mayhem Attack Squad was a pretty obvious nod to Sins of the Wreckers, but shockingly, this was entirely coincidental – at the time of writing, the primary author hadn't read that series.^[1]
• The Mandala, Iacon headquarters of the PSP, has statues dedicated to the Decepticon Justice Division. Unlike their depiction in IDW's continuity, members don't seem to eschew their original names in joining.
• Punch's claim to infamy is infiltrating Helex and bringing down a triumvirate of Decepticon warlords during the war. Issues #213-14 of the Marvel UK comic had Megatron inspiring a revolt against the Triumvirate of 'cons who ruled that city-state.
• The Transformer on Fennec's holo-card, described as a "purple Builder with enormous gold teeth on his chest" is Carnivac, a member of the original Mayhem Attack Squad.
• Overrun brainwashes Lidar using the Robo-Smasher.
• Mention is made of Thunderwing being involved with the Grand Mal in this continuity. We would learn more about the connection in "Not All Megatrons".

Real world references

• A trigger warning is a warning that a work contains content which could act as a trauma trigger.
• The "cover" is done in homage to the cover for the first issue of Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, drawn by Frank Miller.
• Wolfang wasn't initially intended to be a reference to Bigby Wolf of Fables, but once author David Bishop realized the similarity, he "steered into it".^[2]
• Large parts of the first half of the story are a reference to every hardboiled cop story ever (Wolfang as the bitter detective, Aura the weary superior, Monxo running a dive-bar where the cop picks up clues, Blackarachnia the dangerous femme fatale, etc., etc...).

Errors

• On page 5, "Ptero" is misspelled as "Petro".
• On page 14, Blackarachnia's says "I knew you'd be a useful to us".
• On page 24, instead of "Once gave me a resentful stare...", it should be "One gave me a resentful stare...".

Other trivia

• As in previous Uprising text stories, the scene transitions have Cybertronix text in them, in this case they represent Wolfang's notes as his case progresses, and a record of his incoming messages.
• The Autobot leader who Overrun was bonded to goes conspicuously unnamed; "A Brush With Infamy–Prologue" simply refers to the last Autobot leader as "Triple-Threat Prime". The fact that Overrun refers to Hi-Q and Apex—coupled with the fact that he's based on Armada Over-Run—indicates, as author Jim Sorenson confirmed, that said leader was originally intended to be Optimus Prime; when "A Change to the Agenda" established that Optimus may be dead in this reality, the story was changed to allow for the possibility that the leader was someone else.^[3] "Derailment" would, however, end up confirming him to be Optimus Prime.
• Much like Blackout and Spaceshot in "Micro-Aggressions" and Dead-End in "Intersectionality", the Uprising version of Hotwire is shown to be a female Transformer despite previous incarnations being male (and organic Nebulans at that!). Similarly, the Laser Beast Battlefennec is recast in this story as a Cybertronian Predacon, following Sledgehammer in "Burning Bridges".

See also

• "Trigger Warnings" Cybertronix translation

References

External links

• "Trigger Warnings" at The Official Transformers Collectors' Club website
• "Trigger Warnings" annotations by Jennifer Alexis Carlo