The Intergalactic Highway

Uh, oddly I'd probably say the Predacons would need a tank like character. Honestly, most the Predacons tend to be firepower specialists and rather small being roughly Rattrap to Tarantulus in size, and most the Maximals are larger and melee specialists, most notably one being 19 ft tall, dwarfing most the other characters while still being a melee expert. Not normally the worse of problems though as they do have some team work skills..So you don't have to be, you may want a melee weapon of some sort to deal with close combat with the maximals like a knife or rapier.

Hm.. a cloning experiment.. Strangely, I'd say that might be easier to do with Primal and Megatron since we have a clone of Optimus Primal running around that was made by the Vok and we have DNA of him.. or Sonar does, though.. Tarantulus can easily get a sample currently. Though.. BW Megatron isn't related to G1 Megatron, he just took the name as inspiration.

Um.. Yeah, I guess we could just have it as a experiment like that,Tarantulus is always up for doing things that twisted. Hm.. also, since we do have Blackarachnia in the game, do you still want to be a Black widow spider? It's not a problem, but just something I figured I should bring up since we get an abundance of certain animal types and sometimes people play the exact animal species.

Note: This post will only refer to OCs and not canon characters.

The experiment idea would work well if the DNA came from Primal and BW Megatron. As for character traits, I find the whole Maximal vs Predacon thing to be similar to Paladins vs Dark Knights. Paladins tend to play the role of healers, tanks, and support buffs. Dark knights are point characters who exceed in offense and some of their most devastating attacks require the sacrifice of their own HP. These two tend to cancel each other out in most scenarios. NaitoKage has a point that there need to be exceptions in these ranks otherwise fights will always end up in a draw. Paladins rarely lose, but it's really hard for them to win unless if they have an offensive character to assist them. The Maximals have this through Valkyrie, Saber-Fang, and Wintersong. Dark Knights are good sweeper, but they have terrible endurance due to their low HP and defense, so they need buffs and tanks in order to recover from enemy (and their own) attacks. The Predacons have Glowstick, but he often is forced to become the Dark Knight himself. The current episode is a perfect example. Despite him being a scientist, I'm not including Sonar as a buff since he hasn't proven himself to have support-like tendencies.

If Arachnitron can be a secondary medic or perhaps an engineer, she could be the much needed buff that the Predacons are looking for. Her current stats and tools compliment these roles pretty well. I suppose it's possible for a black widow to be a tank and if you can design her to have the size, bulk, and endurance, she could defend the smaller OCs pretty well. You may have to sacrifice speed in order to bump up that endurance.

Hm.. another Medic.. that could be useful, though generally Predacons don't have those sort of tendencies.. Glowstick is kinda an exception since he's so team work oriented. Frilla served that purpose, but she was a Maximal.. so.. yeah. I did ponder having Glowstick die off and just bring in a tank character, but was requested not to as the players in this game tend to take ALOT of damage and kinda need a medic. Kinda like Icebreaker spending half the mission repairing everybody while the other half blowing up the Predacons.

Hm.. there are species of spiders that fit the tank build well.. like Tarantulas (Goliath Birdeater being a main for that list) or heavily armored looking types like the Arrowhead spider.

I have an idea. How about Arachnitron utilizes the outer shell of her beast mode abdomen as a shield? Icebreaker does it but the shield is a separate entity from his actual robot mode, therefore, it doesn't affect his endurance stat. The shield could be black except for the red markings that black widows normally have. She wouldn't be a tank, but she'll still be able to provide more defense to herself or other similarly sized characters. I noticed that Arachnitron is a bit lacking in the weapons department, so the pistol/shield combination could prove lethal in hectic battles or close quarters scenarios. Anyone here play Gears of War? Same thing in this scenario.

Okay, so let me see if I have this right....

Tarantulas performs this cloning experiment to mix Optimus Primal and Megtron's DNA. The experiment ends in the creation of Arachnitron. Arachnitron is either a medic or an engineer. So that requires her stats to look something a bit more like this, right?:

STRENGTH: 6
INTELLIGENCE: 8
SPEED: 5
ENDURANCE: 7
RANK: Assigned by the staff.
COURAGE: 6
FIREPOWER: 7
SKILL: 6

Basically, higher endurance and firepower than before.

As for the story line, here's an idea:

Your current medic dies off and the Predacons find themselves desperate for repairs. Tarantulas realizes that Glowstick's personality is rare and that typical Predacons are lacking in certain personality traits (compassion for instance) that would make a Predacon WANT to help other Preds. He steals Optimus Primal's DNA and attempts to create a clone of Primal. But then realizes that a clone of Primal may be inclined to leave the Predacons to fight with the Maximals. So instead of creating a clone of Primal he mixes some of Primal's stolen DNA with Predacon DNA (whether his own or BW Megatrons or something he created or whatever makes most sense). Thus creating a Predacon with some, but not ALL, Maximal traits....enough maximal traits that Arachnitron would make a good medic, but not enough that Arachnitron would defect.

This way, since you said you wanted to kill off the current medic to bring in a better fighter, you could do that and then the story line would allow room for a new medic.

If Tarantuals uses his own DNA then Arachnitron gets some of his personality traits which would be essential to being a medic/engineer....for example, Tarantulas' constant need to build stuff and experiment could be useful to a medic/engineer who would be expected to be good with her hands when it comes to repairs. As opposed to using Megatron's DNA....mixed with Primal's it could cause Arachnitron to seek out leadership roles which would be not as useful to being a medic. It could also cause her to butt heads with Megatron and even Tarantulas who (assuming we're following the TV story line) is the second in command. Although, it could make for a good story line....that Tarantulas' exprimentation ends up back-firing on him.....

As for the species of spider thing. The art I've done is with the black widow design, but it really doesn't matter. I don't really like the look of the arrow head, but I think I could pull off a brown recluse with the character if the two black widows is going to be a problem.

The Brown Recluse looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_recluse_spider

But tarantulas created Blackarachnia as a black widow so maybe it'd make sense that he would use the same spider....maybe he's hot for black widows.

Heh, well killing off Glowstick was an idea. Though I think Alak is saying the Preds would probably do better having two Medics. Ironically, Glowstick's er.. "Compassion" and "teamwork" and Ambition ended up having him become a commander character, the same could probably end up to Arachnitron. (And wouldn't be surprising. Alot of the episodes are split into teams of two or three.)

Hm.. though I think the next episode is supposed to be the start of the end of Season 1.. with Primal blowing up. Hmm.. Well I guess that is something to think about..

Oh, and essentially her old stats would of been fine for a medic or engineer. It wont be a problem for her to be a black widow, it's just we've had some complaints in the past since.. we have two white tigers, two black panthers, three eagles, two fusor bird dogs... Two of every animal basically, except they're mostly girls. That's why we have the ban on Cats and had a ban on birds for awhile.

NaitoKage wrote:Heh, well killing off Glowstick was an idea. Though I think Alak is saying the Preds would probably do better having two Medics. Ironically, Glowstick's er.. "Compassion" and "teamwork" and Ambition ended up having him become a commander character, the same could probably end up to Arachnitron. (And wouldn't be surprising. Alot of the episodes are split into teams of two or three.)

Nevermind then.

Another idea I had (that I erased from my previous post) was that the reasoning behind Tarantulas' experiments was simply an act of desperation since the preds are outnumbered. At least they were....I'm not sure if that's changed or not. I've seen some posts suggesting the preds are outnumbered but I don't know if they were recent or not.

NaitoKage wrote: Oh, and essentially her old stats would of been fine for a medic or engineer. It wont be a problem for her to be a black widow, it's just we've had some complaints in the past since.. we have two white tigers, two black panthers, three eagles, two fusor bird dogs... Two of every animal basically, except they're mostly girls. That's why we have the ban on Cats and had a ban on birds for awhile.

It must be a girl thing....it probably has something to do with why girls go to the bathroom in groups....

Girls go to bathrooms in groups to either talk or because their systems are known for syncing in ways that I wish my printer would. The reason Birds and Cats are popular is because they're cute. The Predacons currently outnumber the Maximals.

I wasn't referring to the cat and bird fetishes as being "a girl thing"...I was referring to the fact that the girls seem to be the ones with repeated beast modes. Almost as though our social needs extend beyond going to the bathroom together.

The Predacons currently outnumber the Maximals.

Well....another idea busted....

Ah.. Sorry.

Well.. you know. I think I might have an idea that is a simple solution. Your character can have her original background of being a experiment made on cybertron which escaped, perhaps while on a ship something happened to the ship and she used an escape pod/stasis pod to get away from the ship, said pod ends up floating through space and comes through a transwarp hole landing on the planet, it scans the environment and she wakes up wandering around until she meets either Predacon or Maximals.

This way you'd be able to appear whenever you want and retain your background.

Okay, here is my second attempt. I put Predacon/Maximal. That way Arachnitron can just go whereever she seems to fit best. She's a renegade/rogue bot. She never belonged to a group before and her bio can include a line that she plans to stay a Pred or defect because of the many experiments. I didn't bother reposting the sample post, but I can if you want.

NAME: Arachnitron
ALLEGIANCE: Predacon/Maximal
FUNCTION: Medic and Scout
ALTERNATE MODE: Black Widow Spider
HEIGHT: 5 feet

STRENGTH: 6
INTELLIGENCE: 8
SPEED: 5
ENDURANCE: 6
RANK: Assigned by the staff.
COURAGE: 7
FIREPOWER: 6
SKILL: 7
[Stats excluding rank must not total over 45!]

BIO:

Arachnitron was an experiment gone wrong.....Literally. It was an attempt to find out if a hybrid of both factions could be possible. One hypothesis suggested that a hybrid, for lack of a better word, would inherit the strengths from each faction. Their hypothesis was that the Predacon traits would overpower the Maximal traits, but the Maximal traits would add to the Predacon traits. Maximal traits like courage and intelligence. The protoform ended up being too unstable to be of any use to any faction and was so extremely mentally unbalanced that it destroyed itself. Their next thought was to take a robotic form that was already a Predacon. That way the Predacon traits would already be present and the Maximal traits would only ADD to traits already in possession. Then, the two opposing traits couldn't cause unbalance. Unexpectedly, the new code overrode the original codes and it became clear the protoform would most likely defect.

They tried many different code alteration sequences, but none seemed to meet the desired affects. Arachnitron was the last attempt and their closest success. As they did with most of the subjects, they abducted Arachnitron from the orphanage where she was living. They rewrote her genetic code in such a way that would limit her access to the opposing traits. So the Predacons made it so that the Maximal genetic codes were mostly inaccessible.

Unfortunately, they found that she is still fairly mentally unbalanced despite the attempts to section off her codes from each other. The final determination was that the opposing character traits was not the issue; the issue is that the genetic manipulation in general causes mental instabilities; namely a blinding rage that causes fits of irreparable destruction.

Once it was clear that Arachnitron was about to meet her end, she destroyed the research facility and escaped. Now, she is on the run as an escaped failed experiment.

WEAPONS/ABILITIES:

Usually Arachnitron uses her Energon pistol or her cybervenom which can temporarily paralyze her opponents. Once in a while she will use hand-to-hand combat.

Inside a compartment in wrist she keeps some tools needed for a bot on the run: Bugging devices, screwdrivers, a small drill and other necessities and it can serve as a place for storage. She also has explosives in the other wrist compartment.

Aside from being very intelligent, Arachnitron is strong-willed and courageous, and skilled in the art of stealth. She is also cunning and manipulative. Since she is highly intelligent, she is a fast learner and can learn to do a variety of jobs.

WEAKNESSES:

Being of two opposing lineages and the number of genetic rewrites to her core consciousness has caused some mental disturbances in the young Predacon. Limiting her core computer’s access to the Maximal traits in her genetic code has solved some of her problems, but it was not the desired effect that the Predacons sought. She still has some bi-polar tendencies and can slip into them from time to time. She has three different personalities that often fight for control of the body: The Predacon programming, the Maximal programming, and the Hybrid (a mixture of the two). She also has a programming glitch where she loses control of the body completely....in this form, Arachnitron cannot see, hear or speak.

Arachnitron is a slow runner and she does not do an extensive amount of damage with her weaponry which is why her skills are better put to use as a medic or scout. And as with a lot of bots with high intelligence, she sometimes finds herself lacking stimulation and causing trouble…and even sometimes underestimating her opposition.

Hope that works out better!

That should be fine, though to note. Average stats are 5, anything bellow is slower or bellow average, anything above is above average. But yeah, should be fine. If you wanted you could included more weapons or even an ability. You will also be the second smallest character in the game, as the smallest is Frilla, the third smallest being Rattrap,Steelclaw, Blackarachnia.. and so on.

Sounds good. How do I know when I can start?

Uh.. well, how would you like her to come in?

This is just a suggestion, but Arachnitron could show up in the next episode either from a stasis pod or a stolen ship that crashes on earth and is now beyond repair. There's my two cents. ^_^