AllSpark

The AllSpark

the AllSpark (オールスパーク, Ōrusupāku) and its powers and history remains common and main reason for the Great War between Autobots and Decepticons. It is one of the fabled sacred implements of Cybertron itself, the objects capable of creating new Transformer life. Its origins are unknown, lost to the distant past, it also created the Cybertronian gods Primus and Unicron, but it often gives the impression that it possesses a consciousness of some kind and is either working towards a cosmic plan of its own divining, or is carrying out the will of a higher power. In truth, the physical AllSpark is but a shell to contain the incredible life-giving energies within; should that shell be destroyed, the energies will remain, as potent as ever, merely waiting for a new vessel to inhabit. Any fragments that would remain in the event of the AllSpark's physical destruction would still possess all of the incredible power that the original object did.

The AllSpark's power has long been coveted by the Decepticons, ultimately requiring the Autobots to launch it into the depths of space, putting it beyond the reach of any Cybertronian.

History

The AllSpark of this universe is a sphere of blueish crystal. It is not known with absolute certainty if it predates Cybertron in this reality; the earliest record of its existence is its appearance in many primitive etchings from Cybertronian pre-history, dating to around eight billion years ago. The AllSpark's volatility meant that it required a housing to safely harness its powers, and so legend says that seven billion years ago, a mysterious hammer of alien origin that would become the symbol of Autobot leadership known as the Magnus Hammer and Matrix of Leadership was used to forge a container for the crystal sphere, which then held it through until the present day. Kept in the hands of the ruling body of Cybertron (originally the Guardians, later the Protectobots and finally the Autobots) the AllSpark was also used to generate new Transformer life by infusing the protoforms formed from the proto-matter mined from Cybertron's Sonic Canyons with Sparks.

Around seventy million years ago, the Decepticon faction emerged, advocating the use of the AllSpark of conquring the universe as said by their leader himself the original Megatron (the original one), tensions finally exploded, and the Autobots and Decepticons went to war for possession of the AllSpark.

After something in the vicinity of years of civil war, Most ancient Autobots and later on Decepticon ancestors. Because of the fact that this war was becoming more but a pointless battling, the the leader Autobots and last of the Primes, the original Optimus Prime in the Great War came to the choice of putting the AllSpark beyond any Cybertronian's reach, launching it randomly through a space bridge to some distant corner of the galaxy, where it was hoped it would never be found.

Synopsis

Optimus Prime and his crew of Autobots were repairing a space bridge when it activated on them. Once Prime shut down the bridge, they stumbled across the AllSpark, hidden away inside a rock, having apparently emerged while the bridge was active. Ratchet told them of its history and significance in the Great War, believing that the AllSpark had now found them, rather than the other way around. Almost immediately, the Decepticon leader Megatron and his crew showed up in their warship: The Nemesis, tracking the AllSpark's energy readings. Megatron attacked the fleeing Teletran-1 to claim the AllSpark himself, but his attempt was sabotaged by a bomb placed on him by his lieutenant, Starscream. The explosion sent the Autobots' ship careening out of control until the AllSpark activated the space bridge, which itself exploded after the ship went through.

The ship emerged in low orbit over Earth and soon crash-landed in a river south eastern side, not far from Jump City. Fifty years later, the Autobots came out of emergency stasis and ventured into the city where thay also become allies of the Teen Titans to save people from a rampaging monster and the Gordanians. Bumblebee quickly befriended a young girl named Sari Sumdac, who convinced him to take her aboard the Autobots' ship when his teammate Prowl was badly injured. While aboard, Sari came in contact with the AllSpark, which decided for some reason to open up to her—in more ways than one. It reconfigured her security keycard into a powerful tool. With this new key, Sari could revive/repair Autobots, activate machinery, screw up robots, and much more.

For a time, the Teen Titans and the Autobots were celebrated as Jump City's superheroes, but then Starscream tracked them down. He took hostages and demanded the AllSpark in exchange for their return. With Sari's help, the hostages were freed, but Starscream still managed to get hold of the AllSpark, and he quickly started obliterating sections of Detroit with it. Prime attempted to wrestle the AllSpark away from him, but again it opened, this time unleashing a powerful surge of energy that blasted away Starscream to parts unknown. Prime was left severely injured and nearly would have died from his injuries. But worried and without hesitation, Sari used the reconfigured Key on him. The AllSpark intervened directly this time, and saved Prime's spark in time.

After this, the AllSpark remained on board the Autobots' ship at the bottom of Lake Erie for some time.

The day of reckoning the Autobots had long feared came to pass when Megatron was restored and went to claim the AllSpark once again. Inserting the AllSpark into his chest, he planned to use it as a weapon to destroy Earth and conquer Cybertron. However, Optimus Prime used the Key to crack the AllSpark. In the resulting energy surge, the AllSpark was destroyed and its energy dispersed. With its destruction, the Key became the most powerful Cybertronian artifact on the planet Earth, if not in the universe.

AllSpark Fragments

Crystalline shards of the AllSpark landed all throughout the greater Detroit area and were able to endow life into any machine with sufficient cybernetic technology. The first one discovered was in one of Isaac Sumdac's robots while he was working on Megatron's space bridge. It went haywire, and the Decepticons thought it was Sumdac, so Megatron blasted it and found the fragment in what was left of its arm. Megatron theorized that the shards could have spread across the entire world. A Sumdac Systems assembly line had empowered some Security Drones, which showed hostility to everything around them until they were either destroyed or had the AllSpark shards removed from them. Optimus's Autobots, the Teen Titans , and the Elite Guard put a stop to this and extracted the AllSpark fragment from the controls.

AllSpark shards are sufficiently powerful enough to sustain Transformer life even after their sparks have been extinguished, as Starscream discovered. He later found an AllSpark shard in a truck and planted it on a train to lure out Megatron.

The fifth AllSpark fragment gave life to Wreck-Gar.

The sixth AllSpark fragment was found in Master Disaster's remote. This allowed him to control machines and fix the results of his underground street races.

The seventh and eighth AllSpark fragments turned two construction vehicles into the Constructicons Dirt Boss, Scrapper and Mixmaster.

The ninth AllSpark fragment was in Slo-Mo's timepiece. This was able to slow down time around whatever electronic device on which it was used. It also was used to restore Nanosec to his rightful age.

The rest of the fragments that the Autobots had were used to help Omega Supreme reboot and kick some Decepticon tail.

In the both Endgame, AllSpark fragments featured prominently. In Part One, Prowl is able to use his processor over matter technique to coalesce a fragment that had apparently been more or less vaporized. Later, Megatron uses the fragments Ratchet had used to power Omega Supreme in to power Trypticon. Finally, in Part II, Prowl and Jazz combine forces to gather all the fragments they could (of which there were apparently hundreds) back into a whole AllSpark, to counter the clones. This includes the one that gave Starscream life.

Notes

• The AllSpark's powers, enigmatic origin, and storyline role are very similar to the synonymous device from the live-action movie. The look of the outer container, however, is more of an homage to the Matrix of Leadership (i.e. an orange-ish container with bracketed handles and a window in front that opens outward to reveal a glowing, blue, spherical crystal suffused with blue energy). However, the AllSpark here is angular and cubic rather than curved and spheroid like the Matrix, basically hybridizing the looks of the movie and Generation One devices. Unlike its Movie counterpart, it does not kill a Transformer that merges the power source, the inner crystal, with his/her Spark, but grants him/her great power as long as the crystal remains intact, a very similar effect to that of the Heart of Cybertron. Also it's power is able to bring pieces of technology to life, sound familiar?

• At BotCon 2008, Animated creative team Marty Isenberg, Matt Youngberg, and Derrick Wyatt stated that they had no intention of providing an in-story explanation of the AllSpark, because to do so would run the risk of making the artifact less interesting, or being so bizarre that it shattered the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, or being so wildly convoluted that explaining it all would end up overshadowing the actual series story, or all of the above. They specifically cited the Star Wars prequel trilogy's "midichlorian" explanation of the Force as something that convinced them it was better to let the AllSpark remain a mystery. After all, when Generation One tried something like that, we got stuck with the Quintessons.