Cy-Kill (GoBots)

Cy-Kill is the Renegade leader from the GoBots continuity family.

having lovely time @ axiom nexus - thers monument to pointy things to my left (y) #backpacking

Cy-Kill is a cyborg alien from the planet Gobotron. Once, long ago, he was one of the greatest of the heroic Guardians. Along with his partner Leader-1 and Zeemon, Cy-Kill was even named one of the three High Protectors of their world. Though originally content to share power with his friend, when Leader-1's fame began to eclipse his own he chaffed at the idea of being "lesser" to anyone. His boundless pride, ego, and ambition to power led him to rebel and take command of the scattered Renegade forces. If he could not rule Gobotron by popular acclaim he would take it by force! Cy-Kill seems to be quite at home in the role of brutal, ambitious warlord and would be world-conqueror. He was having a good time, fighting those do-gooder Guardians, when suddenly his entire dimension was placed in dire peril. Well, crap.

He's very theatrical.

Fiction

Timelines

A different universe began colliding with Cy-Kill's home reality, but it wasn't very fun. The Doctor reported that to cosmological interference from the other universe, a great Cataclysm was destroying their own. This other universe was populated by strange, robot creatures, struggling through a similar galaxy-spanning civil war.

There was no saving their own universe, and no rational reason to destroy the universe that was removing theirs. Cy-Kill and his rival, Leader-1 assembled their respective factions, explained their dire situation, and put together a team. This team would reconfigure their bodies to disguise themselves amongst these otherdimensional robots, use the Dimensional Interfacer to travel to their universe, and seek out help. Withered Hope

An entity known as the "Beast Sage" provided the Gobotronians and their universe some time, but eventually the effects of the Cataclysm began to spread once more. Although the Dimensional Interfacer still functioned, they were no longer able to contact their exploration teams due to unforeseen changes in dimensional space. Cy-Kill championed inter-dimensional evacuation, or even outright invasion, but Leader-1 and Zeemon rejected the idea, considering blind dimensional transport tantamount to suicide. Sunrise

Brain Problem Situation

Cy-Kill and the Renegades made an alliance with Gog of planet Moebius, organizing a series of bases around the unusually shaped world. By universal coincidence, these bases somehow worked with the planet to create a crude Dimensional Interfacer, and began drawing power extra-dimensionally from 21 stratas away. Optimus Prime and the Autobots of that universe tracked the multiversal drain, and chose to investigate it in new bodies as Spy Changers.

When the Spy Changers arrived on the GoBots' Earth, a misunderstanding led to a fight between the Spy Changers and Guardians, so Cy-Kill's Renegades joined the battle on the side of the Spy Changers. Quickly realizing Optimus Prime was a heroic fool cast in the image of Leader-1, Cy-Kill nevertheless maintained an alliance with the Spy Changers to keep them opposed to the Guardians. Prime was no fool, however, and soon recognized Cy-Kill's true nature. The Spy Changers and Guardians formed their own alliance, and the Renegade bases on Moebius were destroyed, saving the Spy Changers' reality. Brain Problem Situation

Echoes and Fragments

Let's do the show right here!

Sideways and Gong attempted to have some fun by mingling the universal streams of a GoBots reality with those of a Transformers reality during the events leading to the latter's first encounter with Unicron. As a result, Cy-Kill naturally found himself playing out the role of Decepticon emperor of destruction, Megatron.

When Optimus Prime prepared to make a special run to Autobot City on Earth from Moonbase One, Cy-Kill's spy Snoop was there to intercept the new orders. Cy-Kill congratulated her on her espionage skills while simultaneously mocking Zero for his past failures. The Renegades attacked the Autobot Command Center en route to Earth, killing the crew of Prowl, Brawn, and Ratchet, while keeping Ironhide as a potential bargaining chip.

As they reached Earth, however, the hole in the Command Center was spotted from Lookout Mountain, and the Renegades were forced to begin their attack before penetrating the Autobot defenses. Although the battle continued through the night, Sideways and Gong's antics shuffled Cy-Kill out of reality, replacing him and his troops with Decepticons, now attacking Guardian City. Echoes and Fragments

Renegade Rhetoric

AVP incarnation

The second Facebook photo used for Cy-Kill after someone nixed the screencap.

An increasingly desperate Axiom Nexus News hired a Cy-Kill to run Vector Prime's old column. He claimed to be "leader of the Renegades in exile", hoping to one day return home. His take on how he joined the Renegades and his encounters with Zero are definitely true.

Among other answers, Cy-Kill said:

• Transformers make a funny noise when transforming because they suck, not like superior designed Renegades!
• If he conquered Earth, the most loyal and impressive humans would have their brains plonked in GoBot bodies. Say you want in on Facebook and he'll send a recruiting agent round!
• It was totally the evil Guardians and not the heroic Renegades that messed up Gobotron with a meteor, honest.
• He retains a George Washington costume (and Crasher and Cop-Tur their own period dress) just in case of another Revolutionary War based strategem.
• Gunnyr, leader of his own Renegade faction, was absorbed after Zero's defection: Cy-Kill appreciates experience and "ambitious underlings do tend to keep one on one's toes"!
• He believes in keeping a certain distance from his soldiers to be a good leader, rather than making friends.
• His weaponry is a patchwork of his own inventions, Renegade scientist designs, and ones stolen from the Guardian's Professor Von Joy.
• The Renegades will change their name once they have taken control, possibly to GoBot Liberation Army or something. (And "Renegade" is a perfectly sound rebel name, not like he calls them "Untrustworthy-cons" or some crap)
• The Renegades have destroyed stuff but so have the Guardians: collateral damage is necessary in war and he refuses to be moralised about it.
• Zod can beat up Trypticon. Kneeling before Zod? He agrees that would be appropriate.
• He's recruiting new Renegades in the Offworlder slums.
• Cybertronians may be lamer than GoBots but he's not dumb enough to underestimate any foe in a fight; some Transformers could defeat him and so he'll seize every advantage. And by that he means cheating! Losers follow rules, winners cheat and then write the history books!
• He has a fondness for Earth vehicle designs. We got style.
• He can totally impersonate Leader-1! ("Oooooh, I'm Leader-1. I'm a goody two-shoes who doesn't know when to keep my ugly yellow domino mask out of Renegade business. Doop doop doop.")
• He's confident that he could take The Beast in a fight. Yeeeeah, ok.
• He's read C.S. Lewis. The man makes good points about the dread tyranny of "goodness" forced upon you, and it all applies to Leader-1 and his Guardians! Other favorite human writings of his include those of Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Marx, Locke, Nietzsche, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
• If your employer forces extra night shifts on you, and their reason is not just, it is right and just for you to take armed action. Bosses only understand force!
• The Rock Lords are pathetic. Stop asking him about them.
• He had many other adventures after the battle on Quartex, although all of his schemes were ultimately foiled by the Guardians. These have included:
  • He used a cyber-mimetic virus discovered in an ancient Himalayan temple to attack the Guardians, but was thwarted by Rest-Q
  • He tried to take control of an alien society obsessed with auto racing by entering three of his Renegades in the Alienapolis Five Million. They were disqualified when they got caught cheating.
  • They stole a UNECOM device designed to boost intelligence, but it was accidentally used on Cop-Tur. Hilarity ensued.
  • He developed a mutating, fast-growing plant he called Go-Vines and covered all of Earth's monuments with them, but the Guardians stole a sample and reverse-engineered a defoliating agent.
  • He trapped Leader-1 in virtual reality to try to trick him into divulging the whereabouts of a secret UNECOM base, but Leader-1 realized the deception and broke free. (Maybe Cy-Kill forgot he had a brainstormer.)
  • A group of Guardians and Renegades were kidnapped by Guerr-O-Vac, a super-computer that pitted them against each other in single combat.
  • At Crasher's urging, he set a trap for Scooter, but a freak lightning strike on the brainstormer (he remembered) resulted in him swapping consciousness with the diminutive guardian. Hilarity ensued.
  • He ran for President of the United States in order to get into the candidate debates (This was in the days before phone cameras so it was easier to intimidate voters).
  • When a wealthy theatre fan decided to leave all his goods (including what Cy-Kill wrongly thought was a gem of great power) to whoever put on the best show, the Renegades put on Pirates of Penzance in competition with the Guardians' Metamorphosis. Cy-Kill really wanted to play the Pirate King but since nobody else could sing "Modern Major General" the way he liked, "my hands were tied".
  • He encountered an ancient Guardian ship returning from deep-space exploration and managed to convince two of the crew to join the Renegades, though the rest escaped with their vessel and the valuable data contained within.
  • He created 3 semi-sentient RoGuns, weapons that could transform, but they resented being pushed around and defected to the Guardians.
  • He formed an alliance with the Martian tribe of Bars Barkas, which was disrupted by the RoGuns and the Secret Riders.
  • He was briefly deposed by the Master Renegade, who created Power Suits to enable the Renegades to battle Courageous with their own combiner, Grungy.
  • He infiltrated a science fiction convention in a Cylon costume to kidnap a scientist.
  • He stole the communication moon of Gobotron with an oversized Astro-Beam and moved it outside of the galaxy. Leader-1 came with it and, though damaged, delayed Cy-Kill's troops until the beam wore off and it returned to Gobotron's orbit.

• He is disconcerted with being the only cyborg in a mostly mechanical world. Furthermore, he sees the Transformers as a hybrid of mechanics and energy, similar to himself.

The authorities eventually caught up with him but not before he'd bombed Shockwave's R&D facility as a cover for stealing tech (and cheerfully half-admitted it on his column). When Cheetor's team tried to bring him in, Cy-Kill deployed his new combiner Monsterous, who kept the OZSA at bay long enough for the Renegades to depart Axiom Nexus to a time and place unknown with the aid of Gong. Renegade Rhetoric (1)

Weeks later, ANN's viewers voted him the best of the guest hosts for AVP. Ask Vector Prime

You rock, Cy-Kill.

Second run

You can't keep a good baddie down, as Cy-Kill hacked into Vector Prime's column to announce he was continuing Renegade Rhetoric as a solo deal! Over the course of this column, Cy-Kill continued to answer questions about his native dimension, and used them as opportunities to recount his many adventures. Ask Vector Prime Transformers: Renegade Rhetoric

Where in the crowd scene is
Cy-Kill Sandiego

One of these stories included how he ended up in Axiom Nexus in the first place, which he attributed to an accident with the experimental Anti-Phase-Displacer Blaster. His first thought upon ending up in a sea of unfamiliar mechanoids was "I can totally exploit this". He had also obtained "six strange positronic energy matrices" that were capable of "providing an animating essence to crude machine life" while in old A-N, later used on Puzzler.

Female Transformers? Too often used as "window dressing" in his opinion and not as cool as female GoBots! Renegade Rhetoric (2)

Cy-Kill's forces are constantly monitoring Axiom Nexus. In January 2016, his minions Crasher and Cop-Tur hacked into Vector Prime's column to reveal secrets of the Convoy and thus further destabilise the city-state for the Renegade cause. Universal stream names confused them. Ask Vector Prime

After attempting a "Combiner Wars" on Quartex, Cy-Kill limped away and we didn't hear from him for a while. We did hear the dimension-hopping Spy Changers and "Thrustinator" were tracking a Megatron before he linked up with two villains in another reality, ones we learned later was Cy-Kill and Magmar. Renegade Rhetoric (2), 2016/07/14 On New Year's Eve for 2016, Cy-Kill sent us one last message about how in the last year he and the Two M's had come up with enough stories for a third season 64 plots against those dastardly GoBots and Spy Changers and the last one would surely succeed. He left us a heartwarming message that the future belonged to us and all we needed to do "when faced with a dilemma, ask yourself, “what would Cy-Kill” do and you will not go far wrong." Renegade Rhetoric (2), 2016/12/31

Go-Bots comic

While most Go-Bots were built to serve man, "Go-Cycle Red" was built to serve his own kind, being built as a motorcycle for other Go-Bots to ride. Go-Bots #5 Cy-Kill, as he began calling himself, eventually wound up in the possession of T. Coriander Banks in 2018. Part of an underground fight club, Cy-Kill had his bloodlust levels enhanced so he could take part in gladiatorial combat. Concurrently the United States military had allowed for their own Go-Bots to use lethal force. When this coding made its way to Cy-Kill, it deactivated his G-chip and gave him a desire to do harm to humans. Go-Bots #2

After killing his way out of Banks' establishment, Cy-Kill gathered a group of Renegade Go-Bots and drove off into the desert to blaze their own trail. When the humans sent Leader-1 after them, the Renegades managed to overpower the government Go-Bot and downloaded the nuclear codes from his processor. Aware that the humans would never leave them alone, Cy-Kill pledged world conquest to his forces. Go-Bots #1 After recruiting more of the dissatisfied masses to his cause, Cy-Kill marched his forces towards Washington, D.C.. After taunting the human sympathizers Turbo and Scooter for a time, Cy-Kill was confronted by Leader-1 and his faction of Go-Bots. The two leaders clashed in combat but Leader-1 ultimately proved the better fighter, defeating Cy-Kill and taking his place as leader of the Go-Bot rebellion. Go-Bots #2

Over the next few thousand years, after Leader-1 had created Gobotron, Cy-Kill and his malcontents remained a thorn in Go-Bot society. Leader-1's forces managed to capture Cy-Kill several times but to preserve the calcified status quo of Leader-1's empire, Cy-Kill simply had his mind erased each time so he could be released back into the wild and keep the cycle going. Go-Bots #5

When Spay-C returned home, Cy-Kill had managed to tame Zod, leading his latest army to attack the Guardian Command Centre. When the fight moved to space warfare, the Command Centre performed a hyperspace jump and disappeared. Go-Bots #3 The Renegades eventually tracked their foes to the Heart of Gobotron, old Earth, where Cy-Kill amused himself by torturing humans for a time. Catching up with Leader-1, Cy-Kill shattered the Lazer Lance, the only weapon that could fell Zod, and offered his foe the chance to surrender before the Rock Lords arrived and triggered an earthquake that cost Cy-Kill the majority of his force. Seeing that the battle was lost, Cy-Kill fell back to the empty Command Centre and assumed control of it. Following Zod's demise, Cy-Kill used the Command Centre to unleash a lethal barrage on Leader-1 before using its tractor beam to abduct Scooter. Go-Bots #4

After locking Scooter up, Cy-Kill began data mining operations to learn the full truth of Leader-1's depravity. Before he could begin conducting tests, Cy-Kill was confronted by Turbo who offered him the free advice to let Leader-1's methods die with him before he noticed that Cy-Kill had planned to conduct experiments on humans. Enraged, Turbo threw himself at Cy-Kill, eventually managing to shoot him directly in the optics, killing him.

Along with Leader-1's, Cy-Kill's body was brought to Road Ranger. Though regeneration was a possibility, the new leader of Gobotron decided that it was for the best that the two demagogues finally die, instead harvesting their most intact parts to build a new Go-Bot, one that would hopefully embody the best of both leaders. Go-Bots #5

Notes

"Well, there's nothing you can do about me taking all the free cookies!"

• Cy-Kill is constantly "easter egged" in various Transformers stories. But, like, GoBots were totally lame, so wouldn't it be hilarious if he was repeatedly killed over and over again because he was lame? Yeah!
• A generic Transformer resembling the silver, black, and green redecoed Cy-Kill toy appeared in a few IDW stories, where he was, you guessed it, killed!
• Poor guy was nearly killed even in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. (No, really, Hasbro gave the okay and everything!^[1])
• A Cy-Kill was seen in the processing center of Axiom Nexus in "Transcendent: Part 1", not far from the interdimensional GoBot exploration team. Up until 2015's "Ask Vector Prime" and "Renegade Rhetoric" columns, stories said it was essential for the GoBot explorers to adopt a Transformer disguise, so who was this guy? The Q&A column Cy-Kill broke that rule by just wandering around as his usual self and in January 2016 it was established that the Cy-Kill in "Transcendent" was the Q&A Cy-Kill from an unrelated GoBot universe. (This raises the possibility that the doomed GoBots reality from "Games of Deception" onwards was not the original cartoon as implied.)
• The original image used for Renegade Rhetoric featured a picture of Cy-Kill taken from a screencap of the Challenge of the GoBots cartoon. As it happens, that cartoon is still controlled by Hanna-Barbera/Time Warner (technically, Tonka owns the copyright on the show). Before the end of the day, the Renegade Rhetoric image was changed to an original, less lawsuity drawing of the almost-identical TransTech Cy-Kill, repurposed as GoBots Cy-Kill, by Evan Gauntt. Given that later Renegade Rhetoric entries would include other screenshots from Challenge of the GoBots, Fun Publications' concern may in fact be cartoon Cy-Kill's ties to a Bandai-owned mold.
• A proposed Fun Publications BotCon exclusive was a redeco of one of the Prime Arcee Deluxe class molds into a "Femme Fatale Cykill".[sic]^[2]
• An unrealized SD SG idea of Josh Perez was a Shattered Glass incarnation of Cy-Kill, utilizing Cy-Kill's "Series 2" toy coloration.^[3]

Foreign names

• Japanese: Cy-Kill (サイキル Saikiru)
• Mandarin: Salmoore (萨尔魔, Saermo)

Footnotes

External links

GBwiki has content relating to Cy-Kill. Mighty robots, mighty wiki!

• GoBots Cy-Kill at TFU.info
• Black deco GoBots Cy-Kill at TFU.info
• Cy-Kill's patent
• Renegade Rhetoric on Facebook