Several different ways, by this point in history. If you're a Transformer, and you want to generate a posterity, you can:

1. Build a new robot body the old-fashioned way, take it to Vector Sigma, and make a speech. If you have the activation key and Vector Sigma likes your speech, it may infuse a spark of life into that new body for you. Then again, it may not, and you probably won't get exactly what you asked for in that speech, personality-wise. Vector Sigma is inscrutable, not to say unreliable.
2. Acquire a protoform and [SEE ABOVE]. Protoforms are a fairly new innovation on UF's Cybertron, having been derived from technologies brought to this universe by the crew of the Axalon, but they're much more convenient than constructing a whole complete shell by hand. They also tend to take on unique characteristics based on the spark and/or the datatracks inhabiting them. The Einherjar Autobot sparks returning after Twilight were infused into protoforms, because that was a hell of a lot easier on Ratchet than building a couple of hundred custom shells would have been.

   (In the old days, it was also possible to turn to the Well of All Sparks to spark up a new Transformer, but it's been sealed for aeons and some legends say there's nothing in it any more anyway. And as far as anybody's aware, the "Allspark" thing is a myth, as is the notion that the Matrix can create new sparks. Hold existing ones, yes, we've seen it do that, but not make whole new ones out of thin air.)

3. Acquire a protoform and generate a new spark for it through binary resonance. This requires two existing sparks with a binary bond (temporary or permanent) between them, and doesn't always work, but when it does, you get the closest thing to the way water-based lifeforms reproduce, in that the offspring tends to take on characteristics of both parents. In a way, this is similar to the way the asari in Mass Effect get it done, except that the resonance configures the cyber/nano algorithms in a newly formed Transformer spark rather than nucleic acids in a parthenogenic asari embryo. And, as in the asari way, only one partner needs to be a Transformer to make the attempt. Non-Transformers don't have "sparks" in the proper sense of a distinct energy construct, but if you were to somehow extract and concentrate the Spengler flux of a living human, as Skuld does to Gally in Scrapheap City Shuffle, that's what you'd end up with.

It's also theoretically possible to spark a protoform without activating it right away; this would allow for datatracks - knowledge, training, even theoretically the memory tracks of another individual, although that would be considered creepy - to be uploaded before the spark is brought fully online and the protoform is "set", as it were. This method has only been posited in the abstract. Most modern Transformers agree it'd be unsettlingly open to abuse if it were put into practice, since you could theoretically "program" the new generation to be whatever you wanted them to be rather than letting them discover themselves, as is traditional with the newly sparked. Freedom is the right of all sentient beings, after all.

Anyway, Stinger (as is noted in his BPGD file) is the product of a binary resonance. Shana isn't literally his mother, in a chemical or biological sense, but patterns inherent in her Spengler flux can pretty easily be identified in parts of his CNA, and he definitely got that hotshot "I make this look good" thing from her, not Bumblebee. :)

>And what
>does this mean about OP's time as Peterson?

It's never been established, to the best of my knowledge, just how complete the whole "beast mode" thing is. On the original Beast Wars TV series, Tigatron had a tiger ladyfriend, but no offspring, as far as I know. On the whole, I wouldn't worry about it too much.

>Reloaded is full of transformers that aren't entirely the
>children of Primus and its messing with my vague understanding of
>bio/magic/tech in UF.

Well, it depends on how broad your definition of "children of Primus" is. If referring to his direct creations, there are indeed very few (perhaps none) of those left. That's a pretty constraining definition, though. Broaden it out to include the lineage of successive generations, and you've encompassed pretty much all currently extant Transformers - even the ones from other dimensions are children of a Primus, at least. (The exception, of course, being that Unicron's creations are by definition not children of Primus, though they are very similar lifeforms.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
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