OVERVIEW

The starship IPS Axalon, though technically part of the Autobot Forces, has long been seconded to allied services - originally the Wedge Defense Force and latterly the International Police. Her crew is made up primarily of extradimensional Transformers who came to this universe during the Natureworld Incident of 2094. In official terms, the Axalon's crew constitutes both an Autobot Special Forces unit and the International Police Tactical Division's 74th Special Mission Force, in either case codenamed The Maximals.

MAXIMAL PERSONNEL PROFILES

OPTIMUS PRIMAL
Function: Leader; captain of the Axalon

"Sometimes crazy works."

Optimus Primal is not, contrary to the common assumption, his native universe's counterpart to Optimus Prime. Where he comes from, Prime is a historical figure, the greatest leader of the Maximal nation's august (and extinct) predecessors, the Autobots. Primal's name was, in fact, tagged onto him by an enemy who was trying to mock him for the reverence in which he held that ancient Autobot leader, whose example he has always tried to emulate - and he turned it right around again by proving that he had the chops to live up to the name. Tough but compassionate, a consummate soldier but with the heart of an explorer, Optimus Primal is known for his courage, his ironclad loyalty to his crew, and his adaptability. Though he long ago shed the organic alternate mode that he had when he was given the label "Primal", he's kept the name anyway, to reflect the fact that, having had to learn to think like an animal to survive the Beast Wars, he's never quite lost that organic unpredictability of spirit - much to his foes' chagrin.

Like most of the Axalon's crew, Primal often reconfigures his alternate mode to suit the needs of the current mission, but his current favorite form is that of a late-model cargo tractor.

DINOBOT
Function: Lieutenant

"Actions, not words."

Dinobot was once, in his home dimension, a member of an aggressively militaristic faction descended from the Decepticon splinter group called the Predacons, but his strong sense of personal honor clashed so often with the Predacon philosophy of victory at any price that he defected to the Maximal side during the Beast Wars. He's still generally more aggressive than his Maximal colleagues, preferring a fight to a parlay any day of the week. A master swordsman and expert tactician but, he would be the first to admit, a weak strategist, Dinobot knows he's more soldier than general. There was a time when this annoyed him, causing him to chafe under the leadership of Optimus Primal, but that was many centuries and hard-fought battles ago, and today he is fully content to serve a bot he recognizes as greater than himself. Though his official title is Axalon Executive Officer, Dinobot's function in the crew is more akin to that of a warrior king's master-at-arms or a Roman legion's first spear.

Dinobot eschews his shipmates' penchant for what he dismissively calls "alt-hopping". His saurian form, he insists a trifle stuffily, is all a warrior needs.

RHINOX
Function: Engineer

"I gotta be a miracle worker."

Optimus Primal's right-hand bot, Rhinox could run the whole show himself if he felt like it - but that would cut into his tinkering time, and anyway, Primal actually enjoys all that administrative guy-in-charge stuff. Rhinox would rather rebuild a sensor array or conduct botanical experiments in one of the Axalon's hydroponics tanks than strategize any day. When the chips are down and stuff starts blowing up, though, there's nobody his crewmates would rather have watching their backs. Rhinox is enormously strong and nearly indestructible, and though he has an extremely slow temper, once the bad guys have managed to set him off, you don't want to be anywhere around.

Rhinox's most commonly seen alternate mode these days is a Cybertronic utility vehicle specially equipped for ramming, though he has been known to dust off his rhinoceros mode from the Beast Wars for special occasions.

RATTRAP
Function: Scout

"We're all gonna die."

Some bots are always looking on the bright side, no matter how desperate the situation becomes. And then there's Rattrap. To be fair, he's not as cynical as he often appears; his pessimism is more a form of gallows humor, intended to keep up his comrades' morale, than a genuine conviction that doom awaits around every corner. Actually, the one thing Rattrap can be pretty confident about at any given moment is that he's not going to die, because that's his greatest talent. He's the smallest of the Maximals, but also the hardest to kill, and his willingness to do whatever it takes to survive means that only a fool ever counts Rattrap out of a fight. He's also the sneakiest Maximal, which is a useful trait when your job is to go behind enemy lines and find out what they're up to over there.

Rattrap has been known to take on the form of a Cybertronic light scouting vehicle or, on occasion, a human-designed motorcycle, but only when pressed; he actually prefers his old womp rat form. Under a surprisingly wide range of conditions, it's better for sneaking around.

CHEETOR
Function: Warrior

"I wasn't built for comfort."

Cheetor's come a long way since the days when he was the Axalon's resident clueless rookie, constantly leaping without looking and biting off more than he could chew. He hasn't slowed down or become any more cautious, though; rather, he's developed his skills to the point where he can look and leap at the same time and chew as much as he can bite off - most of the time. Cheetor is one of the rare Transformers whose spark can touch the universal energy field called the Force, giving him occasional flashes of insight that border on the precognitive. Since coming to this universe, he's studied this connection and the philosophies the lifeforms of the galaxy have developed around it. From this study, he's learned to just relax and let the events around him flow, constantly alert for the critical moment when the time is right for him to put his fantastic speed and razor-sharp reflexes to use.

Cheetor's preferred alternate mode is a high-performance ground vehicle he's modified extensively from a scan of a New Japanese racing car. It holds the current lap record on the Top Gear test track.

TERRORSAUR
Function: Warrior

"Fear comes from above!"

Terrorsaur isn't really all that scary, and he's well aware of it. The whole thing is a schtick, one which he originally devised as a Predacon to make up with bravado what he lacked in bravery. As one of the handful of Predacons to survive the Beast Wars, he joined the Axalon's crew for lack of any better ideas - and found his niche. Freed from the necessity of competing to maintain his position in the brutal fray of Predacon society, he was at last able to develop the capabilities that he had spent most of his Predacon career pretending to have. He also, to his Maximal colleagues' surprise, discovered in himself the spark of a joker, lampooning his own former follies with a great, wry wit. In addition to his duties as a member of the Axalon's crew, Terrorsaur has a lucrative side line as the much-loved host of the popular children's television program It's Terrorsaur! - the revenues from which contribute much to the maintenance and repair budget of the Axalon.

Terrorsaur, like Dinobot, has maintained the alternate form he had in the Beast Wars. As he puts it, "Hey, this face is my fortune."

SILVERBOLT
Function: Tracker

"No evil shall escape my sight."

Not for nothing is Silverbolt called "corndog" by his colleagues (even though he no longer sports the half-wolf, half-eagle altmode he wore during the Beast Wars). He knows his knight-in-shining-armor routine is a bit silly, but he just can't help it - that's the way he's wired. So rather than be self-conscious about it, he decided long ago to just go straight ahead as his instincts suggest and pretend there's nothing strange about any of it. And, in fairness, he really is as noble and upstanding as his gift for archaic rhetoric suggests. Silverbolt despises underhandedness and sneakiness, which often puts him at odds with Rattrap. Why, then, it happens that the sparkmate to whom he is absolutely devoted is Blackarachnia eludes everyone, including the two of them. Perhaps it's because they complement each other so completely. And then again, maybe it's just because opposites really do attract.

Silverbolt has a strange fondness for alternate modes that are odd combinations of more than one thing - for instance, he's lately been sporting a chassis mod based on the IPO's SHARC flying submarine. Whatever he chooses, he always makes sure it can fly.

BLACKARACHNIA
Function: Warrior

"If you can't be good, at least look good."

Sarcastic and deadly, Blackarachnia began her career as a saboteuse for the Predacon side of the Beast Wars, but her spark was never in their cause. She wasn't really ideologically invested in the conflict at all; her only real loyalty was to herself. Silverbolt's influence, and through him that of the other Maximals, eventually tempered that, and today she's a loyal member of the Axalon's crew - but she's still sarcastic and deadly. Her willingness to rely on stealth and strike from ambush frustrates her knight-errant sparkmate to no end, but even he has to admit that she always gets the job done, and she certainly has the fighting skills to cope with any eventuality in the field. She's also an adept technician, serving as Rhinox's deputy engineer, and an expert at cybernetic warfare; "a real Renaissance spyder," as she says.

Blackarachnia is fond of alternate modes that combine sleek beauty and an air of subtle menace, most notably her beloved classic 2120 Pininfarina Spyder GT sports car form.

JORDAN COCHRANE
Function: Pilot

"Don't be so sure you know what you're dealing with here."

Though she is - to her considerable amusement - occasionally mistaken for Dinobot, Jordan isn't a Transformer at all. She's a genetically engineered sapient neosaur based on the same extinct saurian species as Dinobot's beast form. She and Dinobot met under confused circumstances during the aftermath of the Twilight Incident of 2390, and have been all but inseparable ever since. And make no mistake, she's no mascot. Jordan Cochrane is a brilliant and highly trained spacer, a veteran of the Wedge Defense Force's Exploration Command, and can make a good try at almost any task she chooses to turn her hand to. Her official job is piloting the Axalon, in which capacity she's also the ship's navigator, communications officer, and unofficial archivist.

Bolstered by the Omega-2 retrogenetic treatment and a wide range of sophisticated bionic and cybernetic implants, on top of her natural Velociraptor speed and resilience, Jordan can go shoulder-to-shoulder with her robotic shipmates under all but the absolute harshest conditions.

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