Duobots are a subspecies of multi-component Cybertronians from the planet Cybertron.
Biology[]
While also being a subgroup of Autobots, Duobots consider themselves a species unto themselves.
Anatomy[]
Duobots have similar biology to other Cybertronians, except they transform from two individual robots into a single vehicle.
Powers and abilities[]
Duobots share many of the same abilities as other Cybertronians, namely Multi-Component Transformers.
History[]
Consisting of Shock and Ore, the Duobots made it through the war together, surviving the Battle for Hell's Point, "the day it rained" on Babu Yar, and the Simanzi Massacre, where they braved the Crucible. They also had a prankster streak, having once welded Prowl's hands together for a gag.
The Duobots were members of Special Operations and reported directly to Prowl. One of their regular jobs was handling field agents like Skids and Getaway. Along with Drift, the Duobots were Prowl's agents aboard the Lost Light, charged with attaching a slow cell containing Overlord to the ship's hull and planting a tracer on its engines.
Ore went down into the engine room to carry out their second task as the ship was taking off from Cybertron, which unfortunately led him to be standing too close to the ship's quantum generators when they activated. The resultant suspension of the local laws of space-time caused Ore to be fused with the engine, killing him and causing an explosion that crippled the ship.
Hurled to some bleak corner of the galaxy, the Lost Light was able to put down on a small planet, where what was left of Ore's body was found by Brainstorm who remarked that (on the bright side) at least now they would know which Duobot was which. Meanwhile, an amnesiac Skids crashed near the Lost Light: his homing device had locked onto the Duobots, his nearest handlers.
Ore's passing was observed by Shock, who then set about removing all incriminating evidence of their connection to Prowl, deleting the communication from him and heading down to the engine room to recover the discarded tracer. Unfortunately for Shock, he was set upon and killed by a Sparkeater that had been hidden in the bowels of the ship.
Sometime later, Ore came back to life thanks to the "psychic scream" of a Titan. Still fused to the engine and unaware of what had happened to him, he had a brief chat with Swerve before disappearing when the Titan teleported away. It is unclear what became of Ore, as Swerve believed Primus had intervened and sent him to the Afterspark. However, the more practical Skids suggested that Ore had been teleported along with the Titan because his revival had bound him to him.
The Duobots would be rather ignominiously remembered when Whirl described a batch of fallen attackers as being "deader than a Duobot".
Notes[]
- The Duobots were presumably created as an Autobot counterpart to the Duocons, though with wheels on their legs and treads on their upper backs they do not appear to share that team's "air vehicle upper body combines with ground vehicle lower body" design scheme.
- Indeed, Shock's lament in "The Chaos of Warm Things" that he is now a "walking misnomer" might even suggest that they qualify as "duocombiners" mentioned in passing in "Patternism".
- In the artist's version of "authorial intent" Alex Milne confirmed on DeviantArt that he designed a combined alt mode for the two but was keeping it private for possible later publication.
- When asked about the Duobots' combined mode in a Q&A on the IDW forums writer James Roberts replied that "in [his] head, the Duobots do [not] combine. Rather, they [are] more like clones."[1]
- That said, Roberts had previously used the term "Duobot" in his fan novel Eugenesis to refer to Mini-Cassette combiner Slamdance.
- As a product of the mind of English writer James Roberts, the fun double-meaning of Shock and Ore's names may not be immediately apparent to American readers. Try saying them out loud in an English accent.