Flame



Flame is a disgraced Autobot scientist, and with fairly good reason. His brilliance is overshadowed by an obliviousness to risk as he stubbornly pursues his grandiose ideas. His sole concern with other beings is whether they think he's right. And if they don't, he only becomes more obsessed with accomplishing his goals, no matter who or what must be sacrificed. This has driven him to an eons-long reclusion spent secretly enacting his master plan. On the rare occasion when he actually has contact with others, his mannerisms are flamboyant and histrionic, and he is never without either a grin or a grimace.

He transforms into a "firetank" with a high-powered flame thrower and a very fetching red, yellow and orange colour scheme. Also he has a zombie army, so try not to die around him.

Fiction
Flame was a member of the Iacon Academy of Science and Technology on Cybertron. Flame proposed adapting Megatron's plan—turning Cybertron into a mobile war world—so that it would instead become a mobile spaceship for exploration. Emirate Xaaron spoke out against the plan, as the fusion reactor required for the planetary engine would be highly dangerous.

Flame was removed from the academy and denied funds to continue his research. However, he embezzled money from the academy and continued his research in an old lab in the city of Kalis.

One day he was careless and the lab was destroyed in an explosion. The Autobots thought Flame was dead, but in reality he had survived and discovered that the explosion uncovered the entrance to the experimental engines that Megatron had built.

Flame took advantage of the accident, allowing the world to believe him dead while he secretly pursued his goal. He worked on repairing the engines for four million years, striving for the day that he would prove himself to have been right all along. That day came into sight in the year 1988, when he finally began to activate the massive systems. But venting the fusion reactor ignited a subterranean gas pocket and destroyed a portion of Kalis.

While this did not disrupt his operations, it did draw attention, so he activated his defense plan: Using the Decepticon engine-control computer (with modifications), he broadcast a signal by which he could reanimate any corpses within an area that seemed to correspond to the city limits. This quickly turned Kalis into a "zombie"-infested wasteland where neither Autobots nor Decepticons dared tread.

As it happened, the headquarters of the Autobot resistance movement had recently been moved to a new Autobase in Kalis. So Flame's old rival Xaaron was there when the reactor-venting explosion and subsequent zombie assault occurred. This was another happy accident for Flame, who gloated in taking Xaaron and the Wreckers prisoner so they could witness firsthand the fulfillment of his plan. Legion of the Lost!

Xaaron, of course, was no less averse to Flame's risky venture than he had been millions of years earlier. Xaaron managed to escape from his cell and attack Flame, but the latter's firetank mode sent him running. Xaaron even considered converting to his own "combat mode" despite his fear that doing so might kill him, as it had been so very long since he had done it before. But in the end, Xaaron was able to distract Flame out of his murderous rage by pointing out that the reactor was nearing meltdown.

For a moment, it seemed that Flame would listen to reason, but when the two were actually in the control room about to shut the reactor down, his jealousy resurfaced, and he refused to let Xaaron stop his plan. The standoff was handily ended by the Wreckers, who had been joined by Ultra Magnus, the Sparkler Mini-Bots, and even the Decepticons Flywheels and Trypticon. Flame summoned his zombies, but it was one of them who proved his undoing: The corpse of the Wreckers' old leader Impactor had, due to contact with his former troops, been acquiring a resistance to Flame's control. As Flame tried once again to kill Xaaron, Impactor sent a spear through Flame's head. Impactor then entered the reactor chamber and shut it off while its lethal radiation destroyed him a second time. The engines still exploded, but the damage to Cybertron was minimal compared to what could have happened if the reactor had blown up as well.