Swerve



Gregarious would be a good word to describe Swerve. So would outgoing, enthusiastic, upbeat, joyfully irreverent, flippant, sarcastic, wise ass, troll, or "total pain in the aft," depending on which side of his weapons-grade mouth you happen to fall on and how long you've been listening to him use it. Swerve has a sense of fun and even whimsy that stands out from your run of the mill Autobots fairly dramatically. The little fellow may get on their nerves... he'll probably get on their nerves... But it'll always be with a smile, a laugh, and an epic level quip, making him a good bartender.

He is, however, also a menace to everyone within range of a gun in his hand - including himself - given his legendarily bad aim, as well as to anyone driving nearby because he's so easily distracted by just about anything that catches his attention. Despite this, he's quite intelligent and skilled as a metallurgist, analysing the properties of a material with unique sensors in his hands. When he gets caught up in a problem, he becomes almost laser-like in focus and intensity, going on quest after quest, both major and minor. Unfortunately, this generally leaves him just as distracted from any other tasks at hand and just as accident-prone as ever. He's almost always in need of some repairs, major or minor, because of it.

Now if only Prime could get him to not get easily distracted when receiving his orders too...

Fiction
Swerve participated in the defense of the Ark in 2006, but was trod upon by Trypticon. Five Faces of Darkness, Part 5 Later, after the Quintesson scientist Inquirata attempted to change history by removing the Autobot resistance leader known as A3 from the past, a race Swerve was participating in repeated itself in an endless loop due to the ripples in the timestream.

Swerve appeared on Earth as a member of the 4-Wheel-Drive Brigade. Led by Hound, the Brigade confronted the Insecticons out in the desert, only to be caught in an explosive mine trap and fall into a pit. Working together, Swerve and the others combined their Scramble Power and worked their way free of the pit. A concentrated Scrumbuster attack drove off the Decepticons, and the Autobots won the day.

Swerve was on Cybertron observing the anti-Prime propaganda that Shockwave pumped through the data-net after retrieving the Ark's crew from Earth. Cold War Later, after the Autobots toppled Shockwave and the Decepticons' rule, he was among the group of new recruits seen failing to take on the auto-combatant training drones on Cybertron after Shockwave's rule was toppled.

For at least four million years, Swerve has wanted to swap his metallurgy career for bartending. Before the war, he was a huge fan of Blurr and when he was getting an autograph, Blurr mentioned he wanted to run a bar too after retiring from racing; Swerve thought Blurr might want to run it with him and the only way the racer could escape was to give Swerve a fake phone number. Cybertronian Homesick Blues Forever after, Swerve would tell people that he and Blurr had a plan to run a bar after the war.

During the war, before Cybertron had to be abandoned, Swerve's metallurgical skills prompted Thunderwing to contact him along with several other Transformer scientists with his discovery about Cybertron's dwindling energy reserves. Swerve, like the rest, disregarded Thunderwing's warnings. Stormbringer #1 With a fondness for adventure, Swerve took part in at least ten quests over the course of the war, including a Moon Quest, a Titan Quest, a Matrix Quest, a Prime Quest and the legendarily bad Thumb Quest.

In more modern times, Swerve was stationed at the Kimia Facility. He was a fan of the Wreckers: Declassified datalogs, although he thought Fisitron was a bit of a hagiographer. Bullets Swerve was present when Cyclonus and the Sweeps invaded Kimia. Lamentations He survived the massacre and got away aboard an escape pod piloted by Chromedome and Brainstorm. Arcee soon came to rescue them. Everyone seemed to feel the need to remind him in particular not to say something tactless that might set her off.

Aboard Arcee's shuttle, Swerve listened with the others to Hardhead and Arcee's explanation of the situation with Galvatron, the Heart of Darkness and D-Void. Swerve reiterated everything he had just heard to Hardhead, just to confirm he understood the complicated scenario (he got it all right, except for missing the hyphen in "D-Void"). He was quite naively optimistic at the prospect of putting a stop to Galvatron's plans and saving the universe. However, once they arrived in Cybertron's atmosphere and Arcee had ordered the shuttle to fly directly at the planet's surface, Swerve was among the first to bail out.

Swerve was one of the Autobots who chose to accompany Rodimus on his quest to find the Knights of Cybertron. Red Alert reluctantly allowed Swerve to board the Lost Light if he'd stop talking. Swerve doesn't know. He was in the medibay when Tailgate recovered consciousness, and got to be the one who broke the news about how long Tailgate had been trapped underground. He and Tailgate went out for some fresh air and, along with Chromedome and Rewind, encountered Skids and watched him fight the Legislators. Skids wasn't keen on Swerve's suggestion they should team up.

During the incident with the Sparkeater, Swerve and Skids stumbled on a bar, reminding Swerve of his earlier plans to run such an establishment. The Chaos of Warm Things Swerve opened the bar for a celebration of the Sparkeater's demise. As a subscriber to Fisitron's Wreckers: Declassified, he received a strange new datalog and discussed it with Ratchet, prompting the latter's trip to Delphi.

Unfortunately Ultra Magnus finally found out about the bar, stormed in, and led Swerve away in handcuffs. Swerve was soon on rivet duty with Rewind, clambering around on the Lost Light's hull and replacing rivets. The pair were pressed into service when Fortress Maximus flipped and took Rung and Whirl hostage, as the only way to get near the hostage situation was via an exterior window. While Rewind distracted Maximus with a recording of Garrus-9, Swerve fired his rivet gun. Unfortunately his protests about his poor aim turned out to be true, and instead of wounding Maximus, he blew Rung's head off. Though Rung survived, Swerve was horrified to learn that his actions had left the psychiatrist in a coma. He visited Rung with Skids, and left one of Rung's model ships at his bedside. Later, he would sit and talk to Rung for 147 hours straight, until the patient finally moved for the first time since the shooting... to make a "shush" gesture.

Swerve intended to attend Tailgate's Act of Affiliation ceremony but got sidetracked when he discovered Ore had been recently revived. He was assigned by Rodimus to distract Ore from realizing what had happened to him which would cause the engine block he was stuck on to activate and quantum jump the whole ship. Swerve began a conversation with Ore, not telling Ore what had happened to him, under the false identity of Pipes since the Duobot had been chatting with Pipes before the accident. Swerve used the conversation as an excuse to (surreptitiously) discuss the guilt he was experiencing after shooting Rung, his inability to disobey Rodimus for fear of losing his bar as well as the confusion he was undergoing about the difference between peace and happiness. Ore allowed Swerve to realize that his ability to regret his actions made him a decent person, and Swerve considered whether or not he really wanted the reputation he'd earned. Moments late, Swerve was contacted by Rodimus to tell Ore the truth about what happened, as his death or mental breakdown would jump them away from the recently aggressive Galactic Council. Swerve responded by saying he would rather save Ore than hurt him, orders or no, something Rodimus kept to himself when asked. Fortunately, a recently revived Metrotitan quantum-jumped the ship and Ore was teleported away as an extra convenience.

A few days later, Swerve joined a few other Autobots for movie night in Rewind's hab-suite, watching "Proteus's Promise". Who's Afraid of the DJD? Swerve and Rewind arranged a series of storytelling sessions in the bar to try and help Rung's mental recovery. An Intimate Beheading They made little progress and eventually had a third session with Chromedome, Drift, Ratchet, Whirl and others. Post Hoc Swerve was unable to stop himself occasionally interjecting into the story. Unable to get into his own quarters to fetch refreshments, Swerve raided Trailbreaker's stash of Nightmare Fuel. Following the story, the shipwide alarm sounded and Swerve speculated that someone had trodden dirt into Ultra Magnus's office.

The alarm turned out to be a call to take part in a mission to Temptoria to find the Circle of Light. Swerve kept himself calm during the trip in the Leading Light by using Rungian re-experience therapy. He took part in the battle on Temptoria until his gun ran out, at which point he asked Whirl for another and was thrown the Shoomer. He struggled to lift the huge weapon and accidentally ended up shooting himself in the face with it and so his part in the fight ended. Despite the damage, he survived and was taken back to the Lost Light.

When Swerve and his crew went to Hedonia's bars, he was tasked by Rodimus to bring Ultra Magnus along and help him relax. That led to Magnus falling unconscious after drinking nucleon and Swerve was left to look after him, and provide a shoulder for a maudlin drunk Magnus to cry on. He tried to buck the enforcer up, reassuring him that people did like him; when Magnus fell unconscious again, Swerve quietly admitted that people didn't like him but just tolerate him because of his jokes. After an intense effort, Swerve and the gang got Ultra Drunkus back to the Lost Light (Swerve decided this quest was now in his top three) and he used a prototype broadcast system to tell the whole thing to Blurr's personal number... refusing to admit that it was a fake. After that, sensing a new relationship with Magnus, Swerve asked him (next in a long line) if he'd like to share his room: Magnus, like everyone else, turned it down.

Some while later, Swerve accompanied Rewind to Brainstorm's laboratory, as the archivist was hoping to probe the inventor as to Chromedome's whereabouts. Whilst the two other Autobots talked, Swerve had a poke around, and decided to push a button on small device he picked up, something which he subsequently denied to Brainstorm. The invention, as it turned out, was a "meta bomb", and it had the effect of making Swerve unwittingly act as if he were a character in a comic book. Just then, a ship wide alarm sounded – the notorious Decepticon psychopath Overlord had appeared on the ship and begun a rampage! No doubt too small and inept to be of much use in the battle that followed, Swerve wound up sitting by an injured Drift and thanks to the continuing effects of the meta bomb began an oddly detached monologue about the situation the crew found themselves in.

After the threat had passed, thanks to Rewind's self-sacrifice, Swerve and Tailgate visited the medibay, where Ratchet was working on the mortally wounded Ultra Magnus. To the medical officer's chagrin, Swerve played The Empyrean Suite for the comatose patient. Shortly afterwards, at the memorial service for those killed during Overlord's rampage, Swerve decided to begin a "quest" to learn the contents of Brainstorm's briefcase, as a way of distracting himself from the recent tragedies.

After the service, Ultra Magnus disappeared from the medibay and fled in a shuttlecraft, and in pursuing it the Lost Light arrived at a vast portal hanging in space. Swerve enthused wildly about this latest development to Tailgate, ignorant that the Autobot-in-training had just been diagnosed with a fatal case of cybercrosis. Through the portal, the ship found the long lost Luna 1, but despite the his enthusiasm, Rodimus forbade Swerve from joining the landing party, citing that he had done nothing useful with his metallurgical training for the past months and had instead been a barman. Forlorn, Swerve decided to shut down the bar for good, but was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a huge, heavily armed robot saying nothing but 'seventeen twenty-one' over and over.

The mechanoid promptly opened fire, shredding the room to pieces, but Swerve was able to get behind the bar and trigger the 'security' installed recently by Brainstorm: scores of automated turrets that emerge from the walls and blast the invader. Despite the heavy fire, the attacker remained standing, so the bartender went for another gift from Brainstorm, My First Blaster™. Despite his infamous (lack of) marksmanship skills, this chunky weapon allowed Swerve to put a hole through his assailant, finally stopping it.

With more invaders all across the ship, Swerve ran to find his friend Skids at the oil reservoir. He arrived just as the amnesiac theoretician emerged victorious from an enormous battle, but a large, sword-wielding warrior teleported in behind him and ran Skids through. Swerve frantically opened fire, but missed every shot and was knocked unconscious.