Cheetor's History
Cheetor was originally an athlete who idolized Blurr, the fastest Cybertronian ever to live. A fleet-footed Cybertronian in his own right, Cheetor soon made a name for himself on racetracks like the Afterburner Memorial Speedway, scored numerous trophies and accolades thanks to tricks like his "Tiwaz maneuver", and rubbed elbows with racers and other adoring fans at watering holes like Maccadam's Old Oil House. Eventually, however, Cheetor grew tired of life in the spotlight; craving off-world adventure, he left racing behind and secured a new career as a member of the planet's Science Ministry.
Cheetor's first post would be as a member of the skeleton crew aboard the Maximal research vessel Axalon, where he served as the ship's gunner under the auspices of his captain Optimus Primal. Cheetor proposed bringing multiple stun beams aboard their ship just in case, but Maximal command denied his request.
While on a routine protoform delivery mission to the planet H'nkshanaar-4, the Axalon was diverted off-course to pursue a group of Predacon separatists who had stolen a golden disk and hijacked the Maximal warship Darksyde. Despite his protests that the Axalon's weapons were for defensive purposes only, Cheetor did his best to shoot out the purloined starship's engines in the ensuing dogfight but was unable to stop their foes from spooling their transwarp drive and jumping across time and space. The Axalon pursued the Darksyde to an unknown time period and took the Predacons down with them in a last-ditch maneuver that stranded both ships on a primitive, energon-rich planet. To protect the crew from high levels of ambient energon radiation, the Axalon's artificial intelligence scanned the local wildlife and reformatted the Maximals into techno-organic beast modes.
After reactivating in his new beast mode, Cheetor helped Nyx repair their damaged ship before the high-flying pilot took off to explore the planet with her new wings. Cheetor was upset by this, as it meant that he'd have to turn to the notoriously unhygenic Rattrap to reach into narrow components. When night fell and Nyx still didn't return, Cheetor grew restless and considered striking out on his own to find her before Optimus shot down the idea.
Cheetor, Rattrap, and Rhinox worked through the night to rewire the ship's computer to better locate Nyx, and discovered a mysterious coded message to a Predacon laboratory dated to just before the Axalon departed Cybertron, just before Optimus announced that he'd tapped into the orbital stasis pod network to find her. As the Maximals waited for her to return, they saw Dinobot carrying her unconscious body and immediately assumed that he was the one responsible for harming her. When Cheetor lunged to attack, however, Dinobot transformed and easily overpowered his attacker before telling them that he wanted to join the Maximals.
While Optimus and Nyx interrogated Dinobot in a bid to gauge whether he'd truly had a change of heart, Cheetor stumbled across Rattrap spying on the group using the Axalon's security camera network. When the ship's systems picked up more Predacons, Cheetor, Rhinox, and Primal were forced to buy time while Rattrap did what he could to get the starship's defenses back online. When the Predacons refused to come quietly and launched a full-scale attack, Cheetor battled Scorponok and Terrorsaur before Dinobot joined the fray on the side of the Maximals. Cheetor punched out Scorponok and held out long enough for Rattrap to reactivate the ship's shields—however, this also meant stranding Dinobot, whose spark signature prohibited from retreating to safety, outside with the Predacons. Fortunately, the Maximals were able to turn the ship's guns on the Predacons, intimidate them into making a full retreat, and rescue a critically injured Dinobot.
Some time later, Cheetor was playing cards with the other Maximals when he heard a noise in a nearby corridor. When he investigated, he found Blackarachnia, a newly-programmed Predacon, who quickly paralyzed him with her cyber venom and got to work sabotaging the Maximal vessel. After Optimus and the others freed him from a web cocoon, Cheetor, Rattrap, Dinobot, and Nyx worked together to search the ship and nearly blundered into a grenade booby trap before Blackarachnia, having sabotaged more than half of the Axalon's orbital stasis pods, blew a hole in the ship's hull and destroyed most of the ship's armory as she escaped. Cheetor chased her out into the jungle, but when she lied that she'd set a second booby trap, Cheetor made the mistake of returning to the ship to save his comrades while Blackarachnia retreated to the Darksyde.
After Razorbeast joined their team, Cheetor, eager for a rematch with Blackarachnia, joined in a preemptive strike on the Darksyde to retrieve the Golden Disk, using a jury-rigged escape pod as an improvised shuttlecraft before launching a bombing run against the downed Predacon ship. Cheetor went up against Blackarachnia a second time, and distracted her long enough for Rattrap and Nyx to break into the Darksyde and accomplish the second part of their mission. After successfully dodging Blackarachnia's stun blasts, Cheetor closed the distance and successfully caused her to hit Scorponok instead. However, the sight of Optimus successfully taking out Megatron caused Blackarachnia to kick Cheetor in the face and scuttle off as she reconsidered her loyalty to the Predacon leader.
Cheetor took part in a skirmish against the Predacons that ended with him getting injured in a catastrophic energon explosion. The Maximals rushed his unconscious body back to the Axalon, where Rhinox successfully pieced him back together—but Cheetor's consciousness wouldn't come back online. Unbeknownst to the other Maximals, the Vok Pakak took the opportunity to infiltrate Cheetor's mind and probe its contents by constructing an elaborate dream world where Cheetor hadn't yet left Cybertron aboard the Axalon. After a confusing conversation with his physician "CatSCAN", Cheetor headed to Maccadam's for a drink; when the conversation turned to how to best modify protoforms, however, Cheetor excused himself and went to the roof to clear his head.
It was there that Cheetor first encountered Pakak himself, who informed him that the Maximal-Predacon conflict jeopardized the Vok's delicate experiments. Cheetor quickly realized that, although he'd been trapped in a dream, the Vok couldn't kill him without losing the information they sought. Pakak cut a deal: they'd have a race, and if Cheetor won, he'd walk free. Cheetor agreed, and Pakak quickly wrongfooted the young Maximal by transforming his avatar into Blurr and taking off. Although Cheetor narrowly won, Pakak revealed that he'd decieved the Maximal: the race was a sham, and Pakak had gleaned all the information he needed just by racing his avatar through Cheetor's brain. Pakak held up his end of the bargain by allowing Cheetor to come back online, but wiped Cheetor's memory to ensure he'd tell no one else of his alien encounter.
When Optimus Primal suffered exposure to a sample of aggression-enhancing red energon, Cheetor tried and failed to restrain the berserk Maximal leader. Dinobot successfully dealt with the problem by convincing the Maximal leader to hunt Megatron in the jungle, knowing that the overexertion would help flush the infected energon from his systems. While waiting for Optimus to return, Cheetor set up a campfire outside the Axalon to pass the time. Inspired by Rattrap's complaints about spending the night in the jungle, Cheetor told a spooky story about a terrible war on a faraway world, but the other Maximals found the tale to be too depressing.
A newly-lucid Primal returned with bad news: the Vok had used the knowledge they obtained from Cheetor's mind to alter a number of fallen protoforms into loyal minions and planned to eliminate both the Maximals and Predacons, necessitating a temporary alliance. Cheetor disliked the idea, but nevertheless wound up working alongside Blackarachnia to salvage whatever they could from the Axalon's armory and modify them into something capable of harming energy-based aliens. Ultimately, however, Tarantulas undermined their alliance from within, sided with the Vok, and helped them to raise a massive army of Vok-loyal Cybertronians from every fallen stasis pod they could find. Cheetor and Blackarachnia both took part in the final battle against these "Children of the Vok", where they fought side-by-side although Blackarachnia denied Cheetor's assertion that she could grow into a better person. After the Vok had been destroyed for good, their remaining servants agreed to a truce and left to live in the wild as their creators had intended. In the aftermath, Cheetor and the other Maximals left aboard the repaired Axalon to search for Megatron, whom Rattrap had deliberately blasted into unspace.
