Rhinox's History
In spite of his imposing proportions and powerful weaponry, Rhinox was a pacifist who preferred diplomacy to fighting, and was able to appreciate the rules to much greater degree than his friend Optimus Primal. Unlike many other Maximals, he willingly cooperated with his Predacon colleagues, and claimed to have even loved one once. In the past, he'd once dissected a kremzeek while working for the Maximal Science Ministry.
Rhinox was part of the Axalon's skeleton crew during a routine protoform delivery mission to H'nkshanaar-4, and spent most of his off-hours in the ship's gymnasium sparring with Optimus. However, their ship was diverted off-course to intercept a warship stolen by Predacon rebels. To Rhinox's displeasure, Primal forewent diplomacy in favour of direct attack but the Axalon quickly found itself outmatched. When the Predacons managed to open a transwarp conduit, Nyx managed to follow them through time, though both ships soon crashed on an unknown planet. With a high level of energon radiation, the Axalon reconstructed the crew with protective beast modes.
Busying himself with the topographical scanners, Rhinox observed that the planet was patchwork of landscapes and the anomalously potent energon crystals before he scolded Rattrap for consuming the local fruit. As the two debated the benefits of organic nutrients, they were covertly observed by a trio of Vok. When the invisible aliens departed, Rattrap noted a feeling of being watched, something Rhinox sardonically blamed on the fruit. After Nyx went missing, Rhinox praised his commander keeping a cool head; although he agreed that they should wait until morning to act, he also noted that there were too many unknowns to come up with a theory on what had become of their pilot.
Rhinox, Rattrap and Cheetor worked through the night trying to rewire the ship's computer, but it would be Primal who found a way to triangulate Nyx's position by tapping into the orbital stasis pod network. When the four Maximals went to intercept Nyx, however, they found an injured Nyx and her unexpected savior: Dinobot, who announced he'd come to join the Maximals. When the rest of the Predacons closed in on their base, Rhinox, Optimus, and Cheetor went to buy time while Rattrap brought the rest of the damaged ship's defense systems back online. In the battle, Rhinox traded blows with Skold, who, despite her smaller size, hit as hard as him.
By the time that Dinobot joined the battle on the side of the Maximals, Rhinox used his beast mode to push Skold back; after Rattrap brought the ship's shields back online, Rhinox and the other Maximals retreated under the cover of the Axalon's deflector shield... all except Dinobot, whose Predacon spark signature wouldn't allow him to pass. As the other Predacons laid Dinobot low and nearly beat him to death, the Maximals rescued their new comrade by turning their guns on the Predacons and intimidating them into a retreat. Rhinox brought Dinobot's gravely wounded body back to the Axalon and did what he could to repair him, but Dinobot's spark remained weak and Rhinox couldn't tell if the damage would prove fatal. Several days later, during another sparring match, Optimus confided in Optimus that his recent mistakes had nearly cost them dearly, but Rhinox reminded Optimus that there was no room for him to start second-guessing his own orders. When the conversation turned to Dinobot, the pair found that Dinobot had survived, but wouldn't fight at full strength again. Despite this handicap, Optimus Primal invited Rhinox to stay with them, an offer that Dinobot ultimately accepted.
Rhinox and the other Maximals were playing cards when the recently-activated Blackarachnia penetrated their shields and broke into their base without their knowing. After Cheetor went off to investigate a noise and didn't return, Rhinox and the others found that he'd lost a fight against the newcomer and wound up trapped in a web cocoon. Optimus ordered the Maximals to split up and sweep the ship to find the intruder, and while searching Rhinox found Blackarachnia hacking the Axalon's systems and sabotaging the rest of the stasis pods by uploading a shell program to the network and forcibly de-orbiting the pods. Rhinox attempted to stop her, but the nimble Predacon evaded his grasp and made her escape. Rhinox reported that more than half of the protoforms within stasis pods would emerge as Predacons, and Primal angrily vowed that they would have to go on the offensive by taking the fight to the Predacons.
While searching for a stasis pod in the jungle, Rhinox blundered into one of Tarantulas's booby traps and wound up stranded in an enormous labyrinth. There, he found Waspinator, whom Tarantulas and Blackarachnia had used used to test their maze before they abandoned him. The pair formed an unlikely alliance to escape the maze, but when the two found a way out Waspinator quickly abandoned Rhinox.
After Razorbeast joined their team, Rhinox stood by with the other Maximals as Optimus and Dinobot laid out their plan to take back the Golden Disk and take out the Predacon's transwarp drive with the help of one of the Axalon's escape ships, which they'd turned into an improvised shuttlecraft. While travelling to the Predacon base, Rhinox admitted that he didn't like the idea of fighting, but understood that Megatron's actions left them no other choice. Rhinox fought Scorponok, then went up against Skold once more, who'd been driven mad with grief after Terrorsaur killed her only friend Razorbeast. In Spite of Skold's fury, Rhinox calmly explained that he understood her pain; Skold, briefly moved by this show of empathy, coldly ordered him to walk away before she changed her mind. Ultimately, however, the Maximals failed to retrieve the Golden Disk, although Rattrap took the liberty of downloading most of the information stored on the disk into his own systems.
When Cheetor was injured in an energon explosion, Rhinox brought the wounded Maximal back to the Axalon for repairs. He and Optimus did what they could for their young comrade, but despite mending his body Cheetor refused to wake up. When he finally came to, however, he warned them of a strange dream involving the Vok, before his systems triggered a hard reboot that wiped all memories of his mental encounter with the aliens.
Rhinox's medical skills were again called upon when Dinobot and Optimus were both exposed to an unusual energon bomb after a run-in with Blackarachnia and Tarantulas. However, he discovered that samples of aggression-enhancing "red energon" had turned Optimus into an out-of-control berserker, who rampaged through the ship until Rhinox forcibly restrained him. Dinobot convinced Primal to try and use this extra aggression to take out Megatron once and for all; though Rattrap criticized this course of action, Rhinox pointed out that the over-exertion would help flush the contaminated energon from Primal's systems and return him to lucidity faster than otherwise. When night fell and Primal still hadn't returned, Rhinox, Cheetor, Rattrap, and Nyx set up a campfire outside the Axalon to keep watch. Inspired by the spooky nighttime ambience, Cheetor told a ghost story about a terrible war on an alien planet, which caused Rhinox to wonder if a similar fate could befall Cybertron.
Primal returned from the jungle with bad news: the Vok were real, and planned to wipe out all the Cybertronians on the planet. With no other options, the two sides agreed to a temporary truce, and Rhinox went to work on the Darksyde with Scorponok, where the pair hit upon using the Darksyde's damaged transawrp drive to send a distress message home to Cybertron. However, before they could put this plan into play, the group realized that Tarantulas had cut a deal with the Vok and sabotaged their efforts to coordinate a defense against the aliens. Captured and cornered, Tarantulas unleashed a monstrous zombie Terrorsaur that freed Tarantulas and knocked Rhinox unconscious.
Rhinox came to just as the "Children of the Vok" began a full-scale assault on the crashed Darksyde. Amidst the chaos, he rescued a terrified Skold from the zombie Terrorsaur using a combination of his beast mode strength and his own and chainguns. 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, while Rhinox and the other Maximals left aboard the repaired Axalon to search for Megatron, whom Rattrap had deliberately blasted into unspace.
