Tarantulas's History
Tarantulas was a Predacon separatist in the employ of Galavar; although he considered himself one of the greatest geniuses in Cybertronian history, most regarded him as a wanted criminal, a treacherous mad scientist whose reputation for cruelty and indiscriminate violence had earned him infamy among the Maximals.
Eventually, Galavar went rogue, changed his name to "Megatron", and launched a daring heist to steal a mysterious Golden Disk from the Maximal Science Ministry. While half of Megatron's team stole the disk, Tarantulas, Waspinator, and Skold broke into the Great Shipyard in Vos, liberated the transwarp-capable warship Darksyde from its berth, and sabotaged the rest of the fleet to prevent any pursuers. Tarantulas busied himself with hacking the security protocols required to access the ship's transwarp drive, before the vessel came under assault from the nearby Maximal science vessel Axalon. Tarantulas successfully unlocked the transwarp drive, and followed a set of coordinates inscribed on the golden disk—a jump that took to a mysterious, primitive world. After a brief orbital dogfight with the Maximal starship, who'd followed them across time and space to this unfamiliar planet, both ships crashed on opposite sides of a lush valley. To survive high concentrations of energon radiation, the Darksyde's computer system refitted its passengers with beast modes that would allow them to safely operate outside their ship. Upon reactivating in his new form, Tarantulas joined Megatron as the Predacon leader vowed to hunt down and dispatch any Maximals who'd survived the crash.
As the Predacons settled in, Tarantulas busied himself with tracking a number of anomalous unspace signatures within the ship, and butted heads with Megatron's nominal lieutenant Dinobot when he ordered Tarantulas to scout out their immediate surroundings. Tarantulas snapped that, as rogue agents, he and the other Predacons answered to no one and could do as they pleased. That evening, Terrorsaur returned with a prisoner: the Maximal flier Nyx. While Megatron interrogated their captive, Tarantulas operated the electrical torture device intended to shock her into surrendering her secrets; when Nyx refused to speak, however, Tarantulas deduced that she must be protecting other Maximal survivors, and a pleased Megatron turned Nyx over to Tarantulas to dispose of as he liked. As such, Tarantulas rigged up a public execution, using his new transformation lock lens to keep his victim from fighting back or escaping. The show went as planned, until Dinobot had a crisis of conscience and abruptly turned on his allies. With the advantage of surprise on his side, Dinobot quickly incapacitated Tarantulas by kicking him in the face, then used his security clearance to remotely trip the Darksyde's lockdown protocol and trap all the other Predacons in the base while Nyx transformed and escaped.
It took Tarantulas several hours to unscramble the ship's systems, and by the time that he succeeded both Dinobot and Nyx had disappeared into the jungle that divided the Darksyde from the crashed Axalon, which necessitated a manhunt to find and dispatch the traitor. By following Dinobot's trail, the Predacons found the crashed Axalon and devised a plan to take out both Dinobot and the Maximals in one fell swoop—while Megatron and the other Predacons launched a frontal assault, Tarantulas infiltrated the ship to bring it down from within. While sneaking around the ship's lower levels, he encountered Rattrap, whom he attempted to eat before Rattrap shot him in the face and escaped into the ship's vents. Frustrated, Tarantulas swore to find a way to sabotage the Maximal starship and kill everyone aboard.
While searching for anything he could salvage from the Axalon's many empty laboratories, and, after accessing the ship's consist, discovered that the Maximals had been carrying a cargo of protoforms they'd ejected into orbit before the crash. Eager at the prospect of raising his own army and overthrowing Megatron, Tarantulas quickly wrote a shell program and attempted to access the stasis pod network to upload his code, but as he struggled with the ship's security systems, Rattrap used the ship's cargo-loading exoskeleton to grab the Predacon scientist and hurl him out the nearest window. Tarantulas quickly recovered, and, while Dinobot faced down the other Predacons alone outside the Axalon, Tarantulas ambushed the ex-Predacon, stabbed him through the chest, and joined in his comrades as they beat their former comrade to the brink of death before Optimus Primal used the Axalon's autoguns to intimidate the Predacons into leaving.
While fruitlessly trying to contact the orbital stasis pod network from the Darksyde, Tarantulas discovered that his earlier experiment had indeed paid off: his attempts to hack the Maximal pods had yielded Blackarachnia, who'd taken the initiative of deorbiting the remaining stasis pods and infecting many of them with the same program Tarantulas had used to turn her into a Predacon. However, Tarantulas found that Blackarachnia was no slave, but a fiercely independent warrior who refused to take orders from anyone. Tarantulas attended Megatron's celebration commemorating their new member, but quickly found himself the object of suspicion when Megatron pointedly remarked that Tarantulas had "forgotten" to inform Megatron of this new development.
When Terrorsaur played a cruel prank on Skold by locking her in the ship's brig, Tarantulas and the other Predacons watched the ship's security system in shock as the little Predacon befriended and decapitated their prisoner Powerhug. Some time later, Tarantulas and Blackarachnia worked together to construct an elaborate maze designed to trap Maximals, then used (and subsequently abandoned) Waspinator as a guinea pig to test it. When Rhinox blundered into their trap, he found a pre-recorded message in which the two argued over who would take the credit for the trap.
As Terrorsaur's impatience with Megatron's leadership grew, he grew bold enough to directly criticize their commander, and found himself on the receiving end of a savage beatdown. Fortunately, Tarantulas used one of his inventions to save Terrorsaur before Megatron could deliver the killing blow; the moment Megatron turned his back, he warned Terrorsaur that he'd saved him only because he'd need the spare parts one day. When the Maximals launched a full-scale assault on the Darksyde to retrieve the Golden Disk and disable their transwarp drive, Tarantulas fetched up against Nyx once again, but couldn't stop her from blasting the delicate transwarp engine and permanently destroying it. A furious Tarantulas transformed to attack, but wound up immobilized by Nyx's new taser. Although Tarantulas survived the battle, not all of his comrades were as lucky: Terrorsaur perished, and while the other Predacons licked their wounds Tarantulas eagerly took custody of Terrorsaur's corpse and got to work, promising his dead comrade that he'd find new purpose beyond death.
When Scorponok and Waspinator discovered a mysterious sample of red energon in the jungle, Tarantulas analyzed it and discovered that the substance possessed unusual aggression-increasing properties. He and Blackarachnia found a way to weaponize the substance into an explosive, then ambushed Optimus Primal and Dinobot while the two Maximals were alone in the jungle and escaped after planting the bomb on Dinobot's back.
At some point around this time, Tarantulas came into contact with the enigmatic Vok, aliens who hailed from unspace and the self-appointed guardians of this world, who sought to permanently remove the Maximals and Predacons from their planet. In exchange for the secrets of the universe, Tarantulas betrayed his fellow Cybertronians; while he worked behind the scenes to undermine the tentative Maximal-Predacon alliance, he also made the direct step of locating every fallen stasis pod he could find and reprogramming the Predacons within into loyal "Children of the Vok" who would serve as shock troopers in their impending assault on the Cybertronians.
However, when Rhinox and Scorponok discovered that someone had used Megatron's access code to disable the Darksyde's transwarp drive, Megatron immediately realized that Tarantulas, the only other Predacon who could've known the code, had been working against them. Tarantulas tried to flee to the Vok, but Dinobot impaled the Predacon scientist with his sword and brought him back to the Darksyde for questioning. In retaliation, Tarantulas activated his hidden experiment: since taking custody of Terrorsaur's corpse, he'd rebuilt him into a monstrous, mindless, physically-enhanced zombie. "Experiment ZT-Omega" made short work of his captors, then freed Tarantulas so that he could send a message to Cybertron using the Darksyde's jury-rigged transwarp drive in the hopes that someone could send a ship to their space-time coordinates and rescue him.
As the Children of the Vok besieged the Predacon base, Tarantulas gleefully took in the chaos until Blackarachnia attacked him. However, the arrival of the Vok interrupted their fight. The inscrutable aliens had come to the conclusion that all Cybertronians were inherently violent and could not be allowed to live, and powered up a massive reversion device to scour the planet clean. Together, the Maximals and Predacons successfully weaponized transwarp technology to banish both the aliens and Megatron, and Tarantulas slipped away amidst the confusion. With Megatron gone, Blackarachnia took command of the remaining Predacons and decided that, before leaving the planet, they'd track down the treacherous scientist and kill him.
