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| - Shrapnel and ash. Rubble and ruin. The detritus of destruction, and the cinders of slaughter. This is Vos, home of the brave, land of the valiant – the city that raised its young on steel and obeyed no law but natural selection. This city of shadows, a vast wasteland of creaking debris and craters like weeping sores, is all that remains of Cybertron’s famed gladiatorial nation, a testament to the sheer brutality of nuclear war. The sun has not seen this pitiful husk for centuries, leaving its dust-shrouded wastes in perpetual darkness, save for the eerie glow of irradiated carcasses and the occasional flicker of small-arms fire between skirmishing treasure hunters. It was not always like this. In Cybertron’s Golden Age, long before the ravages of the Great War tore the planet asunder; Vos
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| abstract
| - Shrapnel and ash. Rubble and ruin. The detritus of destruction, and the cinders of slaughter. This is Vos, home of the brave, land of the valiant – the city that raised its young on steel and obeyed no law but natural selection. This city of shadows, a vast wasteland of creaking debris and craters like weeping sores, is all that remains of Cybertron’s famed gladiatorial nation, a testament to the sheer brutality of nuclear war. The sun has not seen this pitiful husk for centuries, leaving its dust-shrouded wastes in perpetual darkness, save for the eerie glow of irradiated carcasses and the occasional flicker of small-arms fire between skirmishing treasure hunters. It was not always like this. In Cybertron’s Golden Age, long before the ravages of the Great War tore the planet asunder; Vos and its neighbouring city-state Tarn were the homes of the greatest gladiatorial games history had known. Warrior fought fellow warrior, or pitted his skills against fearsome beasts brought to the city by its famed galactic explorers, in valiant displays of martial skill and prowess. In the city’s prime, stories concerning legendary gladiators were passed from generation to generation, most famously that of Il Millione, the swashbuckling hero who explored two scores worlds in Cybertron’s name, each time bringing back the fiercest animal he could summon to personally slay in Vos’ arenas. However, no two cities could both call themselves home to the planet’s greatest warriors, and bitter enmity developed between the people of Vos and those of Tarn. Each sought to outdo each other, their games becoming less and less about martial pride and more about producing the most savage spectacle possible for the increasingly bloodthirsty populace – something which Vos, the larger of the two city-states, was able to do, churning more and more of its children into the meat-grinder that the arena system had debased itself to. However, much of this ruthless progression was in fact driven by the Republic, a secretive union of the most ferocious and violent survivors of Vos’ blood sports. The Republic had long existed, even in the glorious and proud days of the pits, beginning life as a trade union of sorts, ensuring that the fighters remained free men and not slaves sent to die. However, greed and savagery soon found a home in its ranks, and once the rot had set it, its spread was irreversible. Within decades of its inception, the Republic had become a private enterprise, a faceless force running the pit fighting – and, through the combination of its vast coffers and the willing puppet they found in an ambitiously political-minded scientist named Starscream, they soon found themselves running the city-state of Vos. While the people of Vos remained ignorant to this fact – or, in light of the prosperity the games continued to bring, kept their heads in the sand – the military dictatorship ruling Tarn were well aware of it; and feared that their arenas would breed a similar result. As such, Shockwave, the callously logical figurehead of Tarn’s junta, openly declared war upon Vos. At first, the conflict was intended to divert the Republic’s attention from the pits to the war effort – however, when the ferocity of Vos’ army, mostly conscripted from the murderous pit fighters, overwhelmed Tarn’s military zones, the junta began firing their stockpile of thermonuclear artillery at their sister city without warning. At first, the burning and broken Vos seemed as though it would capitulate, but a last minute decision was made by Starscream, seemingly pressured by a force other than the Republic, to launch a retaliatory strike. Any hopes of a victor in the struggle were dashed, and within two months of the war’s commencement, neither of these once-glorious cities could boast of so much as a three-storey building left standing.
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