Jetstorm's History
Jetstorm was one of the original Vehicon Generals constructed by Megatron. To give him sentience, he was given Silverbolt's spark.
Jetstorm came online alongside fellow generals Tankor and Thrust, when Megatron realized that controlling his vast armies of Vehicon drones directly was beyond even his mental capacities. In order to more efficiently guide his forces, he created the Vehicon generals to serve as field commanders answering directly to him. Showing a twisted sense of humor, Megatron summoned the familiar sparks of two captured Maximals and one Predacon from the Beast Wars to be his puppets, installing personality shell programs to make them unrecognizable by their former comrades and foes alike. For the bombastic and cruel Jetstorm, he used the spark of the noble and chivalrous Fuzor called Silverbolt.
Jetstorm made his entrance alongside Thrust and Tankor, with Rattrap and Blackarachnia as his audience. When the spider lady noted that three mindless drones shouldn't be a problem, Jetstorm stunned the Maximals by replying that one, they weren't drones; two, they weren't mindless; and three, "Problem" was his middle name. Jetstorm teamed up with Thrust against Blackarachnia, strafing her from the air and obliging her with a ride through the skies after she webbed herself to him. When they initially lost the Maximals' signatures, Jetstorm was the first to detect them inside the spaceport terminal building, and the chase resumed, ending with a firefight between the generals and Optimus Primal and Cheetor that caused the destruction of the Autobot shuttle Omega-Delta.
Berated by Megatron after his team's failures, Jetstorm protested that he'd almost captured the Maximals, only for the "others to screw him up. Unsurprisingly, Megatron didn't buy it. After a couple of painful jolts and a promise of either reward or suffering, the three generals hit the road to find the Maximals. When Thrust stopped and began to brood, Jetstorm confronted him and demanded to know what the problem was, instigating a fight with the Cycle Commander. While they were dueling, the two picked up the Maximals' signatures and took off, only to find Tankor had beaten them to the prize. Teaming up with Thrust, Jetstorm attacked Tankor, landing a solid hit on him but ultimately getting himself knocked out when Tankor's counterattack blew up a fuel tank which walloped everyone but him. Later, Jetstorm angrily told Thrust he never wanted to see "that slagging turret-head" again—right before they were blasted back and then crushed by a falling Tankor.
A sub-surface scan picked up Cheetor's Maximal signature, and Jetstorm brought some Aerodrones to play. He went right for the new guy, hoping to teach Bat Boy some new lessons in pain. Optimus shook him off, though, and the beasties made a run for it. Jetstorm pursued with a homing bomb, setting it to lock onto the Maximals before zooming in to detonate at close range. Nightscream scrambled its locking mechanism with some hypersonics, however, and the bomb went after the Aerodrones instead! One big plume of flame later, Nightscream pressed his advantage by sonic-scrambling the drones up close, getting them to fire on each other and their general. Jetstorm was fuming, and swore to return with a full battalion to fry the animals.
Jetstorm and his Vehicons tracked the Maximals to an underground orchard soon afterwards. Jetstorm gunned down the mouthy punk bat as revenge for earlier, but then Optimus Primal reformatted Nightscream into a techno-organic. The blasted kid now had sonic blasts, and he shot down Jetstorm's wingmen, then Jetstorm himself. Weakened from the fight, Jetstorm initiated an evacuation sequence in his remaining drones, to live to blight another day.
The generals met up with the Maximals again at a Vehicon manufacturing plant. Cheetor and Nightscream were in the process of leading Jetstorm and Tankor into a trap when Rattrap bungled into the picture. Of course, his bungling still knocked the two generals for a loop. After a power surge knocked out at least three quarters of Megatron's power, the backwash also took Jetstorm and the others off-line for the remainder of the solar cycle.
In another chase, Jetstorm and the Vehicon generals attacked the Maximals near the spark extraction facility where Cybertron's populace was broken down for parts. Jetstorm's greatest nemesis during this battle was not the Maximals, but the randomly backfiring coolant vents that littered the area. He just had no luck with those things at all. Next, Jetstorm and Thrust responded to Nightscream and Blackarachnia blatantly causing a distraction in the midst of Cybertropolis. Jetstorm toyed with the fruity bat boy for a while before the brat fanged him. He soon confronted Thrust about how he was clearly not shooting at Blackarachnia. Thrust finally took the shot, but Jetstorm used the power of peer pressure to push him into finishing the job. Nightscream intervened, only to take himself and Thrust temporarily out of action. Jetstorm stepped in with style and used the portable spark extractor to steal the spider's spark for himself. Once he had her spark, Jetstorm took off to bring his prize to Megatron, and maybe earn a prize of his own. Nightscream was right behind him, though, and he swiped back the spark extractor. Jetstorm was so furious about losing the spark that his jovial mask slipped briefly, and he tore after the Maximal in an absolute rage. Pursuing Nightscream into a building, Jetstorm thought he'd cornered the punk in an elevator shaft until Nightscream dropped the car down on top of him. It hurt, but nowhere near as much as the pun.
When Megatron's Diagnostic Drone suggested Nightscream might hold the key to eliminating his eminence's beast mode, Megatron sent Jetstorm and the Vehicons to accompany the drone on a Maximal hunt. Jetstorm faced off against Blackarachnia, taking a few shots at the little lady before being caught up in her cyber-webs, giving her time to confront Thrust. The two of them stared longingly into each other's optics until Jetstorm blasted her from behind...he just couldn't stand the suspense. They caught Nightscream only to lose him again, and Jetstorm and Thrust chased him down to Cybertron's organic dirt layers. The other maximals caught up with them, and Blackarachnia looked to even the score with Jetstorm. He teased her for a kiss; she dropped a boulder the size of a car on him.
Jetstorm and Thrust briefly appeared offering to hunt down the Maximals after they stole a Mole Drone, but Megatron informed them he already had plans for the "mole" among the heroes. After Tankor went off-line, Megatron held a funeral of sorts to learn what happened to his General. Jetstorm poetically sang the praises of his fallen comrade-in-arms, but managed to put aside his grief long enough to ask for power over the Tank Drones. Jetstorm and Thrust were then sent out with the Diagnostic Drone to locate a Maximal test subject to apply the key to Vector Sigma on. They soon chanced upon Blackarachnia, despite the Drone's curiously poor directions. Jetstorm got knocked for a loop when the spider-bot's touch proved to have more of a charge than he bargained for. He managed to track down her and Thrust, but lost consciousness for a while after a canister bounced off his head. When he woke up, the Maximal femme was looking at him all dopey-like. Then she started calling him Silverbolt, which was just downright unnerving.
As both sides geared up for the endgame, Jetstorm and Thrust prepared for the battle at hand. The struggle escalated, and Jetstorm found himself face-to-face with Blackarachnia. He made it clear to her in no uncertain terms that Silverbolt was gone when he summoned some Tank Drones to techno-ize her with the power of their Keys. The final blow was put off, however, when Megatron and Optimus Primal unleashed their respective doomsday weapons, threatening to tear the entire planet asunder.
In the aftermath of the energy backlash created by the Key and the Plasma Energy Chamber, Cybertron was off-line and Tankor, Megatron and Primal were believed dead. Jetstorm and Thrust attempted to continue the fight with the remaining Maximals because, well, they had nothing better to do. And besides, the spider-bot was really getting on Jetstorm's nerves by pining away for Silverbolt, and not recognizing the glorious perfection of his Vehicon form. Although they called off the fight, Jetstorm couldn't stand the idea of following the spotted furball, and took off with Thrust to make their own way on the lifeless world.
They didn't get far. Mere hours later, the Vehicons were under fire from a horrendous dragon creature they nicknamed "Savage". Believing the beast to be another Maximal, they attacked Cheetor and crew when they next crossed paths. Already on a short fuse, Jetstorm practically exploded when Blackarachnia called him Silverbolt again. Once they realized the Maximals weren't behind Savage, Jetstorm and Thrust tried working with them, but that kitty cat was just too big for his britches. When Cheetor demanded they keep the creature alive for questioning, Jetstorm volunteered to bring back several large pieces for Cheetor to chat with as much as he liked. Bravado aside, Jetstorm was quickly crispy-fried and knocked into the distance by Savage's fireballs.
After Megatron came back on-line and reassumed control over Cybertron, Jetstorm and Thrust got their old jobs back as hired muscle. They caught Nightscream alone in the ruins and were toying with their prey when the other Maxies showed up. As always, Blackarachnia paired off against Jetstorm, but this time she had a trick up her eight sleeves: a spark extractor rigged to a DNA scanner. She slapped it on the unwitting Jetstorm's back and goaded him into chasing her. Eager to deal with her "crush" once and for all, Jetstorm pursued the spider at full speed underground, bobbing and weaving through the catacombs until she caught him in a net of cyber-webbing. This sent Jetstorm crashing into a pool of organic ooze from Cybertron's core, and a miraculous transformation began to take place. The spark extractor pulled his essence free from his Vehicon shell, as the DNA scanner began acquiring a beast mode based on the fossilized remains around them. The ooze then reformatted his body so that his new beast shell was automatically modified into a techno-organic hybrid. The radical reconstruction of his physical frame deleted the personality shell program that created Jetstorm as well. Therefore, mere moments after the Vehicon general named Jetstorm crashed into the organic ooze, a techno-organic Maximal once again called Silverbolt arose from where he had fallen.
