Time case
From Transformers Wiki
Thetime caseis atime traveldevice created byBrainstorm.There'snothing particularly conspicuousabout the small, sturdy, golden briefcase that its inventor owns, beyond the fact that whenever anyone else sees it on his person outside of his lab, it's always safely handcuffed to his wrist. Brainstorm takes delight in teasing anyone who asks about its contents with a mixture of bizarre facts that make it impossible to tell ifanythinghe's ever said about it is true.
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Fiction
2005 IDW continuity
Brainstorm took his time case toRoom 113to plead another case for hisUnmentionablesbefore theEthics Committee.When he passed Ironfist and Skyfall on the way, they asked about the case, and Brainstorm gleefully laid out the details of the "Malevolent Counterintuitive Pathogen" it contained which would be released if the case was ever opened. Skyfall dragged Ironfist off to theExit Roomsbefore he could find out whether Brainstorm was joking.Bullets
Brainstorm brought a time case with him when he joined theLost Light,justifying its exemption from security checks byRed Alertwith the "almost certainly serious" claim that if it was opened outside of a controlled environment, it'd be the "end of the world".How to Say Goodbye and Mean ItWhen aSparkeatergot loose aboard the ship soon after its departure fromCybertron,Brainstorm used his briefcase as a shield against the beast, and it coincidentally decided to leave him be.The Chaos of Warm Things
Later,Chromedomeclaimed he'd heard that Brainstorm opened the briefcase onHydrus 4and "the sun went out", to which Brainstorm replied that was a filthy stinking lie: It was actuallyHydrus 5.Rules of DisengagementStories like that made the briefcase something of a legend on the ship; when a disbelievingSwervesaw that Brainstorm had brought the case to a funeral for the ship's fallen crew, he decided that someday, somehow he would open it to see what would happen.The Gloaming
OnLuna 1,when a bemused Rodimus asked if Brainstorm was going to put a "Point One Percenter"sparkin the briefcase, Brainstorm remarked that he hadn't considered it, but that the prospect blew his mind.The Fecund MoonA short time later, during a battle withTyrestandPharma,a stray laser blast from Pharma severed the handcuff holding the case to Brainstorm's wrist.Arm the LonelySwerve took this chance to sneak open the briefcase, but found it seemingly empty and gave it no further thought.The One Where They Go to EarthBrainstorm was subsequently among those sent into convulsions by Tyrest's killswitch; after recovering, he reclaimed his case, but became suspicious that someone had opened it while he had been unconscious. He requested that Swerve keep an ear out for any chatter regarding this, with the grim warning that opening the case when he was not around wasnota wise thing to do.The Sound of Breaking Glass
When a few crew members discovered the remains of a quantum duplicateLost Light,Nautica and Nightbeat found the time case abandoned in a lift in the lower levels of the ship. Over Nautica's protests, Nightbeat opened the case, only to find it empty. Despite the pair's baffled conjecture as to where the contents might have gone, neither noticed local space/time warping around them as the case lay opened.slaughterhouse
After the "real"Lost Lightwas reinstated, they found time case was the only thing that refused to dissipate besides the ship's sole survivor,Rewind.Upon Brainstorm's outing as a Decepticon plant, he calmly walked intoSwerve'sand opened his time case, activating an electro-sensitive poison in Swerve'sEngexsupply and causing everyone on board—save teetotalersRungandUltra Magnus—to collapse.The Road Not TakenAfter Brainstorm's incapacitation of the latter and subsequent escape, an examination of his lab byPerceptoryielded several startling revelations about his briefcase—or rather,briefcases.His perennial arm-candy turned out to be but the control case for an entire system of interconnected cases tapped into theLost Light'squantum generator,which altogether functioned as a grandfather paradox-exempt time machine, allowing him to travel in time and space and rewrite history.Megatrontheorized that the scientist planned to kill a youngOrion Paxso that the Decepticons would win the war,The Custom-Made Nowthough the veracity of his theory was called into question when Brainstorm instead used the time case to travel to the mining outpost on antebellumMessatine,where the young Megatron was stationed.Births, Deaths, and Interventions
Rodimus led a team in pursuit, utilizing the recovered quantum-duplicate time case.All Our Parlous YesterdaysRealizing that Brainstorm intended to kill Megatron, not Orion Pax,Stetthe team traveled to the time of Megatron's construction, successfully apprehending Brainstorm and ensuring Megatron's existence. Brainstorm proceeded to explain that he had invented the time machine in order to save his unrequited loverQuarkfrom dying in Decepticon captivity though he later revised this goal to talking Megatron out of starting the war. After he was repeatedly thwarted (it turned out that theLost Lighters' journey through time was part of history andwas always meant to happen), Brainstorm defaulted to killing Megatron before he could be born. However, Brainstorm could not bring himself to pull the trigger on an under-construction Megatron's spark.Predestination: An Expert's Guide
History was safe, but the team's time case was out of power. Rodimus and Cyclonus then traveled to a secret facility inUnitrexfor the first interstellar starships. At Perceptor's instruction viatime phone,they turned an experimental generator into a quantum generator in order to recharge the time case (not realizing that the facility was in fact the under-constructionLost Lightand that they completed its quantum engines), and theLost Lighters returned to the present. The next day, Perceptor explained to Rung that the alternate timeline only came about because he tampered with the time machine's paradox locks and further theorized that it may exist asits own parallel universe.Predestination: An Expert's Guide
Later, after Brainstorm's disciplinary hearing, all the time cases were burned by Rodimus and Perceptor... save one, which was secretly recovered by Ravage for Megatron.Our Steps Will Always Rhyme
Swerve's exposure to the time case had the side effect of creating a time loop in hisholomattersystems, granting him the power to recycle his own energy flow and create otherwise impossibly large holomatter constructs, such asa replicaofEarth.The One Where They Go to Earth
Megatron ultimately dismissed the idea of changing his fate through time travel and buried the final time case on theNecroworld.There it was discovered byCensere,who used it to travel through time and retrieve "disappeared" Cybertronians, those whose fates had previously been recorded as unknown. The use of only one case to time travel was less stable, however, and left his rescuees suffering from "timesickness" that took some time to recover from. On awakening after Censere's death,Rollerreturned the case to the Autobots, allowing Rodimus to use it as a teleportation device to save Megatron from an antimatter explosion.Do Not Go Gentle
Many years after theLost Lighters' climactic battle with the ascendedFunctionists,the briefcase would be converted into a portable life-support unit for Brainstorm following his laboratory accident.How To Say Goodbye And Mean It: Part 2
Ask Vector Prime
The time-travel misadventure fundamentally altered the nature of this particularuniverse,changing it from a single deterministic reality stream into a universe with multiple offshoot realities, includingPrimax 1114.26 GammaAsk Vector Prime, 27/5/2015andPrimax 208.15 Gamma.Ask Vector Prime, 22/8/2015
Notes
- The naming "time case" was first given inMore than Meets the Eye#37.
