Overshoot

Overshoot is a Maximal from the Beast Era portion of the Generation 1 continuity family.

Yay! I'm relevant!

Overshoot is a member of the elite Maximal Command Security Force. His job is to uphold the will of the Maximal Imperium on Cybertron in the name of the Pax Cybertronia. Though to be totally honest, he'd much rather be watching movies. He's a crack shot and all, but his service to the Security Force is compulsory, and as soon as his time is up, he's out of there, and into the theater.^[1]

Fiction

Beast Wars: Uprising

Overshoot joined the MSCF in the hopes of avoiding the deadly Games, while also shaking down dealers for bribes and extorting Empties. Instead, he wound up guarding an Overcharge depot for forty stellar cycles, waiting for his term to run out so he could move to Crystal City. His paintjob went to pot under the acid rain, he came up with various reasons why Overcharges were called that, and he grew increasingly maudlin about how Cybertron was full of great architecture that was allowed to decay and that they could never make now.

When the Grand Uprising kicked off, Overshoot became grateful for his remote position, far away from the war. He just had to make sure the drones he oversaw were ready for potentially defending the nearby Melpomene Bridge. Traumatised true-believer Stiletto was sent to join him and they took a while to get on. She also mentioned Crystal City had been destroyed, much to his horror.

When the Resistance attacked the bridge, Overshoot was able to take out three opponents and drive off the remaining fifteen... only for 96 more warriors to show up. Realizing that the Overcharges weren't going to be able to repel the attack, he hit on a plan to overload their engines so they'd blow up and destroy the bridge. He needed, and trusted, Stiletto to fly him to safety before it detonated. She did! Then, when Resistance commander Bighorn attacked and almost killed him, she saved him again and Overshoot overheard just what the trauma in her background was. The two trekked on to the nearest city, Overshoot telling new Overcharge jokes to keep her distracted. Burning Bridges

Late into the war, the two Maximals were still on the run together, having abandoned the MSCF and eluding the occasional patrol until the organization and its members mysteriously vanished. While picking their way through wartorn Proximax, the two stumbled on an abandoned MSCF fortress. Though neither Overshoot nor Stiletto were able to glean any information about where their old organization had gone, they found a Darksyder Beast Pod in the fortress and used it to give themselves beast modes; after some deliberation, Overshoot chose the form of an armodrillo. No sooner had he upgraded when he experienced a series of strange visions that led him and Stiletto through Proximax, where they stumbled across a battle between the Constructicons and the Resistance on the Hoist Metrospan. Acting on impulses that weren't entirely his, Overshoot encouraged Stiletto to intervene in the fight, recruiting the misanthropic experiment Rampage, the disillusioned second-generation Constructicon Buckethead, and ex-Resistance warrior Snapper, believing that they were key to saving Cybertron from an unknown enemy. Although Overshoot tried to keep the new recruits from going at one another, Rampage wasn't inclined to cooperate and blasted the bridge, sending all five of them tumbling into the depths of Cybertron.

The quintet survived the fall, and on awakening Overshoot managed to get everyone to calm down by telling them that they were needed for something. The five Transformers clambered down through Cybertron's depths until they reached a chamber containing the mythical Oracle. At the computer's behest, Overshoot entered the Oracle and was granted a series of visions depicting the chaos of the Uprising: though the Oracle prophesied the war would restore balance to Cybertron, the Oracle warned Overshoot of a group of intruders from "beyond"—the "spawn of Antares seeking to derail the new order. On returning to reality, Snapper remembered a group of Predacons going by that name, who had recently gleaned knowledge of the vastly superior Human Confederacy!

The gang returned to the surface, only to find that the self-christened "Antares Eight" had laid siege to a trans-hyperwave caster on the outskirts of Proximax. A running battle ensued between Overshoot's forces and the Antares Eight, which went well for the Cybertronians until Creepy shot Stiletto in the back. The 'bots were forced to stand down as Vamp interrogated the group, demanding to know who the leader was. When Overshoot admitted to being the leader, Vamp casually shot him in the chest, and the Maximal bled out and died.

Thanks to his connections to the Oracle, however, Overshoot's consciousness remained, an incorporeal presence that only Stiletto could perceive. As Stiletto struggled to escape from the sinister Erebos and decipher the plans of the Antares Eight, she experienced periodic flashbacks of her time in the Overcharge bunker and remembering conversations that had never really happened as Overshoot's ghost prodded her thoughts.

As Proximax descended into all-out war between the Transformers and GoBots, Overshoot's ghost was confronted with a choice: he could join the Allspark now—and abandon Stiletto—or remain in the material plane for an indeterminate period of time. Overshoot chose the latter, manipulating more of Stiletto's memories to warn her about Klaws, who had escaped the battle and was now threatening to annihilate both the Transformers and humans with a weaponized transmission pulse. Thanks to him, Stiletto was able to neutralize the threat in time, and Overshoot realized that he was content with staying by Stiletto's side for the time being. Cultural Appropriation

Overshoot continued to linger on the edge of Stiletto's consciousness as she took control of the "Ex-Bots", as their team came to be called, and coordinated rescue missions across Cybertron. On one adventure, he provided her with crucial information about Tarantulas. Shortly afterwards, he warned Stiletto that her 'bots were needed in Protihex and Nova Cronum as the Vehicon Apocalypse threatened to overrun Cybertron.

When the Vehicons had been defeated, Stiletto chatted with Overshoot one last time; the Maximal ghost explained the Oracle's role in the Grand Uprising, and how the mechanimals and beast-formers that now roamed Cybertron represented the next evolutionary step for the mechanical world and its inhabitants. His job done, Overshoot faded away, rejoining the Oracle forever. Derailment

Notes

• Overshoot—like all of the MCSF—uses the Cybertron-series Clocker toy as a base (with a modified Machine Wars Skywarp/Thundercracker head), though no official Overshoot toy exists (and probably never will). His color scheme is based somewhat loosely on the Armada Decepticon Wheeljack. Unlike most characters, he kept his pre-existing design for Beast Wars: Uprising until "Cultural Appropriation", where he swapped it out in favor of an armodrillo beast-body based off of Armordillo.

References

1. ↑ Profile in Hasbro Transformers Collectors' Club #13