Chapter One is mostly background info. It gets more interesting in Chapter Two, I promise, but the Makers have to be described somehow. And seeing as how their origins haven't been explored yet in the movie universe, I'm going to do something similar to the old explanation and twist it around a lot! with my imagination, heavily infusing it with ideas I came up with for a master-race for an original fic I was writing ages ago. It's not like there aren't five or six continuities in existence, happily contradicting away. So don't kill me. Yet.

Chapter One

True immortals have no souls.

Even the term "immortal" is a paradox. How can an Immortal die? Yet they have before, and they will do so again. Their deaths, like their lives, wreak unspeakable havoc on their surroundings.

True Immortals have an unimaginable hate for all mortals, for they have no ability to create something original, and mortals do. They hate us because we are alive. They hate us because we can love and feel joy. They hate us because we can give birth, both figuratively and literally, to completely new creations.

And most of all, they hate us because we are doomed to die.

Immortals are trapped in this universe. Even if, by some miraculous combination of fortune, you manage to kill one, its malicious spirit will linger, a strain of taint on the world.

No one knows how they made themselves immortal. They came from a previous universe, using a transcendance field to carry their essences into what is now known to be a critical universe (a universe where space is nearly flat). The transcendance field is created by a device that can compact and alter the elemental composition of matter and even freeze time within itself, if it is immensely strong, requiring the contained energy of a massive black hole.

After a programmed period of time, the field expanded its inner temporary dimensions, and the denizens out of time were unleashed on the next universe, using the "skipping stone" spaceflight technology they had developed prior to their immortalization.

They fell into the young universe that would one day be home to our tiny, insignificant solar system. As they began to explore their new home, they came to realize that there was nothing more they could make. They could come up with no innovations. Their massive power, their abilities to harness and control incredible energies, their talent at manipulating DNA and other genetic codes, and their dazzling technological advancements were enough to make them godlike in our universe, yet they were stuck at a constant level, frozen in time. They turned to feeding off other intelligences, using drugs, torture, mind control, coercion and bribery to control the races they encountered. Some they enslaved, others became their allies in the worlds of mortals, but still others became their bitter enemies.

So it was that over time they developed a depth of hatred and malice for mortals that was so deep that its influence could be felt in the far reaches of the galaxies they visited. Everywhere they went they left poison, turmoil and chaos, reveling in others' suffering, hating their decadence, loving their madness, shamelessly courting their demise. For they knew that they could not truly die, and this made them reckless and bitter and drove them to insanity. Often the mortals they imprisoned were kept mercilessly alive. Sometimes, seemingly counterproductively, they made races stronger, giving them unbelievable advancements, lavishing new wonders upon them. Then suddenly, swinging in the opposite direction, they seeded poisons both literal and figurative into their pet races, reveling in the slow suffering of their demise.

Astonishingly, they seldom directly killed anything. They loathed openly taking other lives, because release from this world was the one thing they could never have. They forced entire races into battles so terrible that it would drive the participant peoples into extinction. They forced unspeakable madness on mortals, breaking and rebuilding their minds with meticulous care, repeatedly driving many nearly to madness and then pulling them back in a bizarre simulation of their own existence. Furiously, with insane energy, they sought to bend the universe to their image and to be its absolute rulers.

No one has ever accused them of being very logical beings.

So it was that they finally sought, in a moment of sanity, to truly build a people. It was arguably their single most redeeming and most damning work known to the race in question, for they created a force they could not conceive of-a bizarre blend of the inanimate and the living, the mortal and the immortal. They gave them some of their greatest secrets-some of their treasured knowledge of the mechanics of what lies beyond and between dimensions and their knowledge of and ability to create and manipulate transcendence fields being only a few of the greatest of these.

And they gave them life. Some might call it a mere imitation of such, but it was life nonetheless. It was sentience, and more than that, it was a strange synthesis of the essence of a living soul and the heart of the driving force behind dimensional structure itself.

Their prototype was one that would emulate their ways, one that would be a terrible mockery of themselves-but it was to be a mortal. But during its making, two of the Makers, what some might call siblings, left and journeyed across the galaxy alone. They were new additions to their people in this universe, their transcendence pods' systems having managed the space-skips only relatively recently.

And so it was that they came to orbit a lone star in one of the Milky Way's arms, which they named Máril'Dhaani, "Mortal Flame" in the verbal tongue of the first race they encountered, the Anorians. It was a young golden G-type sun with a long, stable life ahead of it and a comparatively quiet habitable zone.

These particular Makers were some of the few who had splintered from the main body of their race. They loved the life that was lost to them, but they paid little heed to those others who possessed it. They did not make races, for in their old time they were renowned for once building a world. They made things of stone and metal, gem and crystal, fire and water and air, but not of life in its various manifestations. Their works were made with painstaking detail and expert craftsmanship, so that their names are lost beneath the others that many races have since given them.

Their calculations were flawless, and as usual, none would find fault with their work. They sought out the star's habitable zone and began slowly to sift through what remained of the star's asteroid belt, using transcendence fields to manipulate the collected matter. Within those fields, pressures and temperatures this universe has not known since its violent birth transformed the material, creating elements this time has never seen, along with variations of some of the more common ones. And over a span of countless millennia, a world was born, formed out of ancient yet new things.

It wasn't long before one of their number discovered them and marveled at this newest work, as much art as efficiency. Together they stood at the feet of the newly-cooled crystal mountain ranges, looking up at the first sunrise the world had seen in its stable form. This would be the place for their semi-mortal race, but that race had to find it.

Upon seeing what their former companions were building, the first sibling turned to the second and said: "It is time we ended our forced isolation from the lands and minds of mortal and immortal alike."

The second nodded. "There must be balance. Surely someone remembers a time when we owere Balance, not Discord, neither good nor evil, guardians of the Walls of Time, as terrible as the foundations of the universe."

The first nodded. "Then so it shall come to pass. We shall build a companion for this creature of the dark, and unlike us he shall be a creature of the light. There will be Balance, because it must be so; it can be no other way, nor will it ever be."

"But bear in mind that total light is as impossible as total dark," the second cautioned.

Bitterly the first laughed. "I know well the ways of the eternal battle, and how they always mix and become one and the same. Unknowingly, good and evil forever court their mutual dissolution."

They brought their proposition before the others of their race, confident that Balance would be upheld, even unknowingly, by these insane minds. And with a touch of their usual madness, they agreed that the two should build a creature of the light as a counterpart to Discord, savoring the thought of the struggle to come.

Little did they know to what they had agreed.

So the two set out to create the greatest living being known to science, forged of metals and composites and crystals known to few existing worlds-the wise, ageless visionary to balance the dark, chaotic warrior. The two were left far away, on the remains of a broken world that was hurled away from its dying sun, until their programmed time of awakening.

So the predecessors of the Transformers came to be.