Our third early review of the week is for the highly anticipated More Than Meets the Eye #20! More Than Meets the Eye #20 is out tomorrow – Wednesday, August 28th – from IDW Publishing. Check out the review and a seven-page preview on our More Than Meets the Eye #20 page of our Comics Resource Section!
WilyMech
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He used the disguise function in Spotlight Mirage where he infiltrated the Autobot base. Organic eyes can still detect Mirage even when he used the disrupters to activate his ability
TF14
Wait a minute I just realized that it's very well possible that Chromedome is no longer able to interface with people anymore, now that he lost one of his arms to Overlord and removed his syringes and gave them Getaway (unless of course Ratchet gave him new ones when he rebuilt his arm)
SMOG
Predator camo is cool, but that's not quite it either. According to his original description, Mirage can't actually hide himself from view, either by invisibility or by camouflage. What his Electro-Disrupter does is "throw" his image somewhere else… making him very much live up to his name. Whoever is affected by the Disrupter actually sees an illusory image of Mirage, but probably several meters away from where he really is. So every time you would try to hit him, you'd miss… but he would still be visible.
Of course, his Disruptor can also change his appearance, which I guess would be a "disguise" function… but I suppose that might also be used to change his colours or shape, to camouflage himself similar to the Predator… so maybe that could still work.
zmog
Infosaur
I still say the easiest ret-con out of that is that Minimus Ambus's alt-mode is some sort of internal organ. In biologic terms what if he transformed into a "heart-lung-ribcage" so if you weren't actively LOOKING for it, you wouldn't think it was a separate biological entity.
Robots in disguise, indeed!
I like that,,, a lot.
So instead of truly being invisible, he has the "predator" effect?
Classic.
Kraken
Prowl doesn't necessarily know where it is. Like Getaway said, he and Skids had to do an awful lot of leg work under their Diplomatic Corps guise to track him down.
The incident with the Brain Bullet was happening just as the Lost Light was leaving Cybertron, hence the fact that Skids arrived through the portal, activated by his Homing Device which took him to Shock and Ore, when they were landed on the planet in number 2 picking up their lost from the accident.
TF14
Just a quick question did Prowl send Getaway and Skids to Luna 1 to deal with Tyrest (implying that Prowl has known where it is for at least two years now) or did Tyrest relocate there after the incident with the brain bullet?
Kraken
No, it didn't. He never noticed it because the blank he fired on himself erased all memory of it, and he is unable to form any new memories of it because the effects of the blank erase them straight away. So he'd be told about it, look at it, and then immediately forget about it.
If there was an AD installed then nobody would have noticed it, and as soon as anyone had, the effects would have ceased working for them immediately.
FantomLibrarian
Ah…that's right. I really need to reread before 21, I'm losing my mind here with anticipation!
Murasame
Might have been a bit cooler if some of the info was given a bit earlier, so that we could have had some time to guess around. Now it all makes sense, but the story is nearly over.
edgs2099
No, everyone could see Skids gun. Skids could even see Skids gun, but the memory erasey bullet made Skids forget the gun after he was done looking at it.
FantomLibrarian
I thought Skid's gun did have attention deflectors…which was why he never noticed it. Either that or Getaway has AD-resistant equipment.
Kraken
There were no AD's on, or in, Skids gun, ever. The only attention deflectors that are in the story are in Ultra Magnus's armour, and Brainstorm's briefcase. The one's in the briefcase were fully activated before they landed on Luna One, that's why it wasn't taken off him when they were captured,as Brainstorm points out at the very point we learn of the existence of such a thing. As to how Getaway can see it, it's not hard to deduce really. The AD only works if you don't know it's there. Getaway and Brainstorm both work for Prowl, they both have ties to the new Institute, it's not a massive stretch to assume they know each other. If they've met before then Getaway will know that Brainstorm always carries his briefcase. Since he knows that Brainstorm always carries his briefcase the attention deflectors that stop you seeing the briefcase unless you know about it's existence, simply won't work.
Ipso facto.
FantomLibrarian
Or maybe Brainstorm added the ADs after he found the ADs in/on Skid's binary gun…
TF14
I've been rereading MTMTE recently and I just got up to the part in the Annual where Rodimus and co. Are inside Ultra Magnus and Skids says something along the lines of "Classic Wreckers it's all bang bang reload bang, close quarters combat is a fine art observe" and I instantly thought of Getaway's "Wreckers done right" line
SPLIT LIP
He didn't install them yet?
The dialogue made it sound like they were a recent addition. That or if the individual has knowledge of it, the ADs don't work. Afterall, his briefcase is famous.
Murasame
I'm just re-reading the whole story, and I was wondering, did not Brainstorm's briefcase have attention deflectors as well? Then why did Red Alert ask him to check his briefcase?
SMOG
See, that would be more fun… to actually break down the mechanics of how his powers work, kind of like the old Specs did.
Of course, Split Lip right notes that Transformers are machines… like us.
It's easy to forget sometimes that we're just organic machines, but we're wired for electricity too (that's a bit part of how our brain and central nervous system works, after all). In that sense, I'm not sure how making that point makes attention deflectors MORE credible in Transformers than it would be in humans, though…
However, despite the similarities, obviously the human and cybertronian electrical/cognitive processes are very very different, so it's unlikely that Mirage's Electro Distrupter would work the same way on humans.
It does remind me of Blaster's old bio though, where they discuss how his Electro-Scrambler works…
"In robot form he carries an electro-scrambler gun, which emits powerful waves of electromagnetic energy that disrupt the operations of all but the most heavily shielded electrical devices. In theory, the gun should interfere with the minute electrical impulses of the human nervous system, but Blaster has never used the gun on a human."
zmog
Murasame
this
Would be funny if Mirage's invisibility would work the same way. Especially in a story involving humans. Cybertronian's would not see Mirage anymore, Mirage walking gently through the crowd and all the people still looking at him, because it does not work on them
SPLIT LIP
The only reason Attention Deflectors don't bug the shit out of me is two reasons:
1. They haven't been used much so far.
2. For the same reason I like the Thought Warfare and "nudge guns" stuff, I don't mind ADs because they work on a very practical principle we often forget: these are robots. Attention deflectors could omit a jamming frequency that creates blank zones in their vison they don't even register. Or something more complicated. But I buy it because it kinda makes sense with them being machines. They may be highly emotive and act just like people, but like people they are ultimately a collection of parts and mechanisms, ones that advanced science can fool.
There's no reason to retcon Shadowplay. Just don't abuse it or make it into something it isn't.