stunt_muppet

The reason G1!Optimus Prime's trailer disappears and reappears whenever he needs it is because it's actually a TARDIS. But he doesn't know it is.

For some reason, Alpha Trion had a young TARDIS in his laboratory (a refugee from the Time War, perhaps?), and he figured that maybe this mysterious transdimensional thing was the key to rebuilding an Autobot successfully. So he included this TARDIS in Prime's schematics - couldn't actually make it a part of him on account of how it was, you know, sentient, but he could designate Prime as its 'pilot', like the Rassilon Imprimatur but with robots. When Prime turns back into a robot, the trailer-TARDIS looks through time and space, senses where it will next need to be, and appears there to re-connect to him. Optimus himself doesn't know how it works, because hey, it's debatable whether he remembers that Alpha Trion built him (that's a rather large continuity hole between "The Search for Alpha Trion" and "War Dawn"), he almost certainly wouldn't remember anything special about the trailer, and besides, if he tried to disassemble it to figure out how it worked there was a chance it might not work anymore (not that Wheeljack hasn't offered).

But that's how he's able to transport heavy machinery, weapons, and even (I think) multiple other robots inside it - it's dimensionally transcendental! And that explains why the Matrix of Leadership wasn't in his chest compartment in the pre-Movie series besides the fact that it hadn't been written in yet but shush, Doylist explanations are not nearly as much fun - it was in the trailer the whole time. See, Prime may not have known that his trailer could travel through time and space, but he knew that no matter how often he got captured, injured, or disassembled, nobody ever got their hands on the trailer, not long enough to retrieve anything important from it. So he put it in there for safekeeping, and the trailer gave it back just before the movie because it had looked through time and sensed that Prime would need to pass it on soon.

THIS SOLVES EVERYTHING. Kind of. And I'm positive that somehow I can use it for that crossover I once planned out where Rose, instead of falling into the Void between dimensions, ended up in Axiom Nexus after "Doomsday", and the Doctor has to negotiate with the TransTechs via Vector Prime to retrieve her. Or alternately, I could just write about the life of a Trailer TARDIS, and what it does with its life after its robot partner is mercilessly killed off to sell new toys.

...I am an enormous nerd.


(And the worst part of it is, this thought entered my head while I was on my walk today. No, really, Unconscious Mind, don't bother thinking about jobs or assignments or anything that will actually be remotely useful.)

In further nerdery, I simply must get my wee fangirl mitts on the Shattered Glass comic. I was all for it already because mirror universes are always fun, but evil!Rodimus has a Goatee of Evil a la Mirror Universe!Spock and this pleases me greatly. Now all we need is for evil!Optimus to somehow acquire an eyepatch and the homages will be complete!

Back to work, back to work.