Faction: Predacon (Technorganic Maximal, officially, but he bears the Pred insignia)
Allegiance: Lightspawn

Type: Technorganic
Beast Mode: Firefly
Function: Ninja
height: 7 feet
Size: Medium
Theme Song: "Come As You Are" - Nirvana

Physical Desription:
-Beast Mode: Lightning bug, completely black, no highlights or trim. Admomen sucks up light rather than emitting it like any normal firefly's should.

-robot Mode: Tall and thin, but all muscle, tight and quick like Bruce Lee, and completely jet black other than his violet irises. Even the whites of his eyes are black. Aside from the metallic sheen off his ninja/optimus style facemask, chestplate, and some leg detailing, and some reflection off his mane of black hair, no light comes off him. Telling which parts are organic or technological is nearly impossible without detailed inspection. Blacklight rarely lets you get such a good look at him, save perhaps as your last ounce of life drains out of you at his sword. Curved Japanese style sword sheathed on his back, two smaller ones on his hips. Numerous compartments for small knives, some mechanical, some hidden in folds of flesh. Two jointed antennae on his head, spikes on elbow and knee joints, insect wings on back and a black orb at the center of his chest are other noticable features. Overall looks extremely humanoid, more Marvel character than robot, an insult to Transformer aesthetics. At first, he felt great shame in this, but the superior abilities of this form won him over. Having largely gotten over his guilt complex, he will even ocaisionally remove his facemask to reveal his shamefully beautiful face of the sort that makes anime fangirls squeak.

Strength: 6
Speed: 9
Skill: 10
Stamina: 8
Intelligence: 7
Firepower: 8
Discipline: 10
Aim: 5

Abilities:
-Swordfighting: Has been training in it all of his short life, can use pratically any bladed weapon with skill. Favors the katana for stylistic reasons, but is actually better with smaller blades, perhaps due to a natural inclination, more likely due to that being his primary teacher's expertise.
-Darklight: Chest orb and beast mode abdomen suck out light from the area around him within a 12 foot radius, fading out towards the edge of range. Works best in dark conditions when there are less photons to suck. Useful for hiding in the shadows and all that. Not an original ability by any means, but when it comes to Blacklight, few things are.
-Cloaking: Technically an extension of his Darklight ability, he can institute a far more powerful cloak over his body, however it takes lots of power and mental effort. At its maximum, usable for 30 clicks at most under the most dire of circumstances, he is completely undetectable. No energy signature, no spark traces, no telepathic giveaways, nothing. If he draws any weapon, it is outside the cloak and visible.
-Silent Running: Flies, breathes and moves in complete silence.
-Stealth: Well, duh. Like any good ninja, he is quite skilled at avoiding detection and capture without using any fancy abilities. In concert with his fancy abilities, can infiltrate practically any facility, no matter how well secured.
-Wall Crawling: Insect ability to cling to walls is retained in robot mode.
-Communications: Has had an encyclopedic knowledge of communications technology drilled into him by his mother. What's more, he actually remembers a good deal of it, and is good at working with what he does remember. Built in advanced com system, not nearly as powerful as Lightspeed's, but as good as any among the technorganics.
-Tech/Hacking: For a brooding loner type, Blacklight is surprisingly technically adept. He is very good at being aware of and hacking security systems (tripwires, hidden cameras, sensor systems, etc), dealing with cloaking devices and the like, etc. Some knowledge of traditional computer hacking, but in that arena is oonly really good at dealing with a few specific situations.
-Vision and Hearing: He emits UV rays, and can suck light from his environs. Of course he has nightvision and enhanced upper frequency vision. His hearing is also quite acute due to the long antennae on his head.

Weapons:
-Swords: Blacklight himself would go on about how each and every one of his swords is unique, the finest in the galaxy, has a personal story attached to it, etc. I, on the other hand, don't care. Fortunately, I don't have to go into such a long listing this time, as he has gotten rid of a number of his extraneous blades. He has a katana on his back, 2 wakisashis (curved japanese shortsword) on his hips, two short energy sabres springloaded in his forearms.

Blacklight only permanently keeps swords that are made of superalloys, artifacts of myth and legend, and/or posessed by demon spirits. He also cares for them meticulously. They can block light to medium weapons fire, pierce virtually any armor, and lob off lightly armored limbs in a single swipe. For most Vehicons, he has to hit at a joint or weak spot to be able to do that. Beam sabres can penetrate force shields that have strength equivilent to heavy TF armor.
-Knives: He has not, alas, cut down on the knives. Hidden in various compartments are an assortment of knives and daggers- 2 short throwing knives in each forearm (one of which has a device in the handle that prints out short messages), a tanto dagger in each calf, a thin stilleto dagger, waved blade dagger, and two large plain knives in his stomach, 1 short knife per foot, 1 serrated blade under each shoulder gaurd, and one small poison tipped knife under the facemask.

The knives vary a little more than swords in their strength. A few are superpowerful, but he's reluctant to use those because knives tend to get lost in battle. He throws the a lot, so quantity is more important than quality. Most are about as strong and sharp as your average TF knife. Easily cut steel, but no match for heavy and especially advanced armors.
-UV Ray: Chest orb can fire a concentrated UV laser if he concentrates. He is loathe to use ranged weapons, but has gotten a little more pragmatic about it. About as powerful as a heavy laser rifle, but not so easy to aim.
-Acid Pellets: Pyramid shaped marble sized containers of powerful acid, spread on the floor in front of pursuers. If stepped upon, shatter and expose foot/wheel to powerful acid that will melt tires and serious impair one's ability to walk. Carries twenty in an easily accessable hip compartment, more in subspace.

Equipment:
-None

Personality: It's probably best, or easiest for me anyway, to describe Blacklight's personality now in terms of what it was before.

"Blacklight is basically a brooding loner in training. Or, from another perspective, a brooding loner wannabe. He does have the ruthlessness, skill and discipline to be an effective modern ninja, which he is well on his way to becoming, but for the crucial brooding lonerness, he's just not quite there. Oh, he does brood, and brood well, and he is adequetely antisocial. There's just something about the way he tries to hard, or he suddenly becomes showoffy around cute fembots his age, or he idolizes Relic, or he keeps using teenage slang that makes the whole brooding loner schtick not quite work for him. He is, of course, blissfully unaware of this fact. Likewise he is unaware that his habit of seeking out dangerous missions, and his need to prove himself disqualify him from true brooding lonerdom, and that he probably annoys the hell out of his "mentors" (when he finds a true, established brooding loner he will become their "apprentice" and follow them around all the time. If his mentor disapproves, it just means he might not stick around just as long. As one would expect, several mentors have tried to kill him, but somehow none has yet succeeded, and Blacklight also didn't get the message, taking it as some sort of test). Blacklight likes to consider himself noble, but is not especially so. He will save the weak from the ravages of the strong occaisionally, if the odds are well in his favor, or the weak happens to be a cute fembot. He is quite obsessec with the idea of sacrificing one's life for a greater purpose, but has yet to really find any purpose he finds worth his life. Some observers say Blacklight is merely going through an adolescent identity crisis stage. Others say the crucial missing part of his brooding is morality- he feels no remorse for any pain or suffering he causes, and he probably never will. Still others say he's just another glitched up Pred. All blame it on his family."

What has changed is that Blacklight has realized how ridiculous he was being. That has not necessarily stopped him from being ridiculous. He knows now that sometimes it's better to get a rant out in the open instead of going into endless inner monologue, and that the skills of a ninja assasin and the style of one are two different things, and the former is definitely more important. The style is just window dressing, which he will indulge in but not let get in his way. Usually. It still blurs sometimes, when his strong sense of pride is involved, or old habits of guilt and feeling persecuted come back. He knows, however, that his is not the archetypical antihero he once wished to be. He is a self involved ruthless bastard, but that doesn't mean he has to be evil- in fact, he's very emphatic, another bit of his fake brooding lonerism that turned out to be real after all. This is why he likes killing to be personal, to feel the pain of his dying enemy and revel in it. It is also why he can't abide the pain of a friend or innocent, no matter how much he wishes he didn't care. Eh, maybe he is an anti-hero after all.

History: Blacklight is one of the Lightspawn, children of the Predacons Prism and Lightspeed. Information about Prism and Lightspeed can be found on the Predacon and Vehicon boards, I have a comic or two featuring Blacklight and the Lightspawn on the General board, and Psyckogod has posted or will post a short story about the Lightspawn as a family unit. Basically, though, Prism is a mercenary, Lightspeed an ex-Secret Police agent, and they've been training their family into a black ops mercenary team, and the most up-and-coming one on the scene to boot.

Blacklight and his slightly older sister Optica were born when their mother was just getting on to a serious hardcore training kick. Their childhoods were almost exclusively devoted to learning their crafts. Optica mainly specialized in computers and commnications, while Blacklight took to stealth missions and melee combat, even though his parents first tried to steer him towards sniping. It was just as well, because the family already had a sniper, though one Lightspeed didn't especially trust. Around when Blacklight was 6, he became obsessed with a dark, lone ninja character he saw on TV, and started emulating that character. Soon he found similar personas in comic books, and then became aware of several real life bots of that type, mainly because they tended to be in the same business as the Lightspawn. His father would go on a rant at least once a week about Sphinx, a fembot who was a constant torment to him, and therefore, in the eyes of some of his kids, really friggin' cool. Though Sphinx was not a brooding loner, Blacklight did somehow learn of an associate of hers that was. Relic. in the ensuing stellar cycles, Blacklight managed to learn all about Relic, put posters of him all over his room, etc. Questions of how he found out so much about an obscure assasin who mostly keeps to himself, or how there ever arose a market in Relic posters aside, this obsession, via the gods of Murphy's Law, pretty much ensured that Blacklight would never get to meet his idol in person. Instead, he would go off for several months at a time to train under other spies, assasins and warriors he would come across. By train, I mean follow them around incessantly until they tried to kill him. Impressively, Blacklight hasn't been killed yet. It seems he is either very lucky, or very underrated. His luck stat, back on Maximal Base, btw, was 4.

A foolish jaunt off to an alternate universe to meet Relic resulted in him getting a little less insane with his brooding loner wannabeism. Relic himself, it turned out, was no longer the tortured soul he'd expected, and various other things happened that haven't been RPed yet so I can't really tell you much about them.

The Lightspawn's ship was in orbit of Cybertron when Megatron's takeover came to pass. Surprise attacked by overwhelming numbers of Vehicon drones, much of his family fell, many in trying to save the others. Blacklight would do no such foolishness. He snuck out through the many hidden crawlspaces in the ship which he knew by heart, and got to one of the secret escape pods. Actually, they were just a couple crates with life support systems and anti-sensor measures on the inside that could be jettisoned into space.. in other words, perfect for the situation. The Lightspawn were nothing if not ridiculously prepared with contingency plans. Cooperating to implement them in a concerted fashion that got everyone out and didn't disintegrate into every man for himself.. well that they needed a little work on.

Anyway, Blacklight crashed to the surface, hid underground, got that pesky virus, ran into a nice but somewhat insane Maximal that reformatted him, who he kindly repaid by killing for sticking him in such a hideous body. Unsurprisingly, his relations with the other "Maximals" (he still insisted on being called a Predacon, though strangely he hadn't been big into factional pride until this point. Mostly it had to do with the Maximal strategy of running, hiding, getting slaughtered, and once in a while overruning the planet with weeds.) was a little shakey. Though he sometimes would associate with others, and try to find other former Predacons, mostly he was on his own.. and much to his surprise, he was actually lonely. Being a loner was no fun without others to be standoffish with. Through long bouts of self examination and brooding, he decided that he had to stop going through bouts of brooding for the sake of brooding. In other words, be honest with himself. And, he had to find other bots willing to take on Megatron and with the cunning to actually do it right. This was not the Maximals. He had heard of the Brotherhood and Angels, but he didn't trust them.. they were just other Vehicons after all, probably just trying to take Megatron's power for themselves. Annoyingly, inevitably, he had to find his family.

Mission History:
Blacklight appeared mysteriously near the Angels' Sanctuary shortly prior to the Maximal takeover of the planet. Spying mysteriously upon Prisma, he noticed some intriguingly familiar things about her. He confronted her mysteriously, and after an unceremonious smackdown delivered upon him, discovered she was his father. This, of course, freaked him out terribly. Soon he also mysteriously encountered Lightspeed, and it is thought that the presence of one of her children helped snap her out of Quantum's mental control. When the Technorganic attack came, Blacklight sided with the Vehicons, or, more precisely, his parents. Though he availed himself in battle, he did so as personal bodyguard for Lightspeed and Prisma, not for the Vehicon cause. He continues to lurk mysteriously about the couple.

Created By: Riboyoflavin