Decepticon Hijack

Autobots' Lightning Strike is the first in the Ladybird Books series of Transformers storybooks.

Written by: Regina Weyn Illustrated by: John Speirs


 * Major characters (in order of appearance): Optimus Prime, Ratchet, Huffer, Sunstreaker, Seekers, Shooting Star, Megatron, Blitzwing, Bombshell, Swoop

Summary
Optimus Prime is having a great morning, standing "proud and triumphant", bathed in the rising sun atop a jutting cliff. Then he checks his watch and sees that it's 8:00 am and time to head to work. Meanwhile in the camp below Ratchet and Huffer are already hard at work trying to repair all the badly damaged Autobots from the last battle with the Decepticons. Thankfully huge numbers of Generic Autobots are also mulling around apparently helping out.

Suddenly the Seekers blaze by overhead. After they go by and everyone has already noticed a totally off-model Red Alert runs around yelling "Decepticon Alert!' in everyone's face. Glad they have him around. Oddly the Seeker's just circled and dodn't attack. Just then Shooting Star phones in with the answer: The Seekers were just a distraction while, nearby, Blitzwing was trying to steal an ordinary Earth oil tanker truck. With this oil the Decepticons could RULE THE EARTH FOREVER!* (*actual Megatron quote.) Blitzwing's sword has depowered the truck but Sunstreaker repowers it and the drivers take off. Megatron grabs the precious truck from behind but thankfully the wildly coifed Swoop sweeps to the rescue and drops an "air to air missle launcher" (yes, you read that right, no it makes no sense to me either) on the Cons, saving the day. The humans pass out, Swoop is a hero, and Starscream and some generics retrieve the scrap that used to be Megatron and their teammates.

Errors

 * Pretty much every 1985 character featured in this story is at least somewhat off-model, some of them like Red Alert very much so.

Items of note

 * This is Shooting Star's one and only appearence. Given the early off-model versions of several other Season 2 characters within it is possible he originates in an early take on Cosmos, though that is only speculation.