IRON Trooper

Countless. Overwhelming. Unstoppable. These are a few of the words used to describe the IRON Troopers. Mysterious, silent, and downright creepy, these robots are the spawns of the mysterious Talisman. Though they can be programmed to do simple tasks, they are instinctively drawn to the defense of the Talisman, like a moth to a flame.

Individually an IRON Trooper is little threat to the extent that a physically fit human is more than capable of taking them down. Thus they act in swarms to achieve their objectives. Despite being mindless, they have been known to adopt differing styles of human clothing to achieve their goals.

Fiction

Twenty thousand years ago, the Eukarian starship Axalon crashed on prehistoric Earth in what would become Brasnya. As Shockwave used the crew for a war game, he studied the Talisman being particularly interested by it creating the robotic troopers from the Axalon's hull. When Shockwave left to continue his experiments, the drones kept watch over the Talisman but the Decepticon never returned and they were buried by the ice and snow. Strange Visitors

During World War II, some of the robot soldiers came into the employ of the Axis. While fighting in Kalistan in 1943, the Screaming Eagles encountered the robots. Though the Eagles defeated them, Garrison Kreiger recognized them for the alien constructs they were and sought to learn more about what other alien species had left their mark on Earth. The Secret of the Mummy's Tomb First Strike #6 Kreiger would be the one to dub them "IRON Troopers." Sgt. Savage profile

Soon afterwards, the Eagles encountered more troopers in Paris, the robots having been drawn there by the clash between "Bumblebee" and "Shockwave". After "Bumblebee" triumphed he believed himself to be the last Cybertronian and requested that Sgt. Savage and Kreiger help him find the wreckage of the Axalon so he could die in peace. The unlikely trio tracked the Axalon's crash site to Brasnya where they fought off hundreds of IRON Troopers who had been drawn to the ship.

When the three entered the wreck of the Axalon, the IRON Troopers linked together to puppeteer the corpse of Domitius Major to fight off the intruders. An enraged Centurion tore them apart but their destruction somehow activated the residual Talisman energy inside the Axalon and it teleported the craft and Sgt. Savage away. Strange Visitors

Several parts of the deactivated IRON Troopers fell into the hands of spies from Brasnya. The spies smuggled the parts out of the country and into the United States via the United Kingdom before Action Man halted their scheme in Pawtucket. A young Mike Power managed to acquire some IRON Trooper components however and reverse engineered them to create new "atomic" prosthetic limbs for himself. Power and Glory

When Soundwave arrived on Earth in the 1980s, he did in days what humanity had failed to do in decades and located the Talisman via tracking the signal of the surviving IRON Troopers. By this time, Kreiger too had finally found the Talisman in the Tomb of Amtoltec in Dashur, Egypt and used it to reanimate the mummies into a new generation of IRON Troopers. Soundwave was unimpressed and destroyed the Troopers en masse but soon decided the Talisman could wait and flew off. The Secret of the Mummy's Tomb Studying the Talisman allowed Kreiger to replicate the IRON Trooper's linking ability to puppeteer the corpses of Domitius Major and the Eukarian Shockwave via Atomic Man's connection to the Talisman. The Troopers fell offline when Atomic Man committed suicide. Power and Glory

Notes

• The IRON Troopers are based on the "I.R.O.N. Stormtroopers" from the 1990s Sgt. Savage cartoon.
• Kreiger refers to them (and all technology created by the Talisman) as "binaltech" technology, "binaltech" being the Japanese name for the Transformers: Alternators toyline.