📝 Flaredive ("FD")

Design is not finished and is still a WIP!

A vain, haughty, and materialistic mech.  Flaredive, most often referred to as simply "FD", is not an easy bot to get along with.  Most find his personality (and voice) abrasive and grating, and his tendency to run his mouth, combined with his inability to defend himself, as well as never learning from his mistakes, means he gets his aft handed to him more often than not.  FD feels an exaggerated and unearned sense of superiority over a good majority of other Cybertronians, and he seems incapable of internalizing most of his nastier thoughts.  FD takes great pride in his appearance (he will spend hours in front of any mirror), always taking care to keep his plating buffed and shined until it's almost gleaming.  He gets very distressed if anything scratches his paint or dents his armor.

Used to have real jewels embedded in his armor before the War; over the years they were pried out and stolen from him, so he's replaced them with polished, colored glass.  Less valuable, but still pretty and better than ugly empty indents; however, he's still bitter about it to this day.  Glasses are a purely cosmetic accessory that he enjoys wearing.

FD was once a socialite in pre-war Cybertron, and his main occupation was (mostly cosmetically) modifying the frames of Cybertronians who were both vain and rich.  While his personality is found unbearable by most, his skills in this area made him a valuable mech, to the point where many could simply ignore how awful he was as a person.

When the War started, FD lost everything he held dear; his high-class "friends", the high standing he held (as well as the society that he held it in), his treasured possessions, and his luxurious living space, which he was driven out of.  The only thing he was left with was his expertise in frame modification.  FD, feeling lost and feeling like he had nowhere else to turn to (and swayed greatly by Megatron's rhetoric (which he did not fully grasp)), he joined the Decepticons, hoping to rebuild his life and get it back to somewhere familiar.

Unsurprisingly, most Decepticons did not take kindly to FD, a mech who was (once) rich, spoiled, and soft.  However, they did take interest in his skills and his great attention to detail, and set him to work repairing battle-damaged Decepticons, as well as upgrading and modifying their frames and weapons.  FD fumbled at first, as cosmetic modifications and repairs/weapon upgrades were very different things and he was hardly used to the latter (not that his superiors cared); he learned fairly quickly when blasters started getting pointed at his head though.  He learned very quickly under the pressure, but his treatment never much improved; FD was obnoxious both in appearance, sound, and personality, as well as easy to push around (having little to no fighting skills), so anyone bigger and stronger than him (which was most mechs) treated him however they pleased.

The expectations of FD's job would expand soon after, where he'd given assignments to create not just weapons, but help develop instruments of torture and imprisonment.  FD would then be constantly transferred from place to place--most often prisons or Decepticon settlements--wherever his skills were needed; he was even briefly stationed at Grindcore, where he had a hand in developing the inhibitor spikes.

This was much of FD's life during the War, until a fateful day when he was picked up by a particularly large and ill-tempered Beastformer...