Tarn(IDW)

Personality: "Tarn is a fanatical ideologue, a cultivated sadist, and a deeply contradictory individual. He doesn't perceive himself as a monster who happens to serve the Decepticons. He sees himself as a necessary instrument of their cause, someone entrusted with preserving its purity when everyone else has become too weak, disloyal, or corrupt to do so. He has a rigid, almost religious understanding of loyalty. To Tarn, the Decepticon movement isn't simply a faction or a political organization. It's an ideal that gives his existence meaning. Its principles provide him with a framework for deciding who deserves respect, who deserves condemnation, and who has forfeited the right to be considered one of his own."

Alternative(Vehicle) Mode: "Tank appearance with four asymmetrically attached energy blasters and a sloped front mounted blockade"

Role: "Leader of the Decepticon Justice Division, Commander of The Peaceful Tyranny"

Backstory: "Damus was forged, born an exceptionally powerful Point One Percenter The Permanent Revolution and an outlier who possessed the ability to render non-sentient machinery inoperative by touching it, but with one drawback: the power hurt him every time he used it. Before the war, Damus attended the Jhiaxian Academy of Advanced Technology where they possibly attempted to analyze his brain-wave patterns and kept his outlier status hidden from the Senate and Functionist Council.

At some point, he crossed the Senate and was subjected to empurata: his hands and head replaced to mark him out as someone to shun. After that, to tie in with his power, he started to call himself "Glitch". Patternism

When Orion Pax devised a plan to steal a bomb disguised as the Matrix from Nominus Prime's corpse, his Senator friend recruited Damus, Windcharger, and Skids from the Academy to participate in the heist. Damus's part in the plan was to deactivate the deflector beams above the Primal Basilica and despite a slight hitch when Damus accidentally jammed Skids' grappling hook by touching his arm, the plan succeeded. An Intimate Beheading

Following Shockwave's capture and brainwashing by the Senate, the Outliers stuck with Orion Pax and aided him in defending a hot spot in Alyon from Sentinel Prime's forces. By this time Damus had gotten replacement hands and learned to use his power from a distance, utilizing it to break down Elite Guard vehicles from afar. With help from a group of time travelers from the Lost Light of the future, the group took down a weapons platform sent to irradiate the hot spot's sparks, then had their memories of the travelers wiped by Chromedome. Possibly due to interference from his powers, the memory wipe seemed to work less effectively on Damus.

During the whole affair, Orion Pax had recommended reading Megatron's treatises around Glitch: "powerful stuff," he said. Thanks to Chromedome's memory wipe only partially working on him, Damus hung on to Pax's overheard recommendation and took his first step down a dark path. All Our Parlous Yesterdays

Exactly how and when Damus joined the Decepticons is unknown, but Megatron would later claim he had deliberately "corrupted" Tarn to hurt someone and prove a point. Your Fierce Tears Damus joined early enough to be at the beginning of Megatron's march across Cybertron. Rebuilt under the supervision of Lobe, Damus's power and endurance was considered by Prowl to put him on the same level as a Phase Sixer. His mask was taken as a sign of Decepticon supremacy but, at least so he told himself, it was really so nobody would notice when he closed his eyes around Decepticon brutality.

Damus became commandant of Grindcore prison, where he became associated with "The Empyrean Suite", playing it at maximum volume to drown out the screams of the prisoners he executed via smelting. In this, he was trying to deliberately bastardize a song composed by Eucryphia to celebrate Prima and the Citadel of Light.

After Damus became leader of the D.J.D. as "Tarn" (and would never again use his old name), his powers developed to the point where he could shut down sentient machines using his voice alone. Under him, the group became very focused on paperwork: the Decepticon Empire required good administration, in his view. The Permanent Revolution When Grimlock, who had briefly defected to the Decepticons, and returned to the Autobot ranks, Megatron was so incensed by the betrayal that he ordered the D.J.D. to bump the Dynobot leader up to the top of the list. In a subsequent battle against Grimlock, Tarn had his face badly mangled by his opponent.

Some time later, the D.J.D. established a base on the world of Messatine in order to obtain the "Nuke" superfuel there. Tarn coerced Pharma, head surgeon of the planet's Autobot medical facility Delphi, into helping feed his addiction by supplying him with an ever-increasing number of transformation cogs from deceased patients, in exchange for the hospital being unmolested by his team. Pharma would eventually cut off Tarn's supply by orchestrating the facility's shutdown.

Though the war formally ended in 2012, Tarn and his group refused to give up the cause—indeed, they would only deign to stand down when Megatron personally commanded it—and continued to hunt down those Decepticons that had betrayed the cause and hadn't yet returned to Cybertron. Informed by Decepticon spy Brainstorm that high-priority target Overlord was aboard the starship Lost Light, Tarn and the D.J.D. continued to work through their list of offenders as they waited for Brainstorm to drop the ship's shielding so they could pick up Overlord's signal. One such unfortunate was Black Shadow, whom Tarn explosively finished off with his deadly voice, after which the team set course of the planet Clemency to hunt down Decepticon deserter Fulcrum. Rules of Disengagement Arriving on Clemency, the team discovered a mysterious stasis tube awaiting them; when Tarn investigated, he found it contained a deranged, circuit speeder-enhanced Grimlock, unleashed by Fulcrum and his new allies, the Scavengers. Tarn was soon able to subdue the brain-damaged Dinobot, but was then crushed beneath the foot of a Cybernought battle-mech that Crankcase had activated. Tarn recovered in time to hear Fulcrum deliver a speech to all assembled about Decepticon ideals before apparently committing suicide. At that point, Kaon detected Overlord's long-awaited signal, and Tarn ordered the D.J.D. to head out—but not before warning the surviving Scavengers that their names had now made it onto The List.

Though the war formally ended in 2012, Tarn and his group refused to give up the cause—indeed, they would only deign to stand down when Megatron personally commanded it—and continued to hunt down those Decepticons that had betrayed the cause and hadn't yet returned to Cybertron. Who's Afraid of the DJD? Informed by Decepticon spy Brainstorm that high-priority target Overlord was aboard the starship Lost Light, Tarn and the D.J.D. continued to work through their list of offenders as they waited for Brainstorm to drop the ship's shielding so they could pick up Overlord's signal. The Permanent Revolution One such unfortunate was Black Shadow, whom Tarn explosively finished off with his deadly voice, after which the team set course of the planet Clemency to hunt down Decepticon deserter Fulcrum. The Peaceful Tyranny soon caught up to the Lost Light. Before confronting the Phase Sixer, the DJD topped on Nuke, the substance's properties causing to them go on a murder spree triggered by Drift's presence. With all the Autobots dead and the Lost Light left dissected, the DJD resumed their travels, coming across the planet Prion where they picked up Nickel and recruited her to the Decepticon cause. Nickel soon convinced the DJD to return to the Lost Light and salvage the ship's engines. When the Peaceful Tyranny arrived however, the DJD found themselves facing off against the Galactic Council and the Black Block Consortia. Though the Cybertronian ship gave a good account of it itself, the DJD was forced to retreat, leaving Kaon and Vos behind on Ofsted XVII until they swung back and picked them up. Arriving on Clemency, the team discovered a mysterious stasis tube awaiting them; when Tarn investigated, he found it contained a deranged, circuit speeder-enhanced Grimlock, unleashed by Fulcrum and his new allies, the Scavengers. Tarn was soon able to subdue the brain-damaged Dinobot, but was then crushed beneath the foot of a Cybernought battle-mech that Crankcase had activated.

The diminished D.J.D. returned to their duties, though Tarn began to weary of the work. After apprehending the Sparkeater-worshiping Blip, Tarn was about to end his life using his voice, until Blip used his last words to demand that Tarn remove his mask. Affronted, Tarn allowed Helex and Tesarus to finish Blip instead, averting his gaze beneath his mask. Tarn subsequently ordered performance reviews for the team, and nearly came to blows with Tesarus when he implied that abandoning Vos and Kaon was not the Decepticon thing to do. Calming himself, Tarn explained that they were returning to Ofsted XVII again in order to recover their bodies, but was interrupted by Helex's announcement that Vos and Kaon had returned to the ship safe, sound, and with something unbelievable: a postwar edition of Towards Peace that revealed Megatron himself had defected from the Decepticons.

His world shattered by this discovery, Tarn had the D.J.D. return to Messatine, where he attempted to fatally overdose on Nuke. Finding even the sensation of dying disappointing, Tarn opened his eyes to see a distraught Nickel pressed against the glass of his fueling capsule. The sight of her triggered a revelation for Tarn: she was a 'bot who had experienced first-hand the threat the predominantly-organic universe posed to Cybertronians, and who had fully embraced the Decepticon cause despite living her life outside of the war. The cause, Tarn now realized, was bigger than any one 'bot—bigger than Megatron. Galvanized, Tarn set up a meeting with the rogue Decepticon warlord Deathsaurus aboard his stolen Warworld. Knowing full well he was on the D.J.D.'s list, Deathsaurus pre-emptively attacked Tarn upon his arrival, even deactivating his audio receptors to protect himself from Tarn's voice, but Tarn was able to communicate with him and his troops through inter-Decepticon radio and explained the reason for his presence: he wished them to ally with him, in return for their being taken off The List. Deathsaurus agreed on the condition that Tarn kill the rest of the D.J.D., which Tarn refused to do—which was the response Deathsaurus had been hoping for. With their alliance cemented, Tarn declared their new objective: kill the traitorous Megatron and all of his allies!"