Come at me,
And you'll see,
I'm more than meets the eye
And you'll see,
I'm more than meets the eye
Spark to Spark, Dust to Dust by Cyclone and Cody Fett is a crossover between RWBY and Transformers (alongside other various Hasbro works) available on Spacebattles
and Sufficient Velocity.
Beginning late in RWBY's volume 1, the story does not adhere completely to any single continuity of Transformers canon but blends a variety of concepts and influences from across the various iterations of the franchise.
When Yang's beloved motorcyle is destroyed, she visits an old friend of Blake's to get a new vehicle: a yellow car which she swiftly names Bumblebee. When her new ride turns out to be more than meets the eye, Yang finds herself thrown into the middle of a war between the noble Autobots and the sinister Decepticons. Taking on the secret identify 'Sunfire', Yang allies not only with the Autobots but also with the White Fang and their leader Adam Taurus to defeat the Decepticons and their allies in the Schnee Dust Company.
Meanwhile, the remainder of Team RWBY - along with their friends of Team JNPR - are investigating the activities of the SDC from their own angle; unaware of Yang's extracurricular activities - or of the existence of the Autobots - they nevertheless become embroiled in their own struggles with the SDC and with the shadowy Atlesian conspiracy MECH, which has plans of its own for the power of Energon.
Spark to Spark, Dust to Dust contains examples of the following tropes:
- Adaptational Heroism: Unlike his villainous canon self, Adam is more of an Anti-Hero here, someone ruthless and extreme but ultimately devoted to the fate of his people. Worth noting that when we first cut to his POV in episode 8, his thought process was almost identical to his canon counterpart, but the battle of Site Thirteen opened his eyes to the bigger picture and started changing him for the better.
- All Love Is Unrequited: Ruby and Weiss are in love with Jaune; Penny and Yang are in love with Sun while Adam appears to be falling for Yang in her 'Sunfire' alias.
- Apologizes a Lot: Pyrrha, even more so than canon; a conversation between her and Weiss devolves into them apologising to one another until Ren interrupts.
- Arc Words:
- You never know until you try.
- This is what I/we signed up for.
- Bad Boss: Megatron fits this to a T. Whenever his underlings fail him, he tortures and brutalizes them with his bare servos.
- Berserk Button: Disrespecting Summer Rose turns out to be this for Raven; it's why she murdered the previous Spring Maiden.
- Big Good: Optimus Prime, as per Transformers canon.
- Breaking the Fellowship:
- By the end of chapter 13, Shatterpoint, Adam has abandoned his alliance with Yang and the Autobots, while Yang turns her back on the struggle against the Decepticons.
- Happens again in Volume III chapter 1, Round One: Fight, Ruby, Weiss and Blake discover that Yang has been working with the White Fang and confront her with this fact, leading Yang to attack Blake and flee Beacon, abandoning her team.
- Break the Cutie: Weiss suffers this over the length of Interlude 1-4: Cold as she is confronted with the depths of her family's wickedness. The interlude ends with a tearful Weiss burning everything bought with her father's money or bearing the Schnee snowflake. Also counts as a Break the Haughty.
- Broken Pedestal:
- Weiss suffers one for her sister Winter after discovering that she is the Atlesian military's liaison with the Decepticons and fully aware of the crimes being committed by the SDC.
- Winter herself gets hit with this when she discovers that Colonel Silas Bishop, her mentor and Parental Substitute within the military, has been Faking the Dead and is actually the leader of MECH.
- In this story, Yang is still hopeful about meeting her mom, and is genuinely thrilled when Raven drops off a mask for her to use. Finding out she's a murderous bandit quickly dashes any respect she had for her mother.
- Call Sign: All Atlas students have one; Penny's is 'Bladerider'.
- The Cameo: Twilight Sparkle makes a brief appearance in Interlude 1-4: Cold as a student at Atlas Academy and a friend of Weiss; Sugarcoat, Indigo Zap and Sunny Flare appear even more briefly as other Atlas Students, as do the rest of the Mane 6 in an interlude.
- Capture the Flag: The chapter entitled 'Capture the Flag' features several teams playing this game in the Emerald Forest.
- Combining Mecha: The Combaticons can combine to form Bruticus.
- Complexity Addiction: Starscream; his plan to overthrow Megatron has over four hundred and thirty-seven distinct phases.
- Dance of Romance: Naturally, the Beacon Dance has a couple of these, between Jaune and Pyrrha & Sun and Blake.
- Doorstopper: The story is over 530K words spread across 46 individual chapters. Needless to say, it's a very long story.
- Dramatic Irony: There's a lot throughout the story. The authors even admit that this is one of their favorite tropes, hence its prevalence.
- Yang and Ruby are determined to protect their sisters from knowing the truth about their activities, completely unaware that the other is working the same problem from a different angle.
- Yang badmouthing Adam's old partner with no idea that the person in question is her current partner Blake.
- Later on, Team RRANNBW figures out that there's a woman named Sunfire involved with the Decepticon fight; however, based on their limited information they think she's a villain and attribute Cinder's activities to her, unaware that she's really Yang.
- Drives Like Crazy: Ruby; her first driving lesson sees her crash into Penny, wrecking Taiyang's car in the process.
- Everyone's Baby Sister: Penny is this to her team-mates, and to the Atlesian forces in general.
- Everyone Can See It:
- Sun's crush on Blake is obvious to everyone except the very young and naive Penny.
- Averted with Pyrrha's crush on Jaune; the only people who notice are Nora, Yang, Arslan and Taiyang.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Well, Adam's nowhere near close to as bad as he was in canon (he's at worst a Well-Intentioned Extremist here), but he struggles with the fact that other Faunas see him and the White Fang as monsters for their actions and can't understand that they decry him because of how violent their methods are, which has negatively impacted Faunas' reputation.
- First Girl Wins: Pyrrha triumphs over all her rivals to win Jaune's heart at the dance.
- Failure Is the Only Option: For Team JSPR and Twilight in their efforts to uncover the truth in the sidestory chapters; this is finally averted at the beginning of Volume 3 of the main story when Twilight learns about the existence of the Decepticons.
- Hero with Bad Publicity:
- Adam and the White Fang; they mean well but even many Faunus can't stand them.
- General Ironwood's intentions are nothing but noble, but many in Atlas believe him to be incompetent at best, a traitor at worst.
- Inevitable Mutual Betrayal: General Ironwood theorizes that the Atlas Council recognise that the Decepticons will almost certainly betray them once they have achieved their goals, but plan to betray the Decepticons first.
- Lack of Empathy: Played with. What horrifies Ruby about her first kill is that she feels absolutely nothing and even desired to have killed her enemy even sooner than what she did.
- Large Ham: Lugnut is a major case, as he just can't stop praising THE GRAND AND GLORIOUS MEGATRON!
- My Greatest Failure: Optimus Prime views allowing Megatron to fall to villainy as his, which is part of the reason he would like to save Adam.
- Mythology Gag: In the chapter 'Interrogations' Blake and Weiss have an argument about the White Fang ending with the reveal that Blake is a faunus just as they did in the canon episode 'Blake and White'; however, in this fic Weiss is the one defending the White Fang and their actions, while Blake is condemning them.
- No Longer with Us: Jaune tells CFVY that Blake is 'gone'; he means that she's run away after her fight with Weiss but CFVY assume that she has died and soon the news has spread throughout the school.
- Oblivious to Love: Jaune, as per canon, is oblivious to Pyrrha's affection for him; Sun is so focussed on Blake that he completely misses the fact that Penny and Yang are both infatuated with him, and even denies it when Neptune attempts to point it out.
- The Paragon: Optimums Prime, whose nobility of spirit encourages Adam to become a better man, including showing mercy to Blake when he had her at his mercy.
- Patchwork Fic: The story doesn't follow any set Transformers continuity and instead mixes elements of all of them.
- How Yang finds Bumblebee is similar to Charlie from Bumblebee, with Bee himself originally being called B-127.
- The first encounter between Yang and Barricade borrows from Sam's first encounter with the Decepticon in Transformers.
- How the Autobots arrived on Remnant is similar to how they landed on Earth in the original G1 cartoon.
- Lugnut and his characterization are taken from Transformers: Animated.
- The Atlesian conspiracy, MECH, is taken right from Transformers: Prime.
- Poor Communication Kills: A confrontation between Blake and Adam post-Character Development has the two hurl accusations at each other during combat, but their words are so vague that both of them end up thinking the other has completely abandoned their principles and is working with the SDC.
- Properly Paranoid: Ironwood, unlike the rest of the Atlas council, doesn't trust the Decepticons one bit and goes to great lengths to maintain operational security, such as not using the CCT network in case the Decepticons have compromised it.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Professor Ozpin, General Ironwood and Professor Goodwitch serve as this to Team RRANNBW, from the very moment that they take their evidence about MECH to Ozpin he takes their concerns seriously and commissions them to continue their investigation, providing support and direction when necessary.
- Really Royalty Reveal: Jaune and his family are related to the Last King of Vale, and therefore have a claim on the Empty Throne should they ever decide to press it. Zig Zagged by Jaune pointing out that there are several branch family's with the same claim, so theirs is nothing special, to which Weiss counters theirs is the only one that hasn't been disgraced in some way, and therefore the only ones with any real chance of claiming the throne. It's a moot point, as neither Jaune nor his father have any desire to press their claim.
- Remember the New Guy?: Team CFVY, making their first appearance in Volume II - Chapter 1: Welcome to Beacon reflect on all their interactions with Teams RWBY and JNPR.
- Running Gag: Nobody is quite sure what to call the relationship between Raven and Ruby; frequently someone will suggest the former is a stepmom, which someone else notes isn't correct, but then they can't think of anything better.
- Secret Identity:
- Yang goes by Sunfire whilst amongst the Autobots and the White Fang.
- Silas is just an alias. His real name is unknown.
- Secret-Keeper:
- Maple, Yang's mechanic and one of the few people who both knows that Yang is working with the Autobots/White Fang and that Blake used to be Adam's partner.
- Yang herself is one for all of the relationship drama going on amongst her friends. She's the only one who knows that Weiss and Ruby both have a crush on Jaune.
- Shipper on Deck:
- Yang is one for Blake/Sun; she is one for Pyrrha/Jaune initially but then switches her support to Ruby/Jaune.
- Bumblebee, meanwhile, is one for Yang/Sun.
- Ship Tease: Between Adam and Yang. Subverted, when when it's revealed that Adam is Yang's half-brother by Raven.
- String Theory: Counterpunch stumbles upon Barricade's room of bizarre theories linking all the Decepticons' enemies, prompting the latter to go on an enthusiastic rant about his "discoveries". Midway through the conversation, Barricade turns on holographic pictures and strings throughout the room, revealing that his theories are even more convoluted than Counterpunch first thought. The best part is that the audience sees that Barricade has actually pieced together some key information (Yang is Sunfire), but is wildly off-base with other bits (Adam is Raven's kid). Then he turns out to have been right about that last one...
- There Are No Therapists: A thankful aversion, as Ruby makes it a point to visit Glynda to talk and sort out her issues after she kills someone while on a mission.
- Time Abyss: The Cybertronians are extremely long-lived. Their war has been going on for possibly longer than Remnant itself. When the Autobots crash landed, Optimus states that the moon was still whole, which was well before the God of Darkness's genocide of mankind.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: Each chapter switches between Yang working with the Autobots and Team Rainbow (RWB+JNPR) investigating on their own.
- Undying Loyalty: Lugnut to Megatron to the point where he practically deifies the very ground he walks. The bot even forced the prisoners at Site Thirteen to attend what basically amounted to a mix of sermons and presentations praising Megatron and demonizing the Autobots.
- Unrequited Love Switcheroo: After finally agreeing to go on a date with Jaune, Weiss had such a good time that she would gladly go on another; unfortunately for her Jaune's not interested.
- Villain with Good Publicity: Professor Lionheart is a traitor, but his students all seem to have great affection for him while the Mistral police and Professor Ozpin both hold him in high regard.
- You're Not My Father: Adam's reaction to Taiyang calling him "son" after finding out Raven is his mother. Taiyang, without missing a beat, just corrects that he's his step-father instead.
