Two stories. The first story is told entirely in rhyme, Dr. Seuss style, a Shout-Out to the story of The Grinch. The third story is related to MTMTE's sister-series, The Transformers: Robots in Disguise.
The second story features Brainstorm's Contrivance Engine making everything seem like Christmas. The Lost Light is about to go through an area of space that is filled with hostile organics, so rather than go around, or raise hostilities and fight them, everybody's going to hide in their B.E.Ds and mask their spark signals until they're through. There's only a few minutes left and Whirl, Swirve and Nautica are locked in Swerves bar, drinking Sub-Space filtered Energon when there's a mysterious knock at the door. Could it be Ultra Magnus, all set to chew them out?
No, it's much worse than that - it's the responsibility of parenthood in a crate of smuggled Engex...
As soon as the Sparkling is awoken, it begins to take form, and the three of them have to get rid of the baby to protect the ship. When they plan to send the little baby femme back to Cybertron, but it sneaks into Minimus Ambus' Ultra Magnus Suit and starts wandering around. They manage to catch up with it just as it tries to give Megatron a big hug.
By then though, it's too late. Nautica apologises to Whirl that he's left with the baby, and asks what he's going to do. He tells her not to worry, and as soon as she's under goes to do the only remaining option to protect the crew - flush the baby out of the airlock and into space. However the form the Sparkling is taking is astonishingly similar to Whirl - one optic and claws for hands. He sighs, and turns off his own Spark on a slow shutdown, so that his BED can hold one spark - that of the Sparkling.
He wakes up hours later in the med-bay, ranting about what happened to the Sparkling to Velocity.
Turns out it wasn't actually a baby - it was a small Scraplet infestation taking on a harmless form until it became strong enough to eat everybody on the ship, preying on Whirl's last remaining scraps of compassion in order to survive. But hey, Whirl isn't upset - he's proud. That's a real survivor in that quarantine jar...
Tropes:
- Brick Joke: "No Guns, No Swords, and No Briefcases" in issue 50 had Magnus mention his armor was getting fumigated for Scraplets. We see here how that came about.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Swerve name-drops the never-before mentioned Cerebros, who'd show up a few issues later in More Than Meets The Eye proper.
- Continuity Nod:
- Rodimus still hates hats. Even if they're keeping his brain safe
- Whirl grumbles that everything in the last four million years is his fault. Which, in fairness, it kind of is.
- Contrived Coincidence: All generated by a Contrivance Engine and the Rule of Funny. The engine itself looks astoundingly like a fully decorated Christmas tree, and the story takes place at Christmas time on Earth. And everyone must go to their B.E.D. to avoid detection. They'd better not shout, they'd better not cry...
- Innocuously Important Episode: A silly little one-off for the X-Mas special, right? Well, yes. But those Scraplets turn out to be pretty important later on.
- Oblivious to Their Own Description: Magnus tells Rodimus that exposure to invisibility fields have been known to lead to irrationality, erratic conduct excessive sarcasm, and moping.Rodimus: God, imagine if anyone on-board started exhibiting those behaviours.
- Ship Tease: Between Ultra Magnus and Megatron, of all people. At least, Rodimus thinks there's something going on, with Meggy lifting Minimus up to finish the Contrivance Engine, and Rodimus' reaction to hearing Megatron telling Magnus he doesn't want a hug.
