Nightbird

As Michael Kelly‘s mysterious character has been officially credited as a generic “Mr. Burke“, the last character to speak about in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts remains Nightbird, the flying assassin of the Terrorcons. Voiced by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, she’s a lethal killer who wields two katanas (of sorts), and is quite a pain in the back for the heroes for the entire movie, being the only enemy capable of flying. The original Nightbird is not a Terrorcon, and is not even a natural Cybertronian, but this doesn’t make her any less deadly: let’s see togeteher.

As Earth had suddenly become the battlefield of the century-long war between Autobots and Decepticons, aliens who resembled giant shapeshifting robots, humanity was left quite humbled by their actual place in the universe… well, most of them. One scientist, Dr. Fujiyama, took the aliens’ presence as an inspiration for his work, and studying them he managed to build his own version of the Cybertronians. What he wanted to make was a fierce and deadly protector of mankind, so he based his creation on the ninjas from his historical heritage. He proudly presented to the world Nightbird, the robot who would have shown the aliens just how advanced human science was, and that would have protected the world from the Decepticons. Well, at least theoretically speaking. The Cybertronians were indeed impressed by Fujiyama’s work, and even Megatron saw opportunity in the human scientist’s experiment: following Megatron’s orders, the Decepticons stole Nightbird little after her debut, and made some improvements of their own. Nightbird, in fact, was nothing more than a drone, capable of obeying simple instructions, but Megatron wanted a fully operational agent, and a machine as alive as he was. Bombshell made a little surgery on the drone, and implanted her with an advanced brain chip, that gave her superior cognitive functions: she was now fully self-aware, almost like a Cybertronian, and blindly loyal to Megatron. Most definitely not the fierce protector of humanity Dr. Fujiyama had dreamt of.

With a cunning mind and all the shinobi-like abilities Dr. Fujiyama had programmed her with, Nightbird was the perfect stealth agent to infiltrate into the Ark, the Autobots’ base. This was a baptism of fire for Nightbird, but she accomplished her mission flawlessly: she broke into the enemy base, defeated Mirage, and stole the World Energy Chip, a database of all the energy sources present on Earth that the Decepticons could have used for their plans, plus their locations. Megatron was quite impressed by his new subordinate… a bit more than impressed, actually, as he started to be quite fascinated by the female warrior. Some remarks about her skills were more than enough to cause his second-in-command Starscream to be afraid of his position, and to start plotting against his unforeseen replacement. At the same time, the Autobots were on the hunt for Nightbird, but their hands were tied, as they had received precise instructions from Dr. Fujiyama not to damage nor destroy the robot: if catching a ninja alive was a hard task, catching a giant robotic ninja alive was near to impossible. This was confirmed by their first battles against the swift Nightbird, who always managed to frustrate their attempts at imprisoning her… until the Autobots used an Energy Net. Megatron, who was watching from afar, launched a massive attack with all his Decepticons to save Nightbird and retrieve the World Energy Chip, but once there Starscream exploited the chaos to shoot the ninja with his Null Ray, shutting her off and leaving her in the arms of Optimus Prime. Prime returned Nightbird to Fujiyama, who deactivated her and put her in storage for good… but the robo-ninja was still there, waiting, ready to come back to join Megatron’s ranks.

Nightbird is not exactly a living being, and albeit she is now self-aware her level of sentience is not that developed, so she simply follows orders and responds to her initial programming with relentless efficiency. She’s inhumanly strong, durable and agile, and she’s programmed with knowledge of several martial arts, as well as in the use of several traditional (albeit revisited and technologically upgraded) Japanese weapons, such as nunchakus, shurikens and katanas. Not a drone anymore, but not an actual living being either, Nightbird is a formidable killing machine whose will is that of her master: she won’t stop in front of anything, until her mission is accomplished.