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In his defense, by the time Skyfire realized he’d missed three rollout alerts for a Decepticon attack, he’d, well, missed three rollout alerts for a Decepticon attack and was mostly concerned with plotting a suborbital flight path. His leftover concentration went to remembering the correct etiquette for this particular species of organics.
“Sorry, folks, he apologized. “Something came up. I’m afraid I’ll have to leave earlier than I meant to.” They’d very politely arranged an outdoor area for him this time, adjacent to the conference hall itself, so at least he wouldn’t knock anything over on his way out.
The mycologists taking a break from the current round of presentations to talk about their research with him made disappointed noises, but they’d all received the conference safety briefing and quickly backed up to let him transform. Some of them waved as they went back inside. Skyfire waved back.
Dr. Lee, his contact for the conference, stayed just outside his transformation radius with the ease of practice. “Just when we were getting to the Armillaria, too.”
“Thank you for inviting me,” Skyfire said, because he wanted to ask more questions and that wouldn’t get him to the rendezvous point in time.
“Oh, it was my pleasure, doctor, as always. You’re more than welcome. Feel free to come back, if your business wraps up in the next two days.”
Skyfire hummed, starting his pre-flight checks and flicking through his route. This was just an evacuation, so— “I hope I’ll be able to make it back by tonight. I’m not going that far.” Less than a twelfth of a planetary rotation away.
“In that case, I don’t suppose I could come along?” She was already starting to back up, despite her question. “That was a joke, I’m sure you must have rules about that sort of thing.”
Skyfire hesitated. There were rules about bringing humans into combat unless they’d been cleared, but it wasn’t like the other Autobots always managed to follow it. And it wasn’t like he was going into combat. He’d be alone for the flight there, and people probably wouldn’t be in a mood to chat on the ride back. “If you want to, you can. We can keep talking about your Armillaria samples.”
“Really?” She sounded thrilled. He dropped one of his smaller hatches open to let her into the cockpit.
The discussion on Armillaria carried them all the way to the rendezvous point. Skyfire never failed to be impressed by the sheer scale of life on Earth—he had taken samples of some of the indigenous fungi in his and Starscream’s intial, disastrous visit, but there was so much data the humans collected as a matter of course that had simply never been on the radar of the Cybertronian Science Academy. Like edibility! Like flavor! Skyfire could run samples through the chemical processors in his mouth and analyze extractions through his secondary tank’s centrifuge processes—though Ratchet tended to haul him in for extensive pumping whenever Skyfire had the poor sense to mention bringing anything involving spores in contact with his internals—but that wouldn’t tell him that it was considered a distinctly mushroomy flavor by the humans. The Cybertronian Science Academy Board wouldn’t consider it important data, but they were terrible at identifying important data anyways.
...They wouldn’t have considered it. They had been terrible. Skyfire was still practicing thinking in the past tense.
“—ever since, it seems like the only thing the non-mushroom gathering public really cares about is how big something is, and the researchers all say they’re not getting caught up in it, but after every conference with an open bar there’s at least one terrible knock-down drag-out fight between the Washington and Wisconsin branches. And the biologists want to pick fights about what an ‘organism’ can be defined is, like they don’t have better things they could be doing."
“Do they have better things they could be doing?” Skyfire asked, coming in for a landing. Ratchet was waving him down from where he was running a field triage station, looking distinctly put out.
“You know, I can never tell when you’re being catty or not? Anyway, I have better things I could be doing. Ooh, are we here already?”
“Yep.” He lightened the tint from the front window now that they were back inside the UV-reflecting layer of the atmosphere. All the data he’d collected on humans suggested they got nervous when they couldn’t see outside.
Dr. Lee sucked in a breath of air, her heartrate increasing. He took in more oxygen to compensate. “….Oh, my goodness. That looks bad.”
Oh, right. The other data was that humans didn’t like seeing anyone missing limbs. One of the evolutionary biologists he and Perceptor corresponded with had sent them a whole list of survival-instinct fear responses, things that corresponded to Cybertronian mistrust of bad ground or greyed frames. Missing limbs had definitely been on there.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry. See how angry Ratchet is?” Skyfire turned to give her a better view as he settled onto a clear patch of ground, keeping his radar tuned for incoming flight paths. “If it was really serious he’d still be working on them.” Instead of shaking his fist at Skyfire and shouting over the shortwave comm.
“About time you got here, you overgrown zeppelin!”
“Hello, Ratchet,” Skyfire said, dropping his rear access hatch. “Good to see you, Ratchet. Glad you’re expanding your vocabulary, Ratchet.”
“Oh, I’m about to expand something all right,” Ratchet threatened darkly. He kept up a steady stream of grumbling as he chivvied the remaining Autobots out of their hiding spot and up to Skyfire’s hold. Skyfire was relieved to see that most of them were moving under their own power—check-in pings on the general channel confirmed that Sideswipe had recovered Hound and Bumblebee’s missing arms and Smokescreen’s foot, and no one else had anything worse than some dents and already-patched torn lines. Skyfire hadn’t ruined anything by being late. It might even have worked out, it looked like all the Decepticons had already left—
“Slag,” Skyfire said as his radar picked up incoming jets moving too fast and too outside of planned flight paths to be Earth origin. He kept it over his cockpit’s internal speakers so he didn’t alarm any of the twitchy front liners.
“Problems?” Dr. Lee asked. She’d been on her feet to peer out the windows, but when he swore she hurried back to the seat he had set up for her.
“We’re going to be making a fast takeoff, is all.” Ratchet had transformed to carry Smokescreen in his bay, and was still driving towards the rear ramp. Skyfire started prepping his launch sequence. "You should probably go to the cargo hold. The inertial dampeners are better there and I might have to maneuver.”
“I don’t want to get in the way.”
Skyfire knew it would be rude to laugh, but the idea of a human under forty astroinches getting in anyone’s way tweaked his amusement circuits. “There won’t be much moving around when we’re in the air. It tickles and they know it. As long as you don’t get near Ratchet’s welding you should be fine.”
“Alright.” Dr. Lee paused near the door. “Do I tickle? Moving around?”
Skyfire assured her she didn’t, which was enough to get her through the door of his instrument room and into his carrier bay. With everyone in the inertia-dampened space and Ratchet safely scooted up the ramp, he could zip through the rest of the launch checks and get into the air before any of the Seekers could claim the airspace above him.
He elected to head for the mesosphere instead of trying to beat them for speed this close to the ground. The new ozone layer on this planet always tickled his rear thrusters in an annoying way, so he focused in on the cargo hold instead.
Actually, that might have been a mistake.
“six—seven—Sideswipe, well done getting the limbs, glad someone’s keeping track of them—eigh—“ Ratchet paused in his helmcount. “Human, is it too much to hope you snuck on at the battlefield?”
“Sorry,” Dr. Lee said, not sounding especially sorry.
Ratchet groaned and then rapped on one wall with a wrench even though he knew Skyfire could hear him anyways. “Damnit, Skyfire, we talked about this! Prowl sent a memo! And I updated your communication lines myself, I know you got a copy.”
Definitely a mistake. He should have acted like he had to dodge Decepticons instead. “The memo said not to bring humans to active combat sites and I didn’t.”
”Unaffiliated humans,” Bumblebee made sure to point out, because he had a bit of a complex about leaving Spike behind when the Ark wasn’t sufficiently guarded. “Unless, ooh, Skyfire, did you make a new friend?” He braced his remaining arm against the bench to lean over and peer at Dr. Lee.
“No,” Ratchet said ominously, collecting Smokescreen’s foot from Sideswipe and setting down to reattach it with a vengeance. Smokescreen knew better than to try and move away. “No more humans. We’re full on humans.”
Hound had managed to get himself twisted around enough to see her too, despite being bereft of both arms and wobbling like he’d shot out a gyro in his knee to boot. “Oh, hey, Dr. Lee! I got that fungus sample you wanted.” He winced. “Can’t quite reach it at the moment, though.”
“That’s fine,” Dr. Lee reassured him. “I can’t really do anything with it right now anyways.”
Ratchet paused with one hand in Smokescreen’s ankle. “If you were fool enough to keep that in your subspace, so help me it better not be loose.”
“Of course not,” Hound reassured him blithely. If it was the sample Skyfire was thinking of, that was definitely a lie. “Hey, Sideswipe, budge up so I can talk to our guest.”
“Maybe I want to talk to our ‘guest,’” Sideswipe said, shrugging Hound’s arms onto one of Skyfire’s lab bench. “What are you doing here, anyways?”
“Oh, doctor Skyfire and I were chatting about Armillaria ostoyae. Honey fungus. He’s been helping out the organism mapping teams at my university.” Dr. Lee had found the shelves on the side of the lab bench and was using them as a ladder. Skyfire kept a cargo arm ready to catch her if she slipped. “I invited him to speak at a conference today and he very kindly agreed to let me come along to continue our discussion.”
“Is that why you were late?” Brawn grouched. He was nursing his own dents in a corner.
“It’s not like I meant to be,” Skyfire protested. “There wasn’t supposed to be combat today.” No one was receptive to this argument, for some reason.
At least, between Dr. Lee and Hound, the flight back was full of thoroughly stimulating mycological discussion. Though Ratchet did call a moratorium on it while he reattached Hound’s limbs, after getting Smokescreen and Bumblebee back in what he called ‘passable’ condition, on the principle that he needed Hound to not try to gesture enthusiastically before his arms were completely attached. Dr. Lee unfortunately didn’t come with her own short-wave comm attached, so Skyfire spent that part of the trip listening to Sideswipe’s attempts to pitch a series of his favorite translated novels to her.
“Romance isn’t really my thing, but I have a doctoral student I’ll recommend them to,” Dr. Lee said when Sideswipe paused to let his vocalizer reset. She was admirably calm in the face of his enthusiastic explanations. “I’m sure he’d be happy to chat after reading them.”
“There’s other humans to chat with too!” Sideswipe bragged. “They’ve already been included in one of the official cultural exchanges.”
“I still say you cheated to get those so far up the list,” Cliffjumper grumbled.
“You really think I could cheat a lottery?” Sideswipe demanded, tone wounded, hand splayed across his chest in a position Skyfire was pretty sure he had seen on a human soap opera.
“Yes,” half the ship chorused at once. Skyfire laughed only when he was sure it wouldn’t startle Ratchet.
“Okay, fine, you got me, but do you really think I could beat a lottery run by Prowl?” Sideswipe shook his head. “If I even thought about tampering with it, he’d have me digging out the Ark’s left booster with one of the tiny human shovels.”
Since the left booster engine was buried by several dozen tons of extrusive igneous ash, that was a serious threat.
“I’d worry less about Prowl and more about what the rest of us would do to you when we realized, personally,” Bumblebee offered from where he was running through reattachment exercises.
”If you realized.”
”When.”
Skyfire received a message from the Ark that interrupted his eavesdropping. He pinged an announcement code through his speakers. “Looks like we’re taking a detour before we get back. Dr. Lee, I’m going to have to drop you off first.”
“I appreciate it,” she said, patting the wall next to her. It was a light enough contact he had to pick it up just as a heat field, but the thought was nice. “Sorry if I got you in trouble.”
“It’ll be fine,” Skyfire reassured her.
And it was, more or less. The three-orbit ban on attending mycology conferences wasn’t great, but he was pretty sure that he could bargain his way into traveling on leave. And Hound and Perceptor were good about sneaking him samples to run through his secondary centrifuges when Ratchet was distracted.
Dr. Lee was halfway across the science quad when the jet ambushed her.
Thankfully, the grounds were empty because it was before noon on a Saturday, so he didn’t squish anyone dropping out of the sky to demand “Human! You will be coming with me!”
Despite her collaboration with Skyfire, Dr. Lee was not actually that familiar with the Cybertronian population of Earth. Still, she knew enough to recognize a Decepticon symbol. And what was definitely some sort of ray gun pointed at her.
“Oh, really?” she said, reaching one hand into her tote. “You seem very confident about that.” She took the same tone she used on overconfident grad students, the ones who would spit fire if you pointed out the holes in their research they were sure couldn’t be there. But who would also come crying on your shoulder once they found the holes themselves and beg for help to fix it.
“Overconfident? Please,” he sneered. Boy, she hoped someone was going to call security soon. “What can one measly human do against Commander Starscream, of the Decepticons?”
Starscream! Right! Well, even if security did get here in the next few minutes, they probably couldn’t do much, what did she have—
Her fingers closed around a ziploc bag she’d packed this morning and she pulled it out slowly, drawing on all her faint memories of doing improv in undergrad. Confidence. It was all about the confidence.
“Well, one measly human, not much. But a measly human and a metallophagic fungus?” She waved the bag of chicken-of-the-woods she had brought in to show the campus Foraging Club this week. If his sensors were anything like Skyfire’s, he wouldn’t have anything rated to scan organic material without ingesting it. “This sample I’ve got here is pretty close to sporing. Between us we could do some nasty damage.”
He hesitated, gears creaking inside his enormous legs. “There’s nothing in your research about metal-consuming fungi.” He’d looked at her research? Weird. Maybe flattering.
“You really think I would put any of that anywhere a Cybertronian could find it?” She glared at him, adjusting her glasses. “Wouldn’t want to scare our allies, after all. Come to think of it, I haven’t had the chance to test it on anything other than earth metals. You’d be doing me a favor.”
They held the standoff for a few more long, tense, seconds. She swallowed. horribly conscious that she was trying so hard to keep her heartbeat steady and her breathing regular and he didn’t even sweat. It wasn’t fair, trying to glare down an alien older than recorded civilization when she hadn’t even had her coffee yet. She changed her grip, preparing to tear the bag open and see if he would call her bluff.
“I see you’re a nasty little specimen yourself, human,” Starscream announced. “If this is how you treat your allies, I hope it won’t be long before you realize you don’t have any left.” He rocketed away from the ground, thankfully using some thrust other than flame. The aerodynamics department would probably have killed to observe it this close.
Dr. Lee just finished walking to her nice, sturdy, pre-war building, let herself in, went down to her nice, safe, basement office and locked the door, and collapsed in her chair. She managed to uncrimp her hand, finally, and discovered that her nails had torn holes through the plastic of the bag.
Oh, well. She had another specimen bag around here somewhere.
OFFICIAL AUTOBOT CIVILIAN INFORMATION FORM (ENGLISH VERSION)
This form is to report Decepticon sightings and previous encounters. If you are currently under attack by Decepticons and have no working Autobot contact line, please dial 984 on the nearest telephone.
Approximate Location of Encounter (GPS coordinates preferable; Country, region, closest population center, locality, landmarks all acceptable): Latitude: 44° 58' 18.59" N; Longitude: -93° 14' 1.80" W
Time and Date of encounter: This morning ~8:25 am
Number of Decepticons: 1
Please provide names of any specifically identified Decepticons: Starscream
Did you witness the Decepticons engaged in any of the following activities? (Check all that apply):
- _ Property destruction
- _ Surveillance flights
- _ Threatening of humans (general)
- x Threatening of humans (specific)
- _ Unidentifiable machinery (active)
- _ Unidentifiable machinery (inactive)
- _ Combat
- _ Arguments
- _ Animals or creatures not native to this planet (to the best of your knowledge)
- _ Energy theft
- _ Materials theft
- _ Other
Please provide any relevant details regarding the items you have checked
Starscream threatened me with a ray gun (??) and attempted to abduct me for currently unknown reasons.
Do you have any further details you wish to provide?
I threatened him away by pretending I had a fungus on me that could eat metal (I didn’t). It was really weird. He said he read my research?
Please provide some method of contact in case we need to follow up: [email protected]
Skyfire was halfway over the Bering Strait when he learned that his private comm channel with Starscream—specially modified to be undetectable by professors and at a frequency that wouldn’t interfere with any sensitive equipment, from their Iacon Academy days—had not, as he had assumed, been shut down or degraded over the vorns.
He was so surprised by the call that he accepted, just to see what Starscream had to say.
”You—imbecile! Soft-sparked, stupidly trusting, overconfident empty-coded moron! You waif! You—you—“ A little frustrated, inarticulate shriek. ”Oblivious fool! Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“What’s this about?” Skyfire asked, pulling up all his scans to flip through them. Was he about to get attacked?
”How have you already acquired a colleague who’s plotting your death?! You haven’t even been awake for a vorn!”
“I’ve what,” Skyfire said. “Look, if this is about the Autobots, I don’t want to—“
”Not them! Those dopey scrap heaps are almost as soft as you are, they wouldn’t have the guts. No, you idiot, your little fleshling…collaborator.” Skyfire could hear the sneer on Starscream’s face, emphatically subglyphed onto each word. “The Lee one that you brought to the last battle. It's developing a weapon against you!”
“Right,” Skyfire said. “Of course. The humans are plotting to kill us all.” He didn’t bother attaching sarcasm glyphs. Starscream would get his meaning.
”I am not paranoid, you glitched excuse for a risk assessment. I saw it. The little creature threatened me with it.”
“She what? How were you—since when do you care about humans?” Skyfire sent a request to the Ark for any recent reports of Starscream sightings.
”I don’t. That’s not important. What’s important is it's been using the research you shared with it to make something that can destroy you. A fungus that eats metal. It bragged about keeping it secret.” Starscream’s voice dropped into a calmer register. ”Not that I—care if you offline yourself, but having a Cybertronian killed by an organic smaller than my cockpit would just be humiliating. Do something about it.” He cut the comm.
Skyfire was pretty sure Dr. Lee was developing nothing of the sort, but that sounded like a worrying enough incident that he dashed off an email to her just to get the details. The reports came in on a secure line Blaster had installed and he sorted through them until he found what he was looking for.
The report made him concerned enough that the three bots awake in his bay pinged him to make sure everything was alright. He reassured them that he was fine, just dealing with something unrelated to their trajectory, and resisted the urge to email Dr. Lee again. Humans could only type so fast.
Her email came back before he’d crossed over Juneau’s airspace. Skyfire took a moment to cross-reference “chicken-of-the-woods” against the human’s global information network.
What he found had him laughing for the next forty astroseconds. Oh, Starscream.
Still. It was nice he’d been concerned.