Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I woke up, and everything was wrong.

I couldn’t move my legs, for one thing.

Also, I appeared to be trapped underground next to two glowing cubes. Always a good sign!

Man, I wish I hadn’t drank so much last night.

A joke! That was a joke, okay? The only thing I was drinking last night was yuzu tea. And yuzu tea did not have the rare and unexpected side-effect of causing you to wake up in a cave next to pink sci-fi cubes.

My hand was reaching out towards one of the cubes. Huh, that’s weird. It looked like I was about to hit a button-

My hand was made out of metal. I shrieked and jerked forwards, hitting the button.

The pink cubes exploded.

I didn’t have time to scramble back but it seemed like it was almost completely aimed upwards, anyways.

And it had completely cleared a way to the surface!

“Go past me I have no memories of,” I muttered. Past Me clearly had managed to macguyver something up. I…wasn’t speaking English. And I didn’t sound like myself. There was…also something odd about the way my mouth was making sounds but I couldn’t figure it out.

There were three robot (??) faces staring down at me.

I looked down at myself. Yep, still made of metal. HUD at the corner of my face.

And I didn’t have legs. There were wires sticking out where my legs should be.

Also- oh nooo.

Noooo my boobs.

They were gone. There was a bit that stuck out on my torso but it was definitively not breasts of any kind. Not even robot breasts. I was bereft.

I had to accept it. This was either a brain in a jar situation, I was dreaming, or I was straight up a robot now. Mechanical being. Whatever. This was not my beautiful body. These were not my beautiful bosoms.

I had yet to find myself behind the wheel of a large automobile, though, so I guess it could have been worse.

“Do you need any help down there?” asked one of the robot heads.

“Well, it’s a bit hard to climb without legs,” I said.

A robot dude without a mouth reached down and lifted me out.

“C’mere, pal. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

“I don’t believe we’ve met ei…ther…” I trailed off when I saw the half-exploded body of a blue robot lying on the ground a few feet away.

Um. Oops?

I felt my systems speeding up.

“He’s…not dead…right?”

The dude who was carrying me put me down and immediately I tipped over, bonking my head into the rocky ground.

I pushed myself upright.

I looked to the other side and there was another body, this one purple and in slightly better shape, collapsed inside a small crater.

“Yeah, don’t worry about it, it’ll take more than an explosion to kill this guy,” said the red and white guy.

I was starting to panic.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was standing above me, I didn’t actually know it would explode-“

Okay, freaking out isn’t going to help, Laura! Focus on something. Shrimply having a wonderful Christmas time. Shrimply having a wonderful Christmas time-

No, wait, you don’t know any of the lyrics to that, focus on something else-

Somewhere, beyond the sea, somewhere, waiting for me, my lover stands on-

Wait, why did they have British accents? Why did I have a British accent? I kind of sounded a bit Scouse, of all things. I mean there was no reason why they couldn’t, but we weren’t even speaking English here.

“It’s probably a good thing you did,” said the shortest robot, interrupting my train of thought. “Otherwise -never mind. This is turning into a very odd day.”

I made a huffing noise, startled out of my anxiety despite myself.

“You sure got that right,” I said.

“Were you also headed for the ship?”

I screamed internally. Go back to saying things I could respond comprehensibly to!

“Look, I don’t even remember how I got underground looking like this, let alone where I was going before that, so, you know what, sure. Makes about as much sense as anything going on.”

Why did I say that?

Why did I say that?

“Oh, huh, there’s a thing in my HUD that says ‘objective: get to the ship before it leaves, you idiot’.”

Wow, that’s incredibly rude. Who wrote this thing? I want a refund. You’re the idiot…HUD thingy.

Wait, what if I’m a ghost and I’ve stolen a robot body and the message in the HUD is the robot whose body I’ve stolen trying to communicate with me??

Tough, dude. This is my city now. With…no legs and no clue where I am. This may be your body but I’m controlling it so whose body is it really, hmmm. So there.

Maybe we can work out some kind of sharing schedule or I can find my way back to my regular body or, heck, I dunno, we extract me from this body and put me in a robot body of my own.

Or maybe he’s dead, I got pulled into here, and whatever is in the HUD is the robot’s ghost, rather than me being a ghost. Maybe we’re both ghosts in this machine.

 Heh, ghost in the machine.

 Or maybe it’s just a snarky HUD.

The dude who had picked me up spoke up from behind me. “Maybe you hit your head falling down there?”

I decided to keep my thoughts about ghosts to myself.

“That’s how you get amnesia, right? Sometimes, at least,” I said. Then cursed internally and hoped robot brains did that. Wait, did robots even have brains? No, slow down, he asked the question, which implies it was a reasonable question.

Which implies that robots have something in their head, whether it’s a brain or not, that can be affected by blunt force trauma similar to a human brain.

The red and white dude looked down at me. “I’ll take a look at your head after we get onboard the Lost Light.” He sighed. “I’m going to regret saying this, but we’d best bring Whirl along too. We can’t risk leaving him…well…anywhere, really.”

The short dude spoke up. “I’ll, er, catch you guys up…I’ve just got to say good bye to someone.”

Original dude picked me up again.

“So, uh, who are you guys?”

The red and white guy spoke up. “I’m Ratchet, your steed there is Chromedome, and that was Rewind who just left. You gonna introduce yourself, or have you forgotten your name too?”

“No, um, I remember my name. It’s Laura.”

“Laura?” asked Chromedome.

“Ahh…yep,” I said, nodding my head. “I’m Laura. It’s me. The Laurinator.”

I paused.

“I’m not actually ‘the Laurinator’. Please don’t call me that. No one calls me that.”

“It’s fine, I get it,” said Chromedome. “I used to have a different name that was kind of…not as great…as well.”

Me and my big mouth. But geez, what was worse than Chromedome? Did they straight-up call him Baldy?

I didn’t say that, of course. It would have been rude. Though did…these guys even have the concept of being bald? They didn’t have hair.

I looked over at the spaceship (whee!) we were headed towards. And then boggled a bit.

“That’s a big ship,” I said. “Why’s it called the Lost Light?” Kind of an odd name.

“Isn’t that the name of a festival?” asked Chromedome.

“Never heard of it,” said Ratchet, blissfully unaware he had saved me from more palpitations. Or whatever this robot body was doing that seemed like palpitations.

Oh wait, they knew I had amnesia. I didn’t need to worry about not knowing shibboleths. But what was going to happen when Ratchet examined my brain and saw nothing wrong?

“All right, patient one, let’s get to the medbay.”

The security guy (who was also red and white) interrupted. “Actually…there’s someone there with a detached arm. Ring, I think?”

“I can see we’re off to a good start,” I said dryly.

~~~~~

Once we made it to the medical area, Ratchet had Chromedome plonk me down on one of the beds.

“Hope you don’t mind if I get set up,” he said.

“As far as I can tell none of this is getting any worse, so go ahead,” I said. “And it’s not like I have anywhere else to be,” I added in an undertone.

Chromedome left shortly afterwards.

The silence stretched on as Ratchet went about setting up.

And on.

And on.

It was the kind of silence you would call pregnant, except, you call a silence pregnant when it’s full of meaning and unsaid things.

There was no meaning in this silence, I just felt it weighing on me. A phantom pregnancy silence.

Wait. Pregnancy. Lost Light. Chromedome.

This was that Transformers comic!

The one I’d tried to read that one time but noped out on because of the gore!

This was fine, I thought with an internal grimace. And an external one.

I’m sure it would be fine.

Things could be worse, right? All my health problems had been fixed. Well, all right, I had gained new and exciting ones in the form of “having no legs at all” but that was fixable!

No more chronic pain!

And you know what, I was metal now. Robots didn’t get sick. That meant there was no chance of me having a debilitating terminal illness. All I had to worry about was grievous bodily injury.

Which, uh, given some of the brutal screenshots I’d seen, was a cause for concern, but it meant all I needed to do was do my best to avoid violence.

It may not have been the best situation, but it wasn’t the worst!

Immediately after thinking that, as if to taunt me, there was a loud noise like an explosion, and the ship shook.

“Hey,” I looked over to the guy carrying his own arm, speaking up to be heard over the loud alarm. “Is that normal?”

He shook his head. Immediately afterwards, I felt like an idiot. Of course it’s not normal! You think alarms go off for routine ship things?

“Welcome to the Lost Light, the finest ship in um…ship-land. It only costs an arm and a leg to get on!” I said dramatically, gesturing at him and then at me. “Or, well, two legs in my case.”

Armless smiled at me politely. The guy I had accidentally blown up said nothing, because he had yet to return to consciousness.

“I’m Laura, by the way,” I said.

“I’m Rung,” Armless replied politely.

“Looks like you…really got your bell rung, huh?” I said, then immediately cringed internally. Not one of your best puns, Laura.

“Ha, yes,” said Rung. “Never heard that one before…”

“I mean if it was good the first time, it’s good the…forty-second time?” I said in reply, metaphorically sticking my foot even further into my mouth.

Luckily I was saved after only a short period of awkward silence by an announcement over the PA system. Or whatever they called it.

“Hey, this is your captain speaking and we’ve experienced some slight technical difficulties on takeoff with the engines kind of…exploding. Everyone who hasn’t already been pulled out into space, please stay away from the breach. When we land, anyone who’s able, come down to help with search and rescue, thank you.”

The PA system shut off.

Nope.

Nope.

I was going to put this aside. There was nothing I could do, even if there was anything I could do.

That made sense when I was thinking it, I swear. Even if I had both my legs, what could I even do to help out besides keep an eye out? I knew some first aid, sure, but that was for humans.

I really wished I could get up and walk around a bit, but, well, see the obvious problem with doing that.

“So!” I said, turning towards Rung. “Why are we on this quest anyways, and where are we going?”

Chapter Text

“I’m getting Swerve to carbon-date you,” said Ratchet as he attached my new leg.

“Uh. What?”

I think that’s a reasonable response to being told that!

“You’re practically built with gears and pulleys! You should be in a museum somewhere!”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “I consider myself a classic. And I’m not that old.” Oh right, the amnesia. “I think."

Wait.

“You put people in museums?” I asked, panicked.

“What? No, of course not.”

Is this what the next bit of my life was going to be like? Not being able to pick up on social cues and stuff like figuring out when people were joking?

So, just like most of the rest of my life until my mid-20s, then.

I know I sounded flippant just now, but, actually, that sucked, okay? It really sucked. So, c’mon, robot brain, help me out here.

My robot brain whirred encouragingly at me.

“Your head looks fine,” said Ratchet, “so any injury you took there has already healed up. You’re still having the amnesia problems?”

“I don’t remember anything more than I did earlier, I don’t think,” I said, which had the benefit of not being a lie.

“All right,” said Ratchet. “Come see me if it hasn’t resolved itself in the next couple of days.”

Yeah, I was so not doing that.

“Just stay here a bit until Swerve gets here.”

“Wait, that wasn’t a joke?”

I guess it’s not like I have anything better to do.

Wait, I could be looking around the ship and figuring out where everything was. So I guess I did have something better to do, but it wasn’t anything time sensitive.

Swerve turned out to be another red and white dude (seriously, why was everyone I met the same colour scheme?) who was about my height.

My current height, I mean. I had no clue how things stacked up compared to my canon height- er, real life height. Er, height when I was a human.

“This should be interesting,” he said. “So, you got no clue how old you are?”

“Basically,” I said. “I don’t really remember much before I woke up in a literal hole in the ground today. I don’t even know what planet we were on, or where we’re going.”

I paused. “It is still ‘today’, right? For context it was right before getting on the ship. Though I suppose it depends on which time zone you’re in, right?”

I too enjoy contemplating how time doesn’t actually exist.

That’s a lie, I don’t and I never have except that time when I was in high school reading too much philosophy and had a crush on St. Augustine.

Hey, don’t knock St. Augustine, he’s cool, and at least I was having fun.

“Yeah, it’s still today, don’t worry about it,” said Swerve. He paused. “Wait, wait, go back to what you were saying. You don’t remember where you were? And you just decided to get on a ship?”

“In retrospect? Not my greatest decision. Probably. Since I don’t remember any of my other decisions. Because of the amnesia.”

“Well you were alive and in one piece, right? So you were at least making some good decisions…”

“Uh, well, I was trapped underground and my legs were gone. So whatever lead to that was…probably the worse decision. Unless there’s a serial killer in the vents or something.”

There is one impostor still among us. Not now, brain.

“Oh, right! Also my HUD said getting on the ship was what I was supposed to do next. In related news, do you know how to fix my HUD so it stops being so mean to me? I just want, like, a regular boring neutral HUD.”

As if summoned, the HUD, which had been flashing “NO ONE WANTS TO HEAR YOU RAMBLING”, blinked out and was replaced with “Recalibrating…”

I rubbed my forehead. It didn’t actually do anything, but I feel like it did convey my current emotions to Swerve.

“Never mind, it seems like it’s sorting itself out now.”

Way to make me look like an idiot, HUD.

For a second I saw the text flicker to say “just as planned” and then flicker back.

Eh, I’m sure it’s probably nothing. I’m not going to lose sleep over it, I say, like a liar.

A few beds over, Ratchet was fixing Rung’s arm and saying something irritatedly, but I couldn’t quite make it out.

“Have you heard his latest theory?” asked Swerve in the gleeful tone of someone about to share something cursed. “He thinks the Knights of Cybertron have evolved into beams of light, and that they communicate via “psychic refraction”.”

“Psychic refraction?!” Ratchet repeated in an incredulous tone. “Oh for-“

“Ow!” said Rung.

“Don’t tell me things like that when I’ve got a scalpel in my hand.”

I’ve been there, Ratchet.

“Thanks for the fix, Ratchet,” said Rung, getting up. “I suppose it’s Whirl’s turn next…”

“Would I be betraying my profession if I said I was hoping for a series of distractions that would prevent me from fixing him for another, ooh, five hundred years?”

“Uhh, probably, yeah,” I said. “I mean at least once you’re done he won’t be back for a-“

I was interrupted by Whirl screaming and lunging forwards to grab Rung by the throat.

Good news, my explosion didn’t kill him, I guess?

As Rung struggled in his grip and everyone else yelled at Whirl, I realized the reason hospitals have orderlies. Someone should probably get that security guy. I tried to get up from the bed and fell flat on my face with a clang of metal meeting metal.

I got to my feet in time to see Whirl stalk off.

“Should we…do something?”

“He’ll come back later to get properly fixed,” said Ratchet tiredly.

Swerve looked at the device in his hand, and made a shocked face. Then he turned towards me and smiled. The smile of someone about to share something cursed.

“My dear Laura,” he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. I made myself relax. Please hurry up and unhand me, sir.

Then he whispered something.

“I’M SIX MILLION YEARS OLD?!”

I had to fake forgetting six million years of memory?

No, wait, how did that make sense?? What kind of metal were these people made out of anyways??

Did carbon dating even go back that far??

Wait, wasn’t carbon dating based on organic stuff? Like you don’t use it to date rocks or metal unless they had organic stuff on them right?

…I think. Look this isn’t my area.

But either way I smelled a rat.

…Huh. The robot body had a sense of smell. I mean I guess why not have a sense of smell, right? I’m kind of a hypocrite for thinking it was weird when I ragged on Al’s armour in FMA for having hearing and sight but arbitrarily not having other senses.

No, actually, I was completely right to rag on it, it makes no sense.

“-aura? Laura?”

Someone was waving a hand in front of my face.

Six. Million. Years.

This was about as far from “fine” as anything that wasn’t a screaming emergency could be.

~~~~

Ratchet had Swerve take me outside, after yelling at Swerve and also telling me not to try transforming for a bit.

So, immediately after going outside, Swerve asked me to transform.

“You don’t even remember what you turn into!”

“Look, I didn’t get as far as I did in life by ignoring doctors,” I said.

“You were trapped in a cave for six million years,” said Swerve.

“You don’t know that! You don’t know how long I was down there! Maybe it was like five minutes!”

“Hm,” said Swerve. “Well, the whole war was kind of hard to sleep through. And then the whole planet got irradiated. And then Galvatron tried to destroy the world and Cybertron reverted back to how it was in ancient times. Yeah, it’s pretty unlikely that someone would be trapped in a cave for all that time.”

“See!” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “Also, I probably would have died due to having no fuel. Also also, clearly I must have taken good care of my antique body in order for it to still be in one piece after all this time.”

There was a pause.

“Weren’t you legless-“

“Okay, fine!”

“It’s tough luck, though,” said Swerve. “You kept your head down and managed to get through the whole war in one piece and then, as soon as the war’s over, you get your legs blown off right after getting back to Cybertron.”

“That sounds plausible,” I said. “Sad, but plausible.”

“So, any clue what your job is? What does “OSAL” stand for?”

“No clue at all,” I said. “But, look, I see some other letters you can’t make out. What ends in “osal”?”

We pondered.

“Proposal? No, why would I have that on my arm?”

Mucosal? No, that’s even worse. Besides, no one here has mucus. I think.

I hope.

But that’s beside the point because it’s an adjective.

“Disposal?” asked Swerve.

“You will be…disposed of,” I said, affecting a dark and ominous tone. “Pfft,” I used a more normal tone. “Probably taking out the trash.”

“What if it’s bomb disposal?”

“Do I really look like the kind of person who does bomb disposal?”

“Ah, you see, that’s exactly why you’re the sort of person who does bomb disposal,” said Swerve. “They’d never expect it.” He tapped his nose sagely.

“You know, I never thought about it but…how does bomb disposal work?”

“Why are you asking me? I’m a metallurgist, not an explosives expert.”

“Ok,” I said.

What? It’s not like there was much you could really say to that. Well, I could have come up with something better if I had tried but it had been a very long and tiring day, already.

And now I stood on the dirt of an alien planet, looking up at its sky.

You’re supposed to enjoy these experiences, but honestly it was pretty…meh. Needed some nice trees or something.

It would be really nice if we were to land on some beautiful alien planet with sweeping vistas, I thought loudly.

Oops, Swerve was still talking. I…think he was talking about metallurgy, but it didn’t sound anything like what I thought metallurgy was.

I tried to tune back in, but I just…

I felt so exposed, out here, it was so flat and open. It was wrong. I needed to be somewhere else, away from anyone, I needed some time to myself.

But, as always, I wasn’t going to get that. I was just going to have to endure.

~~~~

Endure a whole crowd and speech, as it turned out. At least I was away from everything now, even if I wasn’t quite alone.

“This looks like a bar,” I said. For lack of any other option, I’d followed Swerve after the captain had told everyone to find a partner and a room.

“I’m pretty sure it is a bar,” Swerve said. He looked happy. “I always wanted to open a bar, you know. Me and Blurr, after the war. We were gonna run a bar together. Stupid idea. Stupid.”

Oh no. Blurr had died, right? I remembered, there was that thing about Shockwave killing him.

“Well, uh…you could open this one, then?” I said. Asked, rather.

“Nah, no way Ultra Magnus would let me. I can’t imagine how many rules that would break…"

Swerve looked at me. I looked at Swerve.

There was a pause.

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. I’m not the bartending type. Like, at all. And I’m not helping you start some kind of…illegal bar.”

“You’re really no fun,” said Swerve.

“That’s me, all right,” I said. “Well known for having no sense of fun at all. I suck the fun out of rooms when I enter them. This is who I am as a person.”

“But what if someone needs engex to live, huh? What if they can’t get a drink and they die?”

“They had no business going onboard a ship with no known source of engex, then,” I rebutted him pitilessly.

“But Laura,” said Swerve. “You’ve got no idea what Magnus is like. We’ll be filling out forms for fifty years! Better to start it up and beg forgiveness than ask permission.”

“I thought the red guy was the captain, though, doesn’t he have the final word? Why not just ask him? Though, I mean, health and safety regulations exist for a very good reason.”

Swerve made a face. “Aw, c’mon, we just need to get it set up first. Rodimus’ll approve it if he sees what we have already.”

I was beginning to have a very bad feeling about this, but it was probably too late to back out now.

No, wait. Why would it be too late to back out now? Because the one person I’ve attached myself to would feel bad about it? When it’s something that would make me miserable in the long-term?

Yeah, no. I’ve been here before.

Okay, but, seriously how the heck was I supposed to get out of this predicament?

Just…smile and nod and don’t commit to anything and then bail asap.

That’s the Patented Laura Technique! Definitely not stolen!

“Where are you even going to get engex, anyways?”

Swerve opened his mouth. Then closed it. Then opened it again.

“There’s some right here!” He said, gesturing to the tubes behind him. “I’m not sure how much, but enough to get started! And- and I can order more when we stop someplace.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Is engex really that easy to find out there?”

“Welllll…I mean…I could also try making it from our energon supplies!”

I was not getting involved. I was not getting involved. I was going to bail. I was not getting involved.

Never mind that I’d always been interested in trying to do stuff like that. I’d wanted to try making mead one day.

“Why not,” I said, sighing.

Swerve’s wording did not exactly fill me with confidence that he knew what he was doing. I had a pretty good idea the first regulation he would run afoul of was health and safety. Looked like no bar-going for me for the next while. Oh no, so sad, what a pity.

A thought struck me, suddenly. Wait, was this where we chose roommates? Was I now going to be stuck with Swerve?

That would make avoiding him…impossible.

Well, we weren’t actually in a habsuite. Surely I could find someone else. Or, if I was lucky, my own room. How big was the ship, anyways?

~~~~

Luckily for me, it didn’t take too long after that for things to get resolved. I didn’t really get a straight answer on what exactly had happened, as we were removed from the room by security and escorted from the premises.

…of the bar.

Not the ship.

Which would have been bad since we were in space.

But “escorted from the premises” sounds cooler, and thus, the way I referred to it in my thoughts.

“Oh, good, Red,” said the captain, who was also red. One of his arms looked noticeably shinier than it had when he’d stood in front of everyone, “you’ve found yourself a roommate.”

I looked at “Red”. “Red” looked at me.

I weighed my options:

Pros of Red: he wasn’t Swerve

Cons of Red: he was the security guy!

“Um, actually…” I said quietly.

Red eyed me suspiciously.

Wait. Crap. If I said anything, what if it made him suspicious and think I had something to hide?

I mean, I did have something to hide (the whole being a human ghost(?) stuck inside this body).

But I didn’t have anything to hide that a security guy would need to worry about!

Unless that was a regular concern of theirs.

Which sounded incredibly stupid but this was Transformers, and if I remembered anything about the franchise is that it was full of incredibly weird stuff.

Okay, no, fine, I was pretty sure I’d remember if I’d read anyone talking about this kind of thing happening in the comics.

But still!

“Never mind,” I said. “This is fine.”

Boy, I sure hoped it was.

Yeah, I mean, the comic dropped this gag after literally the first issue. Don’t bother stressing, you have much more important things to worry about. ^{[ ▲ ]}

Chapter Text

Fun fact: cheetahs are very nervous and sensitive animals. So, zookeepers pair them with emotional support dogs. The dogs have a calm and confident nature or something like that, which helps the cheetahs calm down.

This was the opposite of that situation.

“What do you mean, you don’t know what to do?!” I asked, panicked.

I felt another mysterious mechanical piece inside of me slowly shift into a new configuration, and the metal on either side of my head rose to cover it.

The situation was this: Red Alert and I had returned to our room with all my worldly possessions in tow (read: my shiny 6 million year old robot ass). And by returned, I mean he didn’t actually have a room picked out yet, and we spent forever debating which room had the optimal position. Which involved walking all over the ship finding out who had claimed which rooms…

I learned from Red that there was apparently some kind of tool that let you view your own memories, only the entire Autobot supply of them had either been destroyed or looted when the command centre had fallen a few years ago. Maybe if I set up some kind of search for one…to fix my fake amnesia.

Well okay I was missing a few memories but not to the extent I was pretending. So I didn’t really need to find a memory viewer. But you know what? Goals are important.

And- yeah yeah, the cheetah situation, I’m getting there, I’m getting there.

See, I’d finally decided to try transforming, since I had no clue what I turned into (and also Red was deeply suspicious I turned into some kind of spy gear or something.)

The problem was…things were not going well. I was stuck, with bits of me moving around at an infinitesimal pace.

Red was being absolutely no help at all. Well, he was trying, at least. By asking me various questions I didn’t know the answer to. How was I supposed to know if I was gram-negative, or whatever it was he had said?

“Try to stop and turn back!” he said, in one of the most uncalm tones I had ever heard.

“That feels like it’s a bad idea!” I shouted back, muffled. At least based on experience with computer stuff. Honestly the best thing to do would be to force a shutdown and reboot, if this was a computer program I was trying to run, but I had zero idea how to do the equivalent of that here, because I existed in physical space. I mean maybe knocking me unconscious would shift everything back to the default configuration but honestly it felt more like a hardware than a software issue.

“What if I try-“ His voice cut off as I heard him rummaging with something, and then I heard a very loud CLANGGG, and then I could feel every single piece of me vibrating at slightly off pitches.

I tried to say something but whatever my vocal mechanism was, was stuck vibrating, so nothing came out.

“Laura? Laura?? Speak to me!”

I wheezed out a noise that sounded kind of like connecting to dialup.

“All right, that’s it, we’re going to see Ratchet.”

“Probably…should have done that earlier,” I warbled.

~~~~~

Well, I never wanted to go through anything like that again in my life.

“Looks like there was a piece of metal stuck in your transformation cog,” said Ratchet. “I’ll just take it and-“

CLICK

As if on cue, all of my joints suddenly shifted and I was…

“What…are you?” asked Ratchet.

“I’m a tree,” I said. How did I know that? “The green on the outside absorbs solar radiation and turns it into energy. Bit useless in space, though.” I would have shrugged if I had shoulders in this form.

“That…does explain some of the odder things I noticed with your legs earlier, but I’d just chalked it up to you being a bit older.”

It’s only now that you mention this? I thought crabbily. Wait, he’d made me replacement legs, right? But if he hadn’t known about the photosynthesis, how would he have properly implemented it?

Suspicious.

And yet, I could feel that everything was working as intended.

That was another thing. How had I know what I turned into, after I had done it? How had I somehow known about the photosynthesis? What kind of robot photosynthesized?

(And why did it seem so familiar?)

My HUD, which had been gone until now, decided to pop up with a “YOU’RE WELCOME”, which hovered, smugly, in the air in front of me for a few seconds before vanishing.

Going back to the photosynthesis…what the heck?

I was…some kind of aluminum Christmas tree?! That’s what I turned into? That was like, totally bogus!

Why couldn’t I have been something ambulatory, I whined to myself.

“All right,” said Ratchet. “Shoo, shoo.”

I transformed back to my legged form. Okay, that was not the best name for it. Humanoid form? Definitely couldn’t use that one around other people. Other Transformers.

Other Cybertronians.

Boy, was it a good thing there weren’t any mind readers around.

“Um, right,” I said to Ratchet. “Thanks for your help. Again.” I waved jerkily and started walking towards the door. “If you need any help, I’m, uh, well, I don’t actually know what my job is here…”

Wait, did they have mind readers around?

“Just go,” said Ratchet, tiredly.

“Thanks for carrying me here,” I said to Red Alert as the door closed behind us. “And for uh, trying to help earlier. Sorry for all the freaking out.”

“I think most normal people would have ‘freaked out’ after that,” said Red Alert. “Especially with the day you’ve had.” He sighed. “I didn’t exactly handle things with grace, either. I’m normally more put together but everything what with the explosion, and the sparkeater…”

“The spark eater?” I asked.

And that’s how I learned the story of what had happened while I was trapped in the bar with Swerve.

“He did WHAT?!” I said, in a calm and rational tone.

“Yes,” said Red Alert.

“Sorry if this is an inappropriate question but…why is this guy captain, again?”

“He’s the one who organized the whole quest,” said Red Alert.

“Okay, yeah, that’s fair.” Not every plan could be a winner. Some of them involved using the ship therapist as bait and getting your arms swallowed by the engine, I guess.

And that was that.

~~~~~

“Are you going to follow me around all day?” asked Red Alert.

“Um, honestly? I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do. I have memory viewer-quest, I guess, but I don’t know how I’m supposed to even start. And I’m not really sure what I’m supposed to do all day…like, everyone on a ship has a role right? Except passengers, but passengers are paying and I’m not paying…”

And also there was nothing for me to do.

So, yes I was following Red Alert around, looking around, as he mouthed “memory viewer-quest” to himself.

I- holy shit, is that an energy crossbow??

Eeeeeeeeeeee. So cool.

The guy holding (who was, once again, red) turned to look at me and waved.

“Thanks!” he said.

Diiid I say that out loud? Well, I guess there were worse times I could have externalized my internal monologue. This one was just a bit embarrassing because of the squeeing. So much for my cool and collected demeanour.

Oh, he was walking over.

“Hi,” he said, sticking out his hand. “I’m Atomizer.”

“I’m Laura,” I said, shaking it. The dude had half his face covered with a faceplate (or maybe he didn’t actually have a face? Dun dun dunnn) so it was hard to read his expression, but he seemed happy.

“So I hear you were trapped in a cave for six million years?”

“Mmrrph,” I said. “We don’t actually know that. I- wait, how did you know that?”

“Swerve,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“You guys are friends?”

“Swerve is…very talkative,” said Red Alert. “Don’t tell Swerve anything unless you want the entire ship to know.”

“The entire Cybertronian race, more like,” said Atomizer.

That seemed a bit harsh. But I guess this meant I didn’t have to explain my entire partially fake deal every time I met a new person.

“Yeah so I hear apparently you’re going to help Swerve start a bar?” asked one of the guys standing next to Atomizer. Finally, someone who wasn’t red! This guy was dark grey and gold mixed.

“I didn’t agree to anything, if Swerve wants to know where I am you didn’t see me,” I said. This was going to be a real headache. “Anyways, you are…?”

“Jackpot.”

Don’t make the pun. Don’t make the pun. Don’t make the pun, because it doesn’t really work when Cybertronians chose their own names. What a waste of a nice stupid pun.

“Nice to meet you too,” I said, shaking his hand.

“Laura, I have to keep going in my patrol,” said Red Alert. “I’ll see you later.” He then power walked off.

He ditched me!

I can’t believe it.

“Great, now that he’s gone, want to try out my crossbow?” said Atomizer, in a quiet enough tone I was pretty sure he was trying to avoid Red hearing.

“Not in the hallway!” Red Alert yelled from around the corner.

“Not in the hallway,” I said. “Oh, wait, sorry, don’t feel like you have to, I don’t want to impose…”

“It’s fine,” said Atomizer. “I see you’re a ‘bot of culture as well. Not a lot of people appreciate bows.”

“That’s because they require so much more training to use than a blaster, and you need physical projectiles that are hard to get,” said Jackpot.

“They wouldn’t be hard to get if more people used a bow,” said Atomizer. This had the air of a bit of an old argument.

“You ever do stuff with trick arrows?” I asked. “You know like exploding arrows…”

Uh, what had Hawkeye used again? Green Arrow?

“Punching hand arrows…no, wait, forget that one…”

“Maybe don’t mention any of this near Brainstorm,” said Atomizer. “I don’t want to think about what he’s building now that he doesn’t have to answer to the ethics community. I could probably figure out something, but the interactions with the energy in the string would have to- sorry,” he said, cutting himself off. “It’s a problem for another day.”

“He’s probably not actually going to build anything unless it’s a request from command or something,” said Jackpot. “So don’t bet on him making anything cool unless Ultra Magnus is standing over him.”

“Oh I was just…making conversation. The bow is cool enough,” I said.

“And I made that,” said Atomizer.

“Wait, seriously?”

“I was an engineer at Kimia back before everything,” he said.

“I have no idea what that means,” I said.

“Means he did weapons design. Same as Brainstorm,” said Jackpot.

“Not exactly the same as Brainstorm,” said Atomizer, sounding a bit tired. “Don’t expect that kind of thing out of me.”

“That would probably mean something to me if I knew who Brainstorm was,” I said, a bit irritated.

“Anyways. Crossbow?” he asked.

“Let’s go to the target range,” I said.

“We have a range on the ship?”

“Yeah it’s over by the, uh…” I paused. “I know how to find it from here, I remember what everything looked like but I don’t remember the names of the landmarks.”

“Well, lead the way,” said Jackpot.

Chapter Text

“Wow,” said Atomizer.

“Wow,” said Jackpot.

“Wow,” said Trailbreaker, poking his head around the corner.

“Mrph,” said I.

“That is some impressive bad aim,” said Atomizer. “I think it’s on par with Swerve.”

Ohhhh man I wanted to die.

No, I didn’t want to die. What I wanted was to get out of this situation and curl up in a dark corner where no one could see me for a bit, and not have anyone bring it up again.

All right, I’d kind of been hoping I’d ace this on the first try for some reason, but I’d…kind of flinched. On every shot. Which is something you do not want to do with a bow.

“I keep expecting there to be more…recoil?” I said. “It’s got barely any weight to it at all.”

“Well, it is an energy bow,” Atomizer said.

“Mrph,” I said again. I handed the bow back to him. “Thanks for letting me try it.”

“While I’m here, I heard you were going to help Swerve with his bar…?” asked Trailbreaker.

I really wished for lungs so I could inflate them and then let out the air in a satisfying burst. Wait, what? That was a really weird way of thinking about sighing.

“I said I’d maybe help out if he got permission and all the permits sorted out.”

Wait Laura, no! Stay strong!

“I mean I backed out after he said he was going to ignore those things…”

“Sounds like Swerve,” said Jackpot.

“I guess that means we just need to get permission from Ultra Magnus, then,” said Trailbreaker.

Who is this ‘we’, you’re talking to, huh?

“If you want to get Ultra Magnus’ attention and have him give you demerits for having a crooked badge, be my guest,” said Jackpot.

“Well, I don’t have a badge at all, so I don’t think he could get on my case,” I said, despite myself.

“This is true,” said Atomizer, nodding sagely. He winked at me. Or something that gave off the feeling of a wink, given he had a visor. “Laura will never have to worry about if her badge is crooked.”

“Or missing. You probably get demerits if it’s missing too, right?” I said, expanding further on the topic.

“Definitely,” said Atomizer.

“Or folded, I bet,” I said. “Hmm…spindled? Mutilated? You know, I never remember what ‘spindle’ means.” Not as a verb, at least.

“It’s not about the- ugh,” said Jackpot, interrupting himself. “You two were winding me up.”

“Yanking your chain,” I said.

“Pulling your leg,” Atomizer said.

“Why are we even talking about badges?” asked Trailbreaker.

“It was something about badgering Ultra Magnus,” I said.

Atomizer groaned. “No."

Atomizer, how could you betray me in this way? That was a great pun.

“Maybe you should go see Swerve, first, and see what kind of help he needs,” I said, starting to walk towards the door. Everyone started following me, so I automatically slowed my pace to let someone else walk in front. “But you know, I bet I could put together something to convince Ultra Magnus. I’m not half bad at these things.”

I mean, how much worse could he be than some of…some of…something I’d dealt with in the past. I’d done presentations before, that was for sure. But for the life of me, I couldn’t remember any of them.

This was bad. Did I have for-real amnesia of some kind? I mean in addition to forgetting how I woke up underground in the first place. But what was I supposed to say? ‘Yeah, remember how I said I have amnesia? Well actually I have even more amnesia than I thought. Yes I know I said I forgot everything, but actually, I was lying before.’

Ha!

“Laura? Are you okay?”

“Just stressing out about my amnesia, nothing to worry, about,” I said. “I just…um…you know what…” I was about to ask them to ignore it, but I’d already drawn it out enough, it would be better to say something. I reset my vocalizer.

“I just remembered I’d done presentations and that kind of thing before, but I couldn’t remember any of the times. Not where or who or when.” Or why, or how, for that matter.

“That must feel weird,” said Trailbreaker.

It’s like a missing tooth that you can’t help but keep pressing at the space with your tongue. But I really couldn’t say that. What other example would work?

“It’s like stepping on what you think is solid ground, only there’s a gap, so you trip,” I said. “But in your head. Really derailed my train of thought. Anyways, what were you saying?”

“Just that maybe we should all go see Swerve first before talking to Ultra Magnus,” said Trailbreaker.

“I was kind of avoiding him,” I said. “But…I’m actually kind of interested now.” Doing a presentation was something I could actually do, I knew this, even if I didn’t know how I knew I had experience. Put those things aside, take them as a given, the rest doesn’t matter. I didn’t need to understand how I knew.

That was how it went, when solving a problem. You didn’t need to understand the givens, but solve the problem based on the givens.

The problem of my memory needed to wait to be solved. I was, unfortunately, going to have trust someone with the truth at some point. I just didn’t have enough knowledge of being Cybertronian, and what was possible.

I looked at the shape of the corridors as we walked towards the room that wasn’t a bar yet. It was kind of…drab. Lifeless.

Hmm, I wondered what Red Alert would think if I painted our room yellow?

No, that would clash with me. No, green and yellow didn’t clash, why did I think that? Or at least, the combo wasn’t what I wanted. It would work with Red, though.

Hah! Pink! The contrast with green would be nice, but it would also work okay with Red’s red.

“I wonder where I could get some paint, though,” I said to myself.

“Hm?” asked Jackpot.

“Oh I was just thinking the corridor looked kind of…”

“Bland? Dull?” Atomizer interjected.

“I was going to go with ‘depressing and joyless’ but that works too,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be allowed to do anything about the corridors,” Nor did I really want to, I thought, ignoring the voice that said you could do it if you weren’t a coward!. “I was just thinking about painting my room.”

Huh, I wonder if there was such a thing as multichrome paint I could use on myself. I could stencil cute little colour-shifting kiwis all over myself.

Atomizer sparkled. No, there was no other word for it. “Oh? What were you thinking?”

“Well, maybe some hot pink accents, at least? Some kind of art or knickknacks would be nice but I don’t know what kind of stuff Red Alert likes.”

“Good luck getting Red Alert to agree to that,” said Jackpot. “He’d probably want to scan the paint for nanocameras and suspect you of some weird plot.”

“You should get some nice crystals in complementary shades,” said Atomizer, ignoring Jackpot.

“Oooh, crystals,” I said, and then, because I had to, “what about an orb? A crystal orb. Or maybe malachite…”

“To hang from the ceiling?” Atomizer pondered.

“You know what, sure!” Disco ball time. “You seem very enthusiastic about this.”

Trailbreaker grinned. “That’s because Atomizer here was an interior designer in another life.”

“Oh, neat,” I said. “I guess I’ll see what Red Alert thinks, first, before I actually do anything, but I’d really appreciate your advice.”

Oh wait, this was taking advantage of him. “I mean, I’ll pay you for it. Once I get some money. I have literally nothing to my name right now.”

“Wait,” said Atomizer, sounding horrified. “Wait, wait. You woke up in a hole in the ground with no legs, no memories, and no money?”

“Put like that, it sounds pretty bad,” I said. “I should definitely ask Swerve to give me some money to talk to Ultra Magnus for him,” I muttered.

“Who would do something like that?” asked Trailbreaker, sounding concerned. “It sounds like you had some kind of serious enemy…”

“Was this the Black Block Consortia? Laura, were you involved with organized crime?” Jackpot asked.

“Uh,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Atomizer. “No way the BBC would hire one of us.”

Heh, the BBC. If I was actually British, I’m sure I’d have some more on-topic joke to make, but all I could think of was the Scottish mafia, which was politics.

“I meant the BBC was the one going after her. Maybe you work for one of their competitors?” Jackpot asked, looking at me.

I don’t think Sky News would hire me, even if I wanted to work for a place owned by Rupert Murdoch.

“I’m pretty sure we’d notice if any aliens had showed up on Cybertron.”

“What if they were in disguise? Wearing a robot suit like…” Don’t say Gundam, don’t say Gundam. “Voltron?” No, that’s even worse!! Why do I remember animated shows I saw like one episode of, but not my work experience?

“It could be any one of us!” said Jackpot.

“Don’t even whisper that in front of Red Alert,” said Atomizer. “He’ll insist on using the really weird scans on everyone.”

“Maybe don’t say it in front of Swerve either, or the whole ship will know,” said Trailbreaker.

To be fair to Swerve, I too would tell everyone I knew about this hilarious joke.

“Back on topic, though,” he added.

“What was the topic, anyways?” I asked.

“Interior decorating,” said Jackpot.

“Intergalactic organized crime feuds,” said Atomizer.

“I don’t really have anything more to add about the interior decorating, but, going back to the organized crime, you might have a point,” I said. “It does kind of match with where I found myself.”

It might also explain why I had all these human memories. No, wait, I meant, why I somehow got turned into a robot. Maybe Past Laura had been involved with alien crime, and then they’d stuck her in this body and…wiped her memories of the crime? Yeah, because that totally sounded like the sort of thing I would do. Not to mention the comic book thing. If I wasn’t stuck in a comic book, why did I think I was?

Well, maybe my brain was playing tricks on me. “Oh, haha it would be funny to make Laura think she’s actually in a fictional series based on an 80s toy selling vehicle”. Heh, vehicle.

No that was stupid.

“More than ‘kind of’, it definitely sounds like the kind of thing they’d do,” said Trailbreaker.

“Wait,” I said. “Why wouldn’t they just kill me instead?”

“Maybe you have powerful friends who would take terrible revenge on them,” said Atomizer.

That definitely sounded fake.

“Maybe they wanted you to suffer,” said Jackpot. He paused. “Maybe they wanted someone else to suffer, like, you were being held for ransom or something, and they were sending back body parts, and that’s what happened to your legs!”

“And then, what? They wiped my memory so I wouldn’t remember what they looked like or where I was, but they got it wrong and just completely removed everything?” I snarked. Wait, hold on a second…that actually…

“I hate to say it but…that actually sounds moderately plausible,” said Atomizer.

Oh, I was pretty sure it wasn’t the case, given the whole “human memories” thing, but it did have some logic to it.

“Well,” I said, “I guess we’ll know if we ever run across the BBC, and they immediately pull out guns and start shooting at me.”

“Nah, they’d do that anyways,” said Trailbreaker.

“Oh?”

“Their whole raison d’être is anti-mechanical prejudice,” said Atomizer. He paused. “You have no clue who they actually are, do you?”

“Nnope.”

“Guys, I hate to interrupt, but this is taking way more time than it should to get to Swerve’s,” said Jackpot.

We all stopped.

“Are we even going in the right direction?”

“I thought we were following Trailbreaker,” I said.

“I thought we were following Jackpot,” Trailbreaker said.

“I thought we were following Laura,” Jackpot said.

“So, I’m the only person who wasn’t responsible,” said Atomizer.

“Where are we now, anyways?” I asked.

“I think we’re in the basement,” said Trailbreaker.

“Okay, I think we just need to go up a floor- did you guys hear that?”

Everyone paused. There was a rhythmic clattering noise getting louder and louder until-

A blue spindly Transformer came sprinting by, carrying Armless Orange Dude (who had his arm back on now) thrown over his shoulder.

“Whirl- Whirl, put me down!”

Whirl ran past the four of us with his feebly protesting burden.

There was a moment of silence after he passed.

Then Jackpot spoke:

“Was anyone going to tell me Whirl was on board, or did I have to find out like this?”

“Let’s just…go find Swerve,” said Trailbreaker.

Chapter Text

“So,” I said. “In conclusion, it is obvious that the creation of a space for recreation and the consumption of alcoholic beverages, in addition to the very real benefits it will create in terms of providing a place of occupation for those who do not have talents -the talents- or skills suited to aiding in the functioning of the ship, will also have the overall positive effect of increasing crew morale, at little cost. The amount of effort required to set this up will be negligible given the space has already been prepared by the previous owners, and thus it would actually involve more work to restructure the space into something else. Thank you for your consideration.” I paused. “Do you have any questions?”

“Are you finally done?” Rodimus groaned. He had stopped paying attention by the time I got to my second sentence and had spent most of my speech doodling on his desk. What a mood. I was very mildly annoyed he hadn’t been paying attention, but I probably would have done the same thing if I was him. I’d have tried to be subtler about it, but then, I wasn’t the captain.

I snickered. Then I tried to cover up the snicker with a cough. Then I remembered I didn’t actually have lungs or a voice box, at least not in the human sense.

“Yeah, I’m done,” I said, switching back into a normal voice, as opposed to my presentation voice.

Let’s back up a bit. I was in Rodimus’ office, giving a presentation on why they should let Swerve open a bar. Swerve was not paying me money to do this, the cheapskate, but I’d talked him up to one free drink a month. So I’d probably have to pay for a drink approximately never. Jokes on him, I wasn’t one for getting human drunk, let alone robot drunk. I probably should have pushed harder, but it wasn’t that big a deal for now, and to be honest it didn’t seem right to take money from him when he needed it to set up the bar…

“You certainly gave a detailed description of the benefits and how you would go about setting it up,” said Ultra Magnus, staring down at me, “but what about the effect on public order?”

Drat. I’d hoped he wouldn’t ask about that. Swerve was here with me, and I could put him on the spot here, but honestly I was pretty sure he’d dozed off or something, given he hadn’t said anything.

“While I myself am inexperienced in this specific matter,” I said, switching back to my presentation voice, “I believe there are many members of this ship who would be able and willing to serve as security. In addition, any misbehaviour could lead to a ban from the premises. We can determine the specifics later,” I added hurriedly. “Both with regards to what behaviour should count, and what the proper measures should be…a zero tolerance rule seems exceedingly harsh given the presumed length of the voyage.”

“Order must be maintained,” said Ultra Magnus. “As a ship under Autobot military authority-“
“Wait, what?” I asked. “No one told me this was a military ship! Or that you needed to be an Autobot!”

“Well,” said Ultra Magnus awkwardly. “It’s not a military ship per se but it is operating using the Autobot code.”

“If it’s not a military ship, or an Autobot ship, why is it using a military code?” I asked.

“Of course it’s an Autobot ship,” Rodimus piped up. He’d stopped paying attention again the moment I put the presentation voice back on, but he’d clearly been listening for relevant bits. Just the way I would in meetings.

“This is getting out of scope, but, umm, you don’t need to be an Autobot to be on the ship, right?” I was pretty sure the answer was no, otherwise someone would have said something to me before now.

Maybe.

Probably?

“Well-“ said Ultra Magnus.

“No, of course not,” said Rodimus. “We got you, and we got Cyclonus.”

Right, purple skull dude. I’d seen him standing around a few times in passing.

Anyways, I decided to make this whole thing with banning people a problem for Future Laura.

“To return to the main point, why don’t we have a meeting to discuss the, uh, possible public order issues at a later point?” I mentally reviewed what I said, and groaned internally. Why did I reuse words so much? Well, nothing to do but go forwards. “Why don’t we have a trial run for, say, a month or so, and then return to the topic once we have a better idea? Obviously if people are, hm, running amok and causing havoc then something will have to be done, but otherwise…?” I trailed off. Heh, I’d been able to use ‘amok’ in a sentence, a rare event to be treasured! I love that word.

Ultra Magnus frowned. “Hmm…”

“Is there anything in the Autobot code that says we can’t do this?” I asked.

“Well, no, but-“

“There you go,” interrupted Rodimus. “It’s fine, we’re good, if someone gets drunk and starts shooting holes in the ship, we’ll deal with that if it happens. Just…stop talking in that creepy way.”

“Sorry,” I said quietly. Oh boy, I’d really screwed this up. What had possessed me to volunteer to do this? I shouldn’t have done it. Or if I had to do it I should have tried to figure out a more casual version rather than talking like a product owner. But there was no way I could have known that in advance!

Well maybe there was, if I was better at picking up context cues.

Okay, what was the worst that could happen here? Captain gets mad and throws me off the ship and I float forever into space. How likely was that to happen?

…not very. But I didn’t know that! It could have been more likely! I should have been more careful!

I was struck by the unpleasant thought that absolute ridiculous worst-case scenarios could be possible, and not easily dismissed. But I had no choice but to keep going. I had to make decisions as best I could with the knowledge I had.

~~~~

“I can’t believe that actually worked,” said Swerve as we walked away.

“Yeah, it wasn’t really my best work,” I said. But then, it never was.

“What? You were great. Terrifying, but great,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said dryly. It definitely said something that he thought a boring meeting was terrifying. As opposed to whatever it was he’d been doing in the military. Thus, I guess, proving that the real evil as always was corporate-speak.

“What kind of stuff did you even do, before?” Swerve asked me.

“I did presentations but most of my job was-“ I stopped. I knew what my job was. Hadn’t I been thinking about it before? But I couldn’t remember. Was my amnesia somehow getting worse?

“Ooooh,” said Swerve. “Did you remember something?”

“More like I forgot something I think I remembered before,” I said grumpily.

“As time goes on you become even more mysterious,” Swerve said. “In more than one way. Because how your brain works is a mystery, and also your past becomes more of a mystery.”

“Yeah, but it sounds cooler if you leave that out and make me just sound like I have some kind of secret dark past as a…I don’t know, secret agent, or something,” I said. It was easier to think about that than it was to think about whatever was going on with my brain.

“Nah, that’s our other amnesiac,” said Swerve.

“Oh right…” His name wasn’t Sally, why did I think his name was Sally? “What’s his name again?”

“Skids,” said Swerve. Sally Blevins! Of course!

“Current theory is that you were working for the BBC, maybe undercover or something,” said Swerve.

“I had this conversation already,” I said. I’m on BBC 2 now, telling Terry Wogan how I’ve made it and…”I’m pretty sure I didn’t work for the anti-uh, anti-Cybertronian organized crime group.”

“But maybe you did,” said Swerve. “You don’t remember any of it, so it’s possible! Also I thought you wanted to sound cool.”

“I wanted to sound cool in my head in a nonspecific way that doesn’t make me sound sketchy,” I muttered. Whoops, that was a bit more honest than I should be.

“One person’s “mysterious and cool” is another person’s “really sketchy””, said Swerve. “Look at Cyclonus.”

Oh, there he was, right there.

“If you don’t know anything about him, he probably seems interesting and mysterious,” Swerve continued. “But I haven’t forgotten how he killed most of my friends and coworkers! I don’t know why Rodimus let him on the ship. I know he’s supposed to have switched sides at the last minute but that doesn’t bring any of my friends back from the dead.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, wretchedly awkward. I wished he hadn’t said that. I wasn’t proud of thinking that, but I did.

“I don’t really want him coming in the bar,” said Swerve. “Besides the obvious, there’s a lot of us - most of us, actually, I think - from Kimia here.”

“I don’t think he’s really the bar-going type,” I said. “But what do I know?”

“No, no, you’re right,” said Swerve. “Also if he causes a problem, Ultra Magnus said we can ban him for life.” He cracked his servo joints.

“Ah, this is my turn,” I said as we reached a fork in the corridor. “I’ll see you later, I guess.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Swerve, waving.

~~~~

The last thing I expected to see when I got back to my room was Red Alert’s accusing finger, pointed right at me.

“I know your secret,” he said.

“I, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You’ve been faking the amnesia this whole time!” he said.

Had I been that obvious??

“I’m sorry! I just- look I- I know who I am but it made no sense and I still don’t know how I ended up in a hole in the ground or why I’m supposed to be six million years old, and it just made sense to say, okay, I have complete amnesia otherwise what was I supposed to say? I’m actually a human and got stuck in a robot body with no clue how - on an, an alien planet from something out of a comic book? And I mean, not just a metaphorical comic book but like a real comic book that I didn’t read when it was coming out because I had no money and also it look really gross like there was some guy with chainsaw hands…”

Red Alert was looking kind of steamrollered.

You know that thing when you’re talking and then no one stops you or says anything and it feels awkward so you just keep going and trying to fill the gap in the conversation and it just feels worse and worse and worse?

“…and way too much blood okay I mean I know it’s not blood it’s something else and I hate having to watch everything I say because what if I use the wrong term for something like I almost said something about choking because you swallowed something wrong the other day!”

“What are you saying? Just calm down and talk normally!” Red Alert said.

“Telling people to calm down never works!!!” I said. “Especially if you’re yelling at them!!”

Oddly enough, saying that did snap me out of it, and I started laughing.

Red Alert was staring at me like I was a photosynthesizing bomb.

“What are you going to do now?” I asked him.

“Most of me wants to lock you up as a spy but part of me thinks I should take you to see Rung instead.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my-“ I cut myself off. “Well okay, fine, there are several things wrong with my head. But I didn’t hallucinate being a human! I know about…chainsaw hands guy!”

“I’ve never heard of anyone with chainsaw hands,” said Red Alert flatly.

“Well, he’s real…” I said. “What about, hm…Drift saved Perceptor’s life!”

“You could have overheard them talking.”

I looked at him skeptically. “Really?”

“How do I know you weren’t spying on them?”

“In my infinite spare time?” I asked. “I’ve never even seen Perceptor on this ship! I didn’t even know he was on the ship.”

“I only have your word for that!”

I paused. What could I say?

Wait! I had it!

“Okay, how about this? How would I even know all this stuff about humans so well, if I was lying about that? Why would my go-to terms be human? Huh?”

“You could have been a deep cover agent!” Red Alert was undeterred.

I wanted to tear my nonexistent hair out! Ah, my glorious boingy sausage curls of yore…

Wait.

“How did I end up in a hole in the ground, then? And how was my body dated to six million years ago?”

“Maybe a time travelling mad scientist decided to upload the brain of a human dimensional traveller into your body,” said Red Alert. But, I noticed the suspicious edge to his voice was gone.

That was still incredibly stupid, though. But I decided in an epic effort of will to keep my mouth shut and not point out the problems with it.

“I just want to know what happened and get my missing memory back,” I said, drooping a bit. “I’m not any kind of spy or anything, I swear.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t make sense for a spy to remember being human,” Red Alert said. “But I’ll be watching you…”

“Is there any way I can get you to not do that?” I asked.

“If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about,” said Red Alert, ominously.

No. I wasn’t dealing with this right now. This could be a problem for Future Laura. At least he wasn’t going to arrest me and throw me into jail. Ship jail. Did ship jail exist? No, if I asked about that he’d start wondering why I was wondering about it.

“Also, I just want to make sure you know, chainsaw hands guy doesn’t exist,” said Red Alert seriously. “I would have heard of him. There isn’t even a rumour about a bot with chainsaws for hands.”

“Oh, you’ll see about chainsaw hands guy,” I said ominously, though I myself was starting to wonder if it was just a photoshop, since I was pretty sure I remembered chainsaw hands guy also having a flower crown, “and then you will have to apologize to me…” I paused. “Actually, speaking of, where are we heading next?”

~~~

“Listen up folks, it's time to get your cold weather tires ready, cause we’re going to Delphi!”

Chapter Text

Obviously, I wasn’t going to be going. I had no business being anywhere near a medical distress signal. After all I was, kind of, a medical distress signal myself, was I not?

Ugh, fine, I guess not really. That was a terrible metaphor. It was a good thing it was safe within the iron walls of my head.

Huh. What kind of metal was I made out of? Probably not actually iron. Heh. Testing my metal. Testing my mettle.

Red Alert “watching me”…turned out to not be that different from normal. Insofar as we even had a normal given it had been…what, less than a week? It felt like years had passed since I had set foot on the Lost Light (okay, been carried onto). I guess it was the stress.

Where was I? Oh, right. Red Alert’s attempt to keep an eye on me had actually lead to er, me getting stuck basically being his assistant in doing the security. Well, there were worse ways to spend my days. At least it meant I had an excuse to avoid Swerve.

So, I didn’t find out about the mysterious signals from Delphi until it was announced that we were going there. Red Alert had been preoccupied with something he didn’t want me to know about.

“Laura, I want to talk to you. I told Rodimus about you and he laughed in my face,” said Red Alert.

Okay, I guess he did want me to know about it.

“But also he ignored it when I told him about every other security violation, like Brainstorm bringing a weapon of mass destruction on board, Rewind’s-” he seemed to remember who he was talking to, and cut himself off. “I don’t know what I expected at this point but maybe at some point he’ll see that this ship is three steps away from disaster.”

Why did Rodimus even ask Red Alert to be the security guy? I couldn’t say that, though.

I put my hands out to shrug dramatically and had to pull back my right arm at the last minute to avoid hitting the colour-coordinated crystal arrangement beside me.

Oh, right. Sadly Red Alert had vetoed the disco ball, but in a move that made me feel horribly guilty, Atomizer and the guys had gotten together and assembled an assortment of cute crystals that made the room seem less like a prison. Though Red Alert had scanned them all first. I know he scans literally everything, but it did make sense here. Who knows where those crystals had come from. If I could scan my plants before I brought them inside and remove any unwanted bugs from them, that would have been super- ah!

I had remembered something. I had had plants! And I kept them outside sometimes. That did seem like a very me type of thing. Having plants, I mean, not the keeping them outside.

Anyways I did not in fact have cute holographic fruit stickers all over my body but I was working on that. Soon. Soon my reign of terror would begin. As long I remembered to make sure those stayed inside thoughts and Red Alert never, ever, found out.

“And on that topic!” Red Alert said, freeing me from my mental tangent, “I’m not hearing things. I know I’m not. I made a recording of the noises.”

“Eh?” I asked eloquently.

“I heard…something…coming from where the sparkeater was kept.” He pulled out what looked almost like a USB. “Take a listen.”

-

“I have no clue what could be making that sound,” I said.

“But it’s definitely a sound,” said Red Alert.

“It’s definitely a sound,” I confirmed. “It almost sounds like…someone talking?”

A horrible thought occurred to me.

“Do you remember the sparkeater?”

“It would be difficult to forget,” said Red Alert, in about as dry a tone as he ever made.

“You said there’s nothing there, right, just wall and then it goes out into space?”

“But there’s definitely something there!” He insisted. “You hear it too!”

“No, I mean…how do we know there was only one sparkeater? What if there are more of them in the vents or something?”

I paused. Outside of the ship. “Could they be clinging to the outside of the ship? Did you look at the outside of the ship?”

“…I didn’t. But Laura, that’s ridiculous, there shouldn’t be…but then again there shouldn’t even have been one…” he trailed off.

Wait, was he taking this seriously? Could I actually be right?

“It should be easy to go outside the ship, right? I heard from Trailbreaker there’s those magnet boots people use, right?”

“It’s a hard part of the ship to get to.”

“So it’s protected then? So something might be hiding there?”

“You’re right,” said Red Alert, looking at me seriously. “We need to go check it out.”

“Wh-wh-wh-aait? ‘We’? Iiii don’t think I’ll be very useful.”

“You can run and get help if I need to fight them,” said Red Alert grimly.

“Wait Red Alert, it’s fine, maybe we should go get Trailbreaker to heeeeeelllp….”

~~~~

It was so beautiful. Out here, I was surrounded by stars and I felt like I could just float away if I wasn’t attached to the ship. Which was literally true, haha, but also in a figurative sense. As if the magnets attached to my feet were the only thing anchoring me to reality…

I knew that wasn’t true, of course, and that if I drifted off it would be long, lonely, and depressing, and quite probably painful (I’d found out radiation could harm us) but still…

“It’s full of stars,” I quoted.

“Yes,” said Red Alert, patiently. “That’s space.”

“I’ve never seen space before. I’m standing out here in vacuum and I can just…” I threw out my arms. My eyes sparked. “It’s incredible!”

And somehow, I felt a little stronger. I guess that was the photosynthesis kicking in?

“Laura!” Red Alert called, “come on! Over here!”

I carefully stomped over in my magnetic boots. Time to see if the horde of spark eaters from my imagination was real or not.

~~~~

“Well,” I said, and then subsided.

Beside me, Red Alert was gesticulating wildly and saying too many words about this not supposed to be being here.

“Well,” I said louder, so I could hear myself over him. “The good news is we don’t have to worry about a bunch of sparkeaters clinging to the ship!”

Red Alert pause his tirade. “I…I suppose that’s true.”

Unless they’re in that thing, I thought but didn’t say.

The two of us stared at the podlike object attached to the ship in silence.

“Does this mean we have a stowaway?” I asked.

“Let’s hope it’s just the one,” Red Alert said darkly.

“But how did it get on? Why?”

“I don’t know, Laura,” Red Alert said, staring at me intensely. “It had to have been back on Cybertron, and that’s the worst part, because…why?”

I felt a chill down my back that had nothing to do with being in the vacuum of space. “Maybe we should talk about this inside,” I said.

~~~

We returned to a scene of chaos. The party from Delphi had returned to the ship as well. And boy did they have a story to tell.

“No offence, but regardless of what anyone says I think I’m going to be staying wayyy over here for a good while until it’s 100% safe,” I said. Red Alert nodded emphatically.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” said Trailbreaker.

“I’m with Laura,” said Atomizer. He shuddered. “That’s a bad way to go. Reminds me of some stuff I saw at work…”

What could be worse than the crying disease that dissolved you-

Ok! I never wanted to think about that statement ever!

Time to change the subject. “Red Alert and I found a problem,” I said.

“I’ve figured out what we’re going to do,” said Red Alert. Why did I get an ominous feeling all of a sudden…”But maybe we should talk about this somewhere less crowded.”

Trailbreaker wilted a bit. “It’s Fortress Maximus, though! He’s got guns in his legs, you know?”

“And the guns will still be in his legs when you actually get a chance to say hi,” said Atomizer. “So what’s going on? Why do the two of you look so serious?”

“There’s something attached to the ship,” Red Alert said. “And there’s something inside that’s alive.”

~~~~

I didn’t like Red Alert’s plan. He didn’t like that I’d brought in Atomizer and Trailbreaker (Jackpot hadn’t been around), but he did have to admit that Trailbreaker’s ability could be useful (“What am I, rust flakes?” Atomizer complained).

So. There there four of us were, about to dig into the floor and find who-knows-what underneath.

“I’ve been working on the railroad, all the live-long day,” I started singing to myself as I started digging. “I’ve been working on the railroad, just to pass the time away…doo doo doo doo doo doo doooo doooo…”

It just didn’t sound the same coming from a mechanical throat.

“So what do you think we’ll find down here?” Atomizer asked in between swinging his - icepick? You know what I wasn’t going to judge.

“I still think it might be sparkeater colony,” I said.

Trailbreaker paused his digging. “And we’re trying to set them free?” He asked incredulously.

“No,” said Red Alert. “We need to take care of them before they get loose.”

“Uh, you know what?” said Atomizer. “I’m just gonna go back and…get my crossbow.”

I looked anxiously over at Red, who had wanted to confiscate said crossbow, but all he said was, “that might be a good idea.”

~~~~

Atomizer hadn’t gotten back by the time we broke through the floor.

The three of us peered down into the secret compartment.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Something much worse than a sparkeater,” said Red Alert darkly. “That’s…that’s…”

“That’s Overlord,” said Trailbreaker.

“Keeping someone trapped down there like that can’t be ethical,” I said.

“It’s Overlord,” Red Alert said. He looked troubled.

“We need to do something,” said Trailbreaker.

“What are we supposed to do?” I asked.

No one answered. Trailbreaker looked sick.

Okay. Let’s think. Overlord, who was apparently worse than a spark eater, was prisoner in a secret chamber attached to the ship. If he was freely wandering around in his secret chamber, it would most likely mean he was trying to stowaway. But he was a prisoner. He was chained up, or- okay those weren’t literal chains, but he was restrained in a way that meant he couldn’t move. Which meant someone that wanted to get rid of him had done this. Hm. It could mean someone on his side who had chained him up so he wouldn’t cause problems if he was of a problem causing type, until the time came but…no, that didn’t work, because they’d need someone inside the ship to eventually let him loose. Though I guess that could exist. But it was more likely that- wait.

“Is he a Decepticon?” I asked.

Red Alert gave me a look. “Of course he is.”

Right. I’d heard about the situation the Decepticons were in when we left, and I don’t think that unless there were some serious shenanigans going on, they’d have been able to do something like this. Unless I’d completely misunderstood, which was possible.

But why would anyone try to get rid of someone like this?

My thoughts were interrupted by a very tall and large blue bot running into the corridor.

“Fortress Maximus?” Red Alert said.

Chapter Text

The moment that passed as we turned to look up at him seemed to take months. As soon as I got a good look at Fortress Maximus, I squeaked and slid behind Red Alert.

What? He was ship security, this was his problem, not mine!

I was so not equipped either mentally or physically to deal with being charged by someone several times taller than me WITH GUNS IN HIS LEGS, as Trailbreaker had been at pains to point out (thanks for that, TB).

And then he-

~~~~

"Wait," said Rodimus. "Can you go back to the sparkeater colony theory?"

Ultra Magnus twitched. "Rodimus, we know that that wasn't the case."

"Okay, be we already know the rest of what happened, what if there are more sparkeaters hanging around? Maybe we should look for them."

"There are not more sparkeaters hanging around! And we still need to get to the bottom of why Overlord was attached to the ship in the first place!"

"What if the sparkeaters carried him?"

"Sorry about the guns in his legs thing," said Trailbreaker to me quietly as the captain and second in command of the ship began another ridiculous argument. I felt guilty. I shouldn't have blamed him for that.

"It's not your fault," I said quietly back. "There's no way you would have known what would have happened. Really I think it's kind of my fault for wanting to investigate this."

"We had a CELL attached to our ship! With a Phase Sixer!" Ultra Magnus' voice rose in volume.

"Does it really matter that much? He's dead! He's not our problem any more!"

"Do you think they'd notice if we left?" I muttered to Trailbreaker.

Red, lucky guy, wasn't here. He was apparently guarding Fortress Maximus in the brig (with Drift, who I guess was probably asking him questions as well). Because we had a brig!

See, before he'd come charging at us, Mr. Fortress (okay, that sounded terrible, but I couldn't just call him Fortress Maximus all the time, it sounded stupid, and I couldn't think of a better name) had had an Incident and had shot a bunch of Swerve's clientele. Which, I mean, fair, I could sympathize.

That really wasn't a joke I could make outside my head.

"Maybe if we just start slowly moving closer to the door," Trailbreaker muttered back.

We made it almost all the way before-

"Where are you two going?" Ultra Magnus loomed over us.

"Oh, give them a break, Mags," Friendship broken with Trailbreaker. Now Captain Rodimus was my best friend.

"We know what happened after that, because Red already told us," continued Rodimus, my new bestie. "Fort Max came charging in, you panicked and yelled 'hey look, an Overlord distraction!', Fort Max looked in the hole you guys made and saw Overlord and started shooting, he managed to hit something and the cell detached from the ship and floated off into space, only to get shot by the ship's guns, because you all made a run for the control centre and held everyone hostage-"

"No one was held hostage!" I interrupted. Rodimus was no longer my new bestie. "Fortress Maximus just…pointed a gun at people…"

I know that sounds bad. This is because it was bad. But it wasn't holding people hostage! If you're holding someone hostage, you're like "I'm going to kill this person if you don't do what I say!" But if you're holding someone at gunpoint and telling them to do what you say, that's…something else. It's called something else! I don't remember what!

Wait, why was I even defending this? He'd gone on a rampage and shot a bunch of people then killed this Overlord guy.

Oh sweet Primus. I was going to get thrown off the ship into space. I was going to be a janitor forever working off all the energon I'd eaten in some kind of indentured servitude situation where I would never earn enough to pay off all my expenses.

No, Laura, be reasonable. It was much more likely they'd stick you in the brig.

"Hey! Hey, Lorgar-"

"Laura," muttered Ultra Magnus.

"Laura," Rodimus corrected himself. "Calm down. Stop- making that noise."

I noticed I was making a high pitched electrical buzzing noise and tried to slow pulse my- I don't even know what it was called.

"We're not going to throw you out of the ship into space! I've been thrown out of a ship into space, it sucks so much. Well, okay, I'd also gotten shot through the spark and was unconscious for most of it but- we're not going to do that to you!"

Rodimus paused. "Actually, maybe we should give you all medals or something, for finding Overlord and destroying him once and for all. So he's not going to be anyone's problem ever again! I don't have to worry about him! We should celebrate this! Right, Drift?"

Drift had snuck up behind us like some kind of giant metal ninja. Well, to be fair, we were all giant and made of metal, but he was like twice my height. Giant-er metal ninja. Also I didn't feel like I was a giant, I felt like I was a perfectly normal height. Everything was built for our dimensions around here, anyways, it felt vaguely ridiculous to think of myself as "giant". Especially given most people around here were taller than me.

"Right," said Drift. He didn't sound like a ninja. He just sounded like some guy.

"So…we can go then, right?" asked Trailbreaker, bless him.

"We still need to-" said Ultra Magnus.

"Ignore Magnus," said Rodimus, interrupting him. "We're cool. You can go."

~~~

Atomizer was waiting for us outside the door.

"You guys're okay?" He asked.

"We're not in trouble," I said shakily. I paused. "We aren't. We really aren't in trouble."

"I need a drink after that," said Trailbreaker.

I twitched. "Please don't say Swerve's. I'm so not in the mood for that."

"I got some stuff in my hab suite," said Trailbreaker.

Man this brought me back to- something. Something about this made me feel nostalgic, but in a lonely way? What did that even mean? Something about drinking with other people.

Wait, what about Red? Shouldn't we get him? Well, he wouldn't want to come along anyways. And he was busy. I could talk to him later. I wondered what he thought. Of all the things we predicted being in the mystery compartment, "random, apparently scary, Decepticon prisoner" had not been one of them.

"Laura, you coming?" Atomizer had turned back towards me. The two of them had already started walking.

"Just wait a sec," I said exasperatedly. "Your legs are a lot longer than mine."

"Well, I can always carry you," said Atomizer. Trailbreaker made a scoffing sound.

Well, in that case…

"Oh no…" I said dramatically, putting a hand on my head and leaning my head backwards, "after that traumatic experience, I'm too weak to walk. Won't someone think of poor sad Laura?"

"Fear not," said Atomizer, getting into the bit, "I am here to help!" He came over and picked me up.

Trailbreaker scoffed again. "You two are ridiculous."

"Oh no," said Atomizer, swaying. "Laura is too heavy for me…". He "fell" into Trailbreaker. "Someone needs to carry both of us!"

"You ran off! If Laura gets to be carried, I should too!" said Trailbreaker indignantly. "I got charged by Fort Max too-" He cut himself off as we all saw a couple of other people approaching.

"Oh it's the guys who pulled me out of the hole!" I said, waving. "Hi…"

Oh no. I'd forgotten their names. One of them was…definitely not named Baldy…

"Oh, hey!" said Rewind (Ha! I remembered his name). "Feels like it's been years since we saw you."

"It's sure been a wild ride on this trip," I said.

"How many more monsters could be hiding in the walls?" The other guy asked rhetorically.

"Well, hopefully, none," I said. I paused. "But then I personally would prefer if there were two less than there actually were."

"Are you doing all right other than that?" Rewind asked.

"Well, more or less," I said, but before I could continue the intercom crackled to life.

"Attention, everyone, this is your captain speaking, AND THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN SHOUTING," came Rodimus' voice from the intercom. "In light of recent events I've decided we all need a BREAK. Anyone who's interested in trying to explore the Lost Light to find out if there's any MORE unpleasant surprises, go report to Ultra Magnus. Everyone else, we're going to Hedonia!"

"Ooooo," said Trailbreaker. He turned to me. "This is going to be great! Finally, a real vacation!"

~~~

CODA:

"Ow, my head," I muttered to myself. I had the worst processor ache like you wouldn't believe - headache? processor ache? ugh. It was hard to think, though, with the alarms blaring inside and-

Oh. Those were also blaring outside. No wonder I had such an ache.

Wait.

"This is not my beautiful house," I said, looking around at the unfamiliar room. Primus, it was a dump.

"This is not my beautiful wife!" I said in a rising tone as I saw I was not alone in the room.

Okay, okay, calm down, you just ended up somewhere else on the Lost Light.

Somewhere with a giant Decepticon symbol on the wall.

I felt something behind me. Slowly I turned around.

There was a giant robotic T-rex staring down at me.

That was the point when I lost consciousness.