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Chapter Text

The Lost Light.

Rung's Office
[0][2] Days Since The Last Teleporter Malfunction

Rung returns from the kitchenette with two energon containers in hand.

“I really must say, Skids.” Rung quirks the corners of his lips into a sharp smile, setting the containers down on the table between them and settling back in his chair. “I’ve missed our chats.”

All the steam from the drink, Rung realizes, has left a thin layer of film on the lenses of his eyeglasses. He takes them off and wipes them down with a cloth he keeps in his kibble, and in doing so allows himself a few more moments to collect his thoughts while he searches for the optimal strategy towards easing his old friend back into life aboard the Lost Light.

In moments like these, where the unknown and the paradoxical can subsume all capacity for rational thought, Rung finds that all those millennia of practice in unpicking the Cybertronian psyche tend to fail him. For all Rung has sought to study the mind, he’s never quite managed to overcome being at a loss for words.

There’s no good way to tell someone they’ve been dead for eighteen months.

“What is this?” Skids asks from across the table, curiously regarding the energon container.

“Camellia kerosinesis.” Rung recites, having only recently learned of the drink’s existence after their last stop on Elpasos devolved into the crew spending several weeks stranded on the planet’s strange melting pot of organic and cybernetic lifeforms. “It’s an evergreen, cultivated in the Angarrix sector. When steeped in a fission reactor, it produces an effect similar to a low-level circuit booster. Somewhat paradoxically, I find it incredibly relaxing.”

Discovering this drink was perhaps the only good thing to happen during their extended stay on that planet. Their co-captain decided, in his infinite wisdom and endless hubris, to divert the ship from their intended destination for two purposes. The first, and more immediate, was that Rodimus had noticed a particularly incandescent meteorite as they entered the system and grew so fixated upon bringing the ship as close as possible to the meteor— to surf the lost light against it— that he inflicted almost catastrophic damage to the fuel quills and necessitated an emergency landing before the strain on the quantum engines tore the ship apart.

Or so Nautica told him.

The second, and altogether more concerning, reason for their crash was that the planet has become known as the ‘usual territory’ of a ‘freelance peacekeeping agent’ of some repute that Rodimus sought to employ in the event that Getaway directly or indirectly caused his expiration. Which is pertinent, because Rodimus has also confided in Rung over the past few cycles that he has been beset by thoughts that Getaway could still be loose in the galaxy, plotting another mutiny.

It appeared to Rung, at first, to be a painful and rather pitiful delusion brought about by incalculable amounts of stress and the burden of leadership. A few cycles later, after the ship has picked up a number of returning crew members who most certainly had been destroyed, and Rung is wondering whether there might be any truth to it.

Rodimus always did have something of a knack for intuiting the unknown and paradoxical.

Not that Getaway’s survival would excuse hiring thugs and assassins, of course.

Which resolved the matter of how they crashed. Their stay upon the planet was troubled by several further factors, not least including an outstanding bounty on Whirl posted by the Galactic Council and the inherent difficulty in making friends and influencing people that comes when your co-captain spends most conversations with the locals consumed by a single-minded hunt for a member of a poorly-regarded Cybertronian special operations unit, and that he seeks to employ the peacekeeping agent who had placed all their friends in jail.

After a few moments, Skids curiosity as a theoretician subsumes him. He decides to take a tentative sip of his drink.

“It’s bitter.” Skids concludes.

“It’s an acquired taste.” Rung offers, with an equally tentative laugh. “You mentioned having some trouble with your memories again?”

“It’s just that I’ve got these jumbled up memories.” Skids says, cupping the container in both hands. It reminds Rung that he has a container of his own, and he takes a sip of his drink. “Obviously, I’m here, but I’ve got this bug in the back of my brain module that I’m not supposed to be here.”

“Are these sensations out of the ordinary from your usual, um—”

Survivor’s Guilt comes to mind, but Rung knows that using the phrase would be disrespectful.

“Not like that.” Skids asserts. “It doesn’t feel like the mindwipes, either. It’s too focused. There’s nothing missing. It just didn’t— couldn’t have happened. Back with the Necrobot and the field of flowers, my spark going out after we used it to flare the others into Outliers to save them from the DJD—”

Rung doesn’t know anything about that.

He imagines his paracausal doppelganger might have, whatever his ultimate fate may be. It’s a terrible secret, really, that a group of former friends should return to the ship and that Rung finds his own name is not among them. His own ‘return’ was such a quiet thing, a whisper on the edge of hearing, new faces that looked upon him like an old friend upon their purposeful displacement to a new universe, and Rung— never truly wanting to impose— going along for the ride, because it was nice to be remembered and because he truly believed that they could use his help.

“It can be a struggle to reconcile conflicting histories, particularly when this ship is concerned.” Rung offers, with a smile. He rises to his feet, resolved to be as truthful as he possibly can. “I want to show you something. Have we ever spoken about these models?”

“Every ship you’ve ever served on.” Skids says. “You told me you’ve rebuilt them, what, a thousand times each?”

“Something like that.” Rung says, regarding the collection of models. He remembers most of the ships well, because one must assume that time flows like a river through preordained channels, only splitting from its initial course because of a natural or artificial blockage. Some, he remembers only vaguely, his time aboard them brief or uneventful. One, he would rather forget.

But his gaze is affixed to a different ship, labeled as the Mechanica Divine, that bears no resemblance to any ship he ever served upon.

“I never served on this one.” Rung says, lifting the model from its display stand.

“As a psychologist?”

“Well, I don’t have a license.” Rung offers, modulating a nervous laugh. “So these days I prefer to just call myself the ship’s friend.”

“Swerve’ll fight you for that title.”

“Shoot at me, probably.” Rung offers a vague gesture with his empty hand. “He might even hit.”

“In a million years.” Skids takes a swig of the kerosinesis, growing accustomed to the taste.

“But, no.” Rung says, steering the conversation back on track. “I never set foot aboard this ship. I don’t even recognize the design."

“What do you mean by that?” Skids asks.

“I mean—” Rung pauses, searching for the right words. “That the temporally displaced nature of this ship means that you have to account for certain... idiosyncrasies, when it comes to the historical record.”

“Right.” Skids says, regarding him curiously.

“It also means, admittedly, that I may not be the best judge of your predicament.” Rung says, finally. “I was just happy to be remembered.”

Deck 13,
Habitation Unit 1.
[0][2] Days Since The Last Teleporter Malfunction

Screechwing flaps his little wings in frustration.

“What’s wrong?” calls Jetflix, because her bunkmate screaming is always cause for some concern. She doesn’t actually care what might be troubling the little bat, unless it’s something that might get them all killed, but she imagines that the story of whatever mild inconvenience has thrown him into a fit this cycle might prove amusing.

“They announced a new side project.” Screechwing seethes, turning a holographic monitor towards her. Jetflix narrows her ocular receptors, studying it carefully.

Words. On a page. It’s not exactly exciting words, either, all valiant humans and knights and swords battling against the end of the world.

“Who?”

“This one author!” Screechwing screams, in the typical Bezosi patter, throwing both wings up in the air and wiggling his claws dramatically. “Thirteen Brand-forsaken years I’ve been following this story, and it feels like he’s doing anything but finish it.”

“What does it matter?” Jetflix shrugs. She can see nothing particularly troublesome about a slight delay for words on a page.

“Matters ‘cause it’s fun, and I like it, and I wanna have more of it.” Screechwing recoils, suddenly self-conscious. “I wanna know how it ends! What happens to all the characters! Who wins and who dies!”

“...But the author is making other things.” Jetflix surmises, struggling to follow the train of logic.

“Yeah. All focused on little weirdos running around doing pointless stuff.” Screechwing crosses his wings over one another, pouting like the angsty little bat-bot he is. “Look at this. Whole novella about two space detectives getting lost on distant planets until one kills the other with a rock and eats him.”

“...So, you’re reading it, and you don’t like it.”

“No I ain’t,” Screechwing looks disgusted with her. “Cause it’s not what I wanted, is it?”

“It’s what they wanted to make.” Jetflix shrugs. “Give it a try. You might enjoy it.”

“Like hells I will.” Screechwing vents air through his back, spinning around on his stool and tapping his sharp claws against the digital interface. “Gonna give TBC a piece of my mind. I got dozens of people on there who agree with me, you know.”

“Dozens of Decepticons.”

“Who are people.” Screechwing says. “I read the Reintegration Act. They got rights same as the rest of us ‘Bots now.”

Jetflix cants her head to one side.

“Cobolt’s a ‘Con and he’s a person.” Screechwing adds, helpfully.

“Agree to disagree.”

Auxcord pokes her head through the open door, the tensor cables coiled up on her head wobbling as she leans forwards to gesture them over. The ambassador’s in a rush to get ready, Jetflix realizes, so this must be a more formal kind of occasion. Somewhat self-consciously, Jetflix starts to try to buff out a scratch on her shoulder.

“Guys.” Auxcord says, giving a twirl of her white-gold chassis. This must be important, she’s buffed herself to a mirror sheen. “How do I look?”

“...Like you normally do.” Screechwing says, barely looking away from typing a scathing review of a book he hasn’t read, and Auxcord deflates.

Jetflix looks over to Screechwing, disgusted. “Don’t listen to him, he’s got energon crumbs in his wings.”

“Do not.” Screechwing hisses, brushing the crumbs from his wings.

“You look nice.” Jetflix admits. “Where are we going?”

“Down to Swerve’s. Cobolt’s about to give the speech.”

“This can’t be as important as you two have been making it out to be,” Jetflix rubs her face plate “It’s not as if they’re leaving the ship forever.”

The sign above the bar reads GOODBYE FOREVER, so Jetflix concedes the point.

“Sick, that is.” Screechwing says, perched on her shoulders as Jetflix weaves through the surprisingly substantial crowd of bots. “When they’re trapped on Chervil and all.”

“...It’s not about them being trapped, it’s about them moving to a different department.” Jetflix shakes her head. "And they're trapped on Blicero, not Chervil."

“I know, but if I’m putting up a big sign that says ‘SORRY FOR YOUR LOSS’ and your cassette just exploded, I’m not gonna think the sign is referring to you getting plugged at Basketrek." Screechwing laments. "Oi, move us over to the banquet table. I wanna nick an entrée.”

"Fine, but I want to see if Traverse is he—”

Cobolt breaks away from an impromptu interview with Slamdance for the insider and taps his container of Engex with a phase spork.

“Alright, if I can just ask for a second of your time.” Cobolt says, making his way to the side of the bar. His faceplate shifts nervously before the big blue bot starts to speak. “Now, I know this isn’t strictly speaking protocol, and I know Spoke and Lockstock ain’t here tonight on account of the latest teleporter malfunction, but I know they’d still want us to tell them how much they mean to us, and that we’ll miss them both now that they’re being moved to the maintenance team. In addition to us currently missing them, because they’re stuck on Blicero.”

That draws a polite chuckle out of some of the crowd. Jetflix stands, arms folded, while Auxcord is telling her to play along with the jokes because it helps the speech end faster.

“So I just want to raise a glass and let them both know that even though they're moving from Procurement And Logistics, they’ll always be our PALs!”

There’s a polite round of applause, alongside the tepid ‘Woo!’ of Equinox in the crowd.

“There,” Jetflix says, turning to Auxcord. “I’ve attended. Now get me out—”

“Doesn’t count as attended until I’ve introduced you to the host.” Auxcord hooks an arm around her elbow, and drags her over to Cobolt as Screechwing hops off her shoulders to gorge himself on energon goodies. “Cobolt, this is Jetflix of Tyrus. She’s in logistics, too.”

“Jetfix. Forgive me if—”

Jetflix scowls.

“Flix. With an L.”

“Oh, right.” Cobolt trails off as he remembers that name, struggling to think of anything nice to say about her. “You’re the…”

“That one, yes.” Jetflix says. “Anyway, now that we’ve both graah weep buh-beeped—”

“Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong.” Auxcord corrects her, gently. “It could save your life some day.”

“Sure. Anyway, Now that we’ve both done that, I should get back to my many important duties on the ship.” Jetflix says, awkwardly squirming to try and free herself from Auxcord’s grip. “I know that Spoke and Lockstock both mean so much to us—”

“They were such a big part of this team.” Cobolt begins, and Auxcord just smiles her ‘I Won, Scrapper’ smile at Jetflix as Jetflix slowly starts to realize she now has to stand here for an entire anecdote from her boss’s boss. “Y’know, back when we were shooting ‘Bots back on Ciboria, in the earliest stages of the rebellion, they—”

“When the Decepticons lost that planet, yes.” Jetflix says.

“Well, yeah, but only because Prime stormed in at the eleventh hour.” Cobolt concedes. “Now, our commanding officer at that time was Meat Grinder,”

Auxcord blinks, trying to bite back where she recognizes the name from. “...Were they from Iacon?”

“Nah, Nyon. Had a big insurgency against the Primes during the Clampdown. Half of 'em signed up with our current captain, the other half went 'Con.” Cobolt says. “Anyway. I know we probably should’ve known we were on the wrong side of the war when our leaders started showing up with names like Meat Grinder and Organ Smasher and I-Eat-Autobots, but we were young ‘bots and didn’t know any better, but back on Ciboria he said—”

“Something suitably villainous and dramatic, I expect.”

“Nah. Terrible at speeches. Where I got it from.” Cobolt shakes his head. “But Prime on the other hand, came down from the sky like all hell was breaking loose. Autobots at the gates! Autobots in the air! Autobots in the walls.”

“In your walls?”

Jetflix cants her head to one side, not unlike a curious dog.

“Well, Cyboria had seen better days.” Cobolt shrugs. “Building we holed up in was called the Amentacea. Spoke and Lockstock were part of the team that snuck in through the walls, sabotaged our fusion core, smoked us out of there. Then we all ran out the front gate, right into an Autobot ambush!”

“Is it really an ambush if you ran out the front door?” Jetflix says, before Auxcord elbows her in the side and whispers a quiet 'Be Nice.'

“Prime was waiting for us. He said,” and Cobolt drops his voice modulator to approximate a good ‘Prime Voice,’ because every cybertronian needs to have a good impression of Optimus Prime in their locker. “Enough, Meat Grinder! This is between us.”

He drops the modulation back to his usual energetic tone.

“Now, Meat Grinder wasn’t exactly the brightest spark in the hotspot, but he knew that bringing Megatron the head of Optimus Prime would ingrain him as a Decepticon legend , so he agrees to a one-on-one fight all honorably-like. Problem is, his alt-form was a big wrecking ball , so all it took was one shot to the cog to mode-lock him and—”

Cobolt laughs, recounting the one-sided fight.

“Swear on my Spark I saw Prime ball Meat Grinder up like a basketrek bot and dunk him through the ring.”

Jetflix wipes dirt from her aural receptors to make sure she’s hearing this correctly.

“Optimus Prime balled your commanding officer up and threw him.”

“Saw it with my own receptors.”

“You have some experience with Prime yourself, don’t you?” Auxcord nudges Jetflix. “She worked with him during the war.”

Ark-32.
Something Like Two Million Years Ago.

“Bumblebee, report.” Optimus Prime calls, with his usual gravitas, as the display on the command console flickers back into view.

“Fat load of nothing on this rock, Prime.”

“Keep searching. There are Decepticons on Totalia. I feel it, through the Matrix.”

“I have the energon shipment!” Jetflix offers, wheeling the heavy crate into the command center.

“Place it down in the corner, Slipstream.” Prime says, and returns to the read-out on the display module. “Hound, are you reading anything on the comms?”

“...I don’t even know who Slipstream is,” Jetflix grumbles, before snapping out of her memory core.

“Anyway, I won’t keep you.” says Cobolt, clearly intending to keep her here for at least two more war stories. “But—”

“I just remembered I left a cassette in Toaste—”

“Attention everyone!” Rodimus calls, through the Lost Light’s intercom system. “We have a few unexpected, cough-human-cough, visitors on board after a slight ‘teleporter not-our-fault-this-time’, so everyone please watch where you’re walking and make sure all choking hazards and sharp pointy bits are squared away and accounted for. We don’t expect them to be on board the ship for longer than a couple hours.”

“Oh blessed T’Mup, please let this be the Crossover that ushers in the bright and bountiful quarter.” Equinox calls out, making the sign of the Brand.

“...Humans?” Jetflix’s ocular receptors widen.

“Quick.” Cobolt says, ushering them out of the door. “Get back to Deck 113 before we get locked down in here again.”

Jetflix scoops up Screechwing from the snacks table, checks that Auxcord is with her, and then runs for the door.

“Every bat for himself!” Screechwing calls, wrestling free of Jetflix’s grasp, and makes it through the crack in the door just before it traps the rest of them in Swerve’s.

Chapter Text

Palo Alto,
California.

Danni Witwicky bangs her hand against the receiver of the payphone.

On the plus side, she has one heck of an excuse for why she hasn’t called her mom before she catches the next flight home, given that the aforementioned payphone just ate every quarter she shoved in it without letting her make a call and there’s some weird electrical glitch turning her phone into a two-thousand dollar paperweight right now.

That second one is the part that’s really bugging her, because Danni gets serious about keeping things charged these days. She got caught out once, back when they were kids, separated from her brother one one of the mandatory Appalachian camping trips they seemed to go on every week.

Spike got competitive, she remembers, didn’t want to be the last one up the mountain. Danni tweaked her ankle, somewhere between a break and a strain. Problem was, she and Spike had gotten so into the habit of running off that it barely even registered that she was lost and hurt until she’d started moving in one direction and the people who were looking for her in the other. Her cellphone was on low battery before she even got in the car, and she’d spent the whole ride out making the little snake chase dots, so it died on her. After that, she spent the better part of that day alternating between screaming and crying on the hiking trail until the search party her dad rounded up finally found her and helped her back to a hunting lodge. Took her weeks just to walk properly again.

Took her mom even longer to convince Danni to go back to the woods.

So since then, Danni’s cultivated what she considers to be a well-placed kind of paranoia that every electrical device she gets her hands on will fail her, when she needs it the most, and from there became incredibly fastidious about making sure her phones, her laptops, her charging banks are loaded up to the absolute max before she steps out of the house.

Her mother had joked once that if her dad was Sparkplug, Danni was turning into Energy Bill.

At the time, Danni had just joked that she saw the number a cool nickname had done to Spike, and left it at that.

Now, she’s just missing all of them. She misses the family vacations too, even if they terrified her for a good while, because at least back then they were usually all together and sometimes even happy. Then dad died, mom got sick, and her brother became a household name for all the wrong reasons, and now Danni just feels like she’s skulking around in the shadows embarrassed by her family name, like she’s got some kind of stink on her that’ll never wash clean.

Out of options, she starts asking the passers by for cash for a cab. She figures: cute student probably on her way home for Christmas, kinda Bohemian look to her, obviously in a bind, maybe somebody will take pity on her and toss her a twenty for the ride to the airport.

It doesn’t take long for her to give up, but she sure learns some creative insults in the mean time. So she mutters that people in this town are jerks, and starts rummaging around in the coin slot of the payphone.

At this point, she’d just settle for the quarters back so she has the cash to at least pretend she can hail a cab to the airport. She’s maxed out both her credit cards trying to keep up with the cost of living at Stamford these days, any cash she has left over is all tied up in those Wallet apps, but she’s got a paper ticket for the plane on account of her electro-paranoia, and an estimated departure time, and she already feels like she’s so incredibly late that even waiting for a cab is gonna cause her to miss her flight and—

And, Danni thinks, she has to take a few deep , calming breaths like her therapist taught her before she starts to spiral at the thought of leaving her mom to face Spike’s upcoming trial alone. Because as much as she can’t bear to look at him, after everything he’s done, she still needs to be there for her mom when it matters.

“Cool.” She mutters, like a mantra. “Cool, cool, cool.”

Danni thinks nothing of it when it takes a little more effort to yank her arm loose from the payphone than she thought it would, because. Danni’s not expecting it when the payphone lurches to life, transforming into a whirring mass of blades and metal fangs. She’s not expecting all the electrical equipment piled up in her backpack to spring to life either, start clinging to her like metal spiders, gnawing and biting at her through her hard enough to draw blood.

She yanks them off, but keeping the backpack is a lost cause, so she tosses it. One of them, the one she recognizes as her her busted phone, is relentless in chasing her down, trying to latch onto her head like a facehugger and scratch her eyes out. Danni pries it loose, throws it down, and stomps on it until it stops moving.

But those lithium ion batteries really pack a punch, and Danni hits the dirt with a dull thud.

She’s not sure whether it’s the distant screams that carry her back to her feet, the smell of smoke in the air, or just the sheer mad panic of all the chaos around her leaving her with no other option but to keep going. So she runs, because there’s not much else she can do, while her ears are ringing and the monsters are terrorizing everyone and it feels like every building in this town is falling apart around her.

Danni ducks around the corner from a parcel drone turned Hunter-Killer drone, and figures that trying to understand how this started is going to get her nowhere. Panicking isn’t either, so she takes cool, calm breaths like her therapist always tells her and thinks about the advice her panicked father told her when he was caught up in the evacuation of New York.

EDC handles evacuations. Find the point and stick to it. Stay on the surface, stay out of trouble.

Do not, under any circumstances, try to be a hero.

Danni looks up at the sign on the adjoining building, a sunrise vista of the San Francisco Bay with the words ‘EPSILON: BRINGING YOU THE ALL-CONNECTED CITY OF TOMORROW’ on it, and laughs until her throat goes hoarse, because there’s not much else she can do.

She runs a hand through messy brown hair, and remembers that until an hour ago, her biggest problem today was catching her flight, figuring out how to tell her mom that her grades stink and her brother’s a notorious criminal of the robot wars, and hoping nobody at the airport noticed that she hasn’t cut her bangs in a while.

“Okay.” She mutters, mostly to herself, as she sinks down beside a dumpster while a machine that looks like the cross between a giant gorilla and a self-driving car rushes past her. “Okay.”

There’s no metro service in California. That’s important, because her dad told her what happened to everone who tried to hide in the metro during New York.

First place to go in a crisis is the train station, Danni remembers, which is across town. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s something, so she can pull herself to her feet and takes a second to compose herself in the relative calm of her little hidey-hole. She glances around, but the chaos seems to have passed her by.

A nearby scream shakes her out of it, and reminds her otherwise. There’s a kid, and there’s a robot that used to be a vending machine bearing down on them, and there’s enough distance that she can maybe throw herself in between the robot’s big whirring chainsaw before—

Before an alternative that doesn’t bear thinking about.

Stay on the surface, stay out of trouble.

Do not, under any circumstances, try to be a hero.

Danni has exactly one thing in common with her brother: she was never particularly good at listening to her father.

Danni runs, scoops the kid up, ducks down as a big red blur crashes into the robot with a sickening metallic groan. Metal smashes metal, and Danni just runs as the kid cheers the red robot on. At least one of them isn’t terrified— Danni’s rushing through the side streets, trying to keep her map of the city straight in her head as she’s panicking and trying to navigate through the destroyed buildings and she turns a corner and spots a pristine looking yellow Beetle sat there. Danni approaches it, nervously, exhaling sharply as she waits for it to turn into an evil robot or something, but it just sits there with the headlights on.

The worst part is she’s reasonably sure the kid is shouting something like “Come on, I had him right where I wanted him!” as she’s running.

At least there’s one self-driving car in this city that’s not trying to kill them.

Danni has never been so glad to see a Volkswagen in her life. She stands there for a second, trying to catch her breath, as the door of the car swings open.

“...I am setting a terrible example for you.” She winces. What the kid was doing by themselves on the street doesn’t bear thinking about, given the circumstances, but she can at least try and get them to safety. “This is a one-time evil robots exception to the rule about getting in a car with strangers.”

“Punch buggy yellow.” the kid says, and punches her in the arm.

The Lost Light.

Six Hours Earlier.

“Wait for it.” Swerve says, pointing up to the speaker.

“Til all are one.” Rodimus says, through the intercom. “Rodimus out.”

Everyone locked in the bar starts to groan.

“Screechwing!” Jetflix slams her hand against the vacuum-sealed door. “Press the button and let us out of here.”

“No,” his scratchy voice calls, on the other side of the door. “I’ve been feeling a severe lack of appreciation from you lot about all my contributions to the team, so you can stuff it up your cogs.”

“You don’t contribute anything to the PALs.” Jetflix says, matter-of-factly. “That’s the problem.”

“That’s what I’m talking about!” Screechwing hisses. “You lot are hearing this, right?”

“...Nobody else is paying attention to you,” Jetflix says, glancing over to Cobolt and Auxcord trying to media a growing religious schism brewing between the hardline Spectralists and Brand-agnostics over the arrival of a group of humans aboard their ship, to dubious results. “Could you please press the button before we’re party to the next Chartreuse Inquisition?”

“When you value my contributions.”

“It would be a very valuable contribution if you pressed the button to—” and Jetflix smashes her fist against the door to punctuate her point. “Open. This. Door!”

“Would be. If there was a button.”

“…What?”

“There’s no panel or anything.” Screechwing says. “Hasn’t been the whole time.”

“There must be. It’s against code otherwise.”

“Since when has Swerve cared about the building code!” Screechwing screams, and Jetflix cants her head to concede the point without giving Screechwing the benefit of hearing her agree with him. “Tell you, I didn’t spend months floating in an engex vat in there as a brain module—”

“The mutiny did not last for months, Screechwing.”

“It bloody well felt like it did! Twenty six of ‘em!” Screechwing makes a noise that Jetflix can describe primarily as ‘audible-scowling.’ It’s quickly drowned out by the Spectralists chanting that the threat has become ‘turquoise.’ “Just because you managed to escape it ‘cause—”

Jetflix pauses for a moment, eyeing the door curiously, knowing that whatever rumor Screechwing overheard about how she managed to avoid the worst of the mutiny is entirely untrue.

“...cause you were plugging your conjunx in the fraggin’ Rodpod!”

Okay, perhaps the story Screechwing has heard was entirely true, and she still has nightmares about it. In her everlasting defense, Jetflix also has a bunkmate who never leaves the hab on purpose, and nobody on the ship willingly enters the Rodpod.

It’s hard to find privacy on this ship, Jetflix insists, as she wilts with a profound sense of embarrassment.

“So now I’m doubly plugged off with you!” Screechwing screams. “‘Cause y’know how hard it is for a bat like me to find a conjunx?”

“...Screechwing.” Jetflix vents air. “It’s not because your alt-mode is a bat. People don’t want to be endura with you because you have a terrible personality.”

“Didn’t stop you from finding a junxie though did it?”

Fair point.

“Have you tried getting it removed?” She asks.

“What, my bat bits?”

“No, your personality cluster.”

“Oh, har har.” Screechwing hisses. Jetflix glances up above the brewing clash between the two clusters of fanatics, and notices a vent above the bar. “Like you can ta—”

“Screechwing. There’s a vent. Can you climb up and—”

“Apologize for being rude.”

“Can’t I get Auxcord to apologize on my behalf?”

“No! ‘Cause you never tell her what you did that you need to apologize for.”

“Fine. I’m sorry for suggesting that the only way to fix your terrible personality is a full transplant of your brain module.”

“And I’m a lovely bunkmate who never causes problems.”

“...Don’t push it.”

“Enjoy slowly suffocating in the worst bar on the Lost Light, then.”

“Oh come on, now you’re being too dramatic for my standards.” Jetflix vents air in frustration. “Tell you what. I’ll get you into that exclusive restaurant Counterfly runs on Deck 42, and we can call it even.”

“Hey!” Swerve says, cupping his hands together from behind the bar. “I run a perfectly alright drinking establishment. Stop advertising competing businesses in my bar.”

“You’re… suspiciously calm about all this going on in your bar, Swerve.” Jetflix says, suddenly curious.

“You hang around with Team Rodimus, you get used to emergency lockdowns.” Swerve shrugs his shoulders, wiping an Engex container clean. “I tell you, this one time we were convinced that there’s a new kind of scraplets called super scraplets and that we all came into contact with them due to Tailgate’s new hoverboard. All over the Insider, that one. Great times.”

“Plus,” Swerve adds, putting down one glass and picking up another. “Hourly rental.”

Cobolt breaks away from the brewing scuffle to regard Swerve with suspicion, too. He does have a vested interest, Jetflix supposes, because he’s the one. “...You told me the fee was three hundred shanix.”

“Three hundred shanix an hour.” Swerve grins, pointing finger guns to Cobolt. “And the rental agreement says in section B-4 that, in the event of an emergency lockdown caused by a teleporter malfunction and/or act of Primus and/or hubris of Rodimus during a function, that the chronometer on said hourly rate continues to tick. So I say we can hunker down, you can make the most of your tab, and we can get out of here in a cycle or six.”

“If you last that long, you cog-munching—”

“Easy there, sugar bear.” Swerve pulls out his My First Blaster from behind the bar and hovers a hand over the panic button. “Not my problem that you didn’t read my exceptionally well-written rental agreement.”

“So. Deck 42.” Jetflix narrows her ocular receptors. She looks back to the door. “Screechwing. What do you say?”

“No.” Screechwing says. “Restaurant’s too fancy. Bet it’s all disgusting.”

“...Fine.” Jetflix feels her joints groan with strain. “You’re a lovely bunkmate who never causes problems.”

“...And—”

“Climb into the vent.” Jetflix shouts, hammering at the door with the palm of her hand.

“Please.”

“Climb into the vent, please.”

“Not difficult, was it?” Screechwing vents air in a sharp hiss. “Swear, the manners on some people.”

Palo Alto.

Now.

Danni has her head in her hands in the driver’s seat, rubbing the dirt and mud and blood off her face, before she moves the rear view mirror around to check on the kid in the back.

She’s suddenly acutely aware of the existence of seatbelts, and that they don’t seem to be wearing any. Danni glances around, scrambling to try and pull one on, but the car doesn’t seem to have any. There’s no obvious latches to pull open the doors, either, which concerns her even more.

“Normally, I think the best precaution is just not to crash.” the car calls. That isn’t entirely strange at first, to Danni, because she’s taken enough cabs in California to know that most of the self-driving cars in the Bay have synthesized voices and a repertoire of stock greetings for passengers. What is strange is that this one appears to have been programmed to affect an accent that… Danni struggles to place. Modulated. Kinda weird. Definitely too casual, considering the situation. “Good thinking, getting the kid out the way. What’s your name?”

But that’s strange. Too familiar and way too human to be a self-driving car.

Which means it’s an Autobot. Or worse.

“...Thanks.” She says, now more than a little suspicious of the car. She tugs at the straps of her tank top, grimacing in the rear view mirror as she notices the blood smeared against the tattoo on her chest. “I’m, um—”

Danni pauses for a second. It not like it’s a lie to say the name she actually uses, these days, especially when the alternative is the car that just saved her life dumping her in the middle of the street to get killed by murderbot cellphones and killer vending machines. “Irving. Danielle Irving.”

“Danni to your friends?”

“Yeah.” she pauses. “Kid?”

“Cliff,” he says, folding his arms. “Your plan sucks."

Danni blinks. "...I didn't say anything about a plan."

"That's why it sucks. We gotta find the Autobots so that they can save the city.”

Danni just rubs her face with her hands. The Autobots have caused enough problems for her family as it is, and she doesn’t think there’s much left of the city to save.

“Well, you found them.” the car says, and Danni almost feels like he noticed her apprehension. “Don’t worry, you two. We’re here to help.”

“Cool.” Cliff says. “Where’s Prowl? He’s the coolest one.”

Danni swears she can hear the engine make a sound that’s close to someone choking on a drink.

Right. Yellow Beetle. Aliens and robots. Here to help. Danni has a pretty good idea of who she’s sitting in, at this point, which either comforts or terrifies her.

She’s not entirely sure which.

"...I think I got your autograph as a kid." Danni says.

“Where are you headed?” the car asks.

“I was headed to the station.” Danni says, shaking her head. “It’s—”

“An EDC evacuation spot.” the car says, surprisingly knowledgeable about all this. Danni figures they must be coordinating with the disaster response efforts. “You’re not gonna wanna go there. Those shock troops just cracked the city open, and now we got Skyscorchers doing strafing runs on anywhere that might hold survivors.”

“...Skyscorchers?”

“Yeah, you’d think what’s left of the Cons’d be bad enough.” the car says. “Throw in Terradive and his gang of psychos, you’ve really got trouble.”

“...Terradive.” Danni winces, rubbing her hands against her face.

“Nobody’s giving Deceptichops points for their naming conventions.” the car offers. “Y’know, this all used to impress people more back in the day. Before all that self-driving stuff.”

“I’m very impressed.” Danni squeezes her eyes shut. She’s also mostly in a state of mad panic and worry and concern and doesn’t have a ton of time for the awe of being in an alien robot car right now. “…but where are you taking us?”

“Good question.” he says. “Skybridge. Energy shielded, it’ll transport you to Autobot City. I’ll loop back and search for more survivors—”

“I need to get to Charlotte.”

“Well, we’re rounding up most of the survivors—”

“The City. North Carolina.” Danni says. “I— Look, my mom’s sick, and I had a flight booked, and—”

“If you need to get anywhere on Earth, or otherwise, in a hurry… your best bet is the Skybridge.”

“Okay.” Danni repeats, until it starts to sink in. “Okay.”

The car swerves to avoid a robot that was once a vending machine, and Danni has to grab a hold of the dashboard to stop herself from leaving her seat. She looks back to check whether Cliff is safe, and the kid is just having a blast with all of this.

“Where’d you learn to drive?” Danni winces.

“...Prime told me I’d have passengers like this.” Bumblebee sighs, venting air from his exhaust. “I shoulda listened. Hold on tight, I’m getting you out of here.”

Danni’s about to say something, but she’s taken aback when every screen in the city starts to display the same image.

Even she knows Megatron’s face.

The Lost Light,

Now.

Ratchet walks into the bar to let Swerve know they’ve lifted the lockdown. Seems like he knew it first, the place looks like a total mess.

“What’s that rattling?”

“Screechwing’s stuck in the vents.” Swerve says, with a shrug. “Figure we can keep him in there until he learns a valuable lesson about friendship, or something.”

“...So you know about the lockdown.”

“Had a big party in here.” Swerve grins. “So I figure these humans onboard are my chance to hit it big in the entertainment world, and I’m thinking that our first song should be a new, Earthling reinterpretation of an old Cybertronian classic. A song that honors Primus!”

“No, Swerve.” Ratchet says. “Just no.”

The Lost Light,
[0][0] Days Since The Last Teleporter Malfunction.

Now.

“Well, I must say that my latest excursion proved—” Megatron trails off, the captain’s office falling silent as they watch the unfolding disaster on Earth on a holographic display. A city destroyed, its people routed, by its own machines being turned against them. He knows the playbook well, because he was there when it was devised.

The Alpha Scenario.

One of those hypothetical extensions of the Infiltration Protocol, designed to undermine the advantages of advanced civilizations, as an alternative to the protracted sieges of technologically-sophisticated planets that became commonplace all too quickly in the early phases of the war. It was the sort of idea they bandied about in the heady days when their war of liberation first shifted toward interstellar conquest. They never truly implemented it at scale, put any of the theory into practice during his time as leader of the Decepticons, because in the grand scheme of things they had the benefit of waiting eons in the eternal march towards peace and organic lifeforms did not. It proved far more cost-effective to subvert the organic components of any society's structures than risk perverting the spark to induce transformations within the weapons through which their enemies waged war. Even if turning the weapons of the enemy into made-to-order shock troops to be used against them carried a sense of irony that made it a compelling thought nonetheless.

Megatron thought the idea died when Earth put up enough of a fight for the Decepticons to eschew traditional protocol and begin a full-scale conquest of the planet, but he supposes it was only a matter of time before someone dug up the bones of the idea and found a way to test the theory through practice.

“...That bloody wraith who looks like you."

And plastered across every surface with a screen, which was almost every surface on that wretched little planet that had so disrupted his destiny, was his own face. Speaking his own words. Written millennia ago.

A long forgotten Decepticon doctrine, writ in blood and ashes and the destruction of a city. What's more, they found the one figurehead who could achieve it.

“Now,” says Megatron, as every gun in the room is turned upon him in an instant. “That is curious.”

Chapter Text

The Lost Light,

An Hour Later.

Cobolt is deemed reliable enough, reintegrated Decepticon or not, to form part of the security escort as they transfer Megatron to his home for the next few cycles.

Truth be told, there’s a part of his control cluster that wishes this whole scheme was the truth. Cobolt returned to Cybertron, to the ruins of a dying world, because he could never abide following any of Megatron’s illegitimate successors. Not Galvatron, nor Tarn… nor any of the other warlords and raider bands that have carved out their own little fiefdoms in the ruins of the Decepticon dream. Even Soundwave, the only one who ever really understood what they were fighting for, clung to a single station when they could have freed the stars.

No, Cobolt signed onto the Lost Light because the war had been a half-done thing. When he saw that a ll those battles were fought to reclaim a planet that no longer wanted them, where Autobots and Decepticons alike were jockeying to reinstate something that looked all-too-much like the senate they fought to overthrow in the first place, he knew there was no place for him on that planet.

So Cobolt bought into another dream, to find the Knights of Cybertron, and followed it to the bitter end.

“Enough, Rodimus.” Megatron vents air in a sharp, groaning hiss. “I’m going willingly.”

“Sorry about this.” Rodimus scratches at his kibble. “It’s just that half the crew wants to mutiny over this, the other half wants to raise the Decepticon banner and take back Fortress Sinister—”

“...and one says she’s a friend of mine.” Megatron huffs air through tired vents. He settles himself into the all-too-familiar confines of his prison cell as the forcefield hums to life. “I’ve told you everything I know of this.”

Rodimus and the rest of the security team clear out, leaving Cobolt to stare at their former leader for a few moments. There’s one question burning in the back of his brain module, and he feels the need to ask:

“Did you do it?”

It’s the first time, in four million years of fighting and a handful of years of peace, that he’s ever spoken to Megatron directly. Megatron, with tired optical receptors, just looks at the faded brand on Cobolt’s shoulder.

“You were one of the early converts, weren’t you?” Megatron says, and Cobolt stops in his tracks.

It depends on how you categorize early, Cobolt decides. He was there among the gathered crowd at Nova Peak, when Megatron stood atop the spires of Iacon and made his official declaration of the war against the Senate, but even then the movement felt old.

Even then, there were grumblings that the movement had betrayed its ideals. The Decepticon cause has never not been pining for its glory days; opinions only vary on when those glory days actually were.

“Just say the word—”

Rydion Precinct, Iacon,

A Long Time Ago.

“--and I’ll let you out of here.” Cobolt says. There’s a heft to his movements, back in those days. He still remembers how long it took to get fully used to the bulkier frame he spent his first paycheck on. Convinced himself for cycles that the back-alley Clinic must’ve known he was on the force, and did something to sabotage him.

He remembers the two bots in the cell as Buzzkill and Sawblade, but they wouldn’t be known as that for another million years. Right now, just as the movement was getting started, they were just two agitators round up by Senator Proteus’ crackdown on political dissidents.

Even then, he could sense the change on the wind. Two weeks earlier he was being asked to process anti-vocationalists and harmless religious groups like the Cyberutopians, so cutting them loose and deleting their files from the systems felt more like righting the Senate’s wrongs. By the time Buzzkill and Sawblade wind up in there, the ‘Cons are starting to absorb the Triple Ms and what was left .

“Decepticons don’t ask for mercy.” Buzzkill growls. “We don’t give none, either.”

Which came as news to him, because the Megatron he always read back on the slums of Polyhex was mercy writ large. It’s hard to explain, looking back, that Cybertron was a fist choking the low-grade Energon out of the disposables from a dozen different directions. From the Functionalists, from the Senate, from the Institute, and from the tyranny of the lineage of Primes. To an Empty in the Dead End, the kind who could never break into the Intellectual-class because his alt-mode read Disposable and his spark was too weak, Megatron offered a way out.

It’s no surprise so many listened. Nor why, when the tone of his writing changed, so many turned with him.

With the cameras disabled, he can afford a little candor.

“The senate won’t just execute you.” he vents air through the holes in his faceplate. It’s a speech he feels he’s given a hundred times before. “They’ll remake you. Break you down and rewrite you, put you on recordings denouncing everything you stand for, to let everyone know what happens to those who speak out.”

“Like slag they would—”

“You saw what happened to Pious Maximus.”

Buzzkill looks over to Sawblade. Not a bot on Cybertron didn’t notice the Cyberutopian leader’s sudden shift in rhetoric.

“Sure, Good Cop. Talk a big game if you want and press the buzzer to let us walk out.” Sawblade says. “Why should we trust you not to shoot us in the back when we run?”

Cobolt makes the signs with his hands: YOU-ARE-BEING-DECEIVED.

They sign it back, and when Cobolt’s partner returns from the interrogation chamber to investigate the cameras shorting out, Cobolt shoots him down without a second thought and runs.

Megatron just utters a coarse, tired laugh at him. It’s hard to reconcile the bitter old co-captain with the gladiator on Kaon, or the revolutionary leader, or even the dissident philosopher. The Lost Light has done what the Senate and the Autobots never could: knock all the fight out of him.

“We’ve never spoken, have we?” Megatron says.

“Cobolt.” he says. “Procurement and Logistics.”

“Cobolt.” Megatron pauses for a moment, attempting to place the name. Cobolt once heard that Megatron prided himself on knowing the name of every Decepticon under his command. It became harder to reconcile with the truth when he saw them send wave after wave of ‘Genericons’ to their deaths on Totalia. “You never served under my command, did you?”

“Cyboria. Aegiax. Totalia. The Corcapsia Incursion.”

“...One of Galvatron’s.” Megatron vents air, curiously. “Did the Conclave mark your brand?”

“At Nova Point, on Declaration Day.”

“...When we desecrated the spires of Iacon to prove a point.” Megatron remembers. “To let the Senate know that there was no place on their planet, no matter how sacred, that we would not destroy in the name of peace.”

“It meant something.” Cobolt insists, almost infuriated at hearing Megatron dismiss it so thoughtlessly. “To all of us. That someone was standing up to the senate, the clampdown, and the functionalists, and—”

“Is that what you thought it was?” Megatron says. “Not war?”

“War was the only option left.”

“And yet you still followed. As a war of liberation became conquest.”

“I saw what the Constellate worlds were like before we got there.” Cobolt insists. “All those planets… it was still liberation. We were still following the dream.”

“It was slaughter.” Megatron insists. “On an industrial scale. Untold planets… untold species, all fed to the war machine. For the sake of building an Empire. And then, once the Empire fell to Autobot weapons, we turned to infiltration, the plundering of civilized planets. What would you call that? Procurement?”

“It was war.” Cobolt says. “The Autobots plundered the worlds they came across, and so did we. Only we had rules of engagement. Protocols.”

“Protocols that, unless I am mistaken, always ended with inhabited worlds reduced to dust and ashes.” Megatron shakes his head. “Tell me this, then: Where did we go wrong?”

“You didn’t finish the job.” Cobolt says, finally. “Even now the war’s over, it ain’t peace. It never will be, until you take back—”

“Ah yes. Megatron takes back command to rally the last of the Decepticons for one last charge against the Autobots.” Megatron says. “Off you go, then. I hear Galvatron was making a play for one final blaze of glory, before he lost his head.”

“To turn it back into what it was meant to be.”

“...And usher in a bold new era of Peace through Tyranny?” Megatron contorts his mouth into something that almost resembles a smile. “Now you sound like our dear friend Glitch. Look where he ended up."

“Tarn lives.”

“Someone wears the mask.” Megatron retorts, dismissively. “And a callow imitator of a man who held no dignity beyond that which I bestowed him with, a man left this world broken by my hand and groveling for mercy at my feet... that demands neither my attention nor my curiosity."

Cobolt vents air, at a loss for words.

“I have led three revolutions over the past four million years." Megatron continues. "Two were successful. In both of those revolutions, I did not fire a single shot. Do you know why?”

“You learn from your mistakes.”

“Perhaps, and perhaps not.” Megatron leans in, narrowing his ocular receptors. “But I know now what the Megatron who picked himself up off the street and saw a face staring back at him in the shattered glass did not: I know that my way works.”

Megatron pauses for a moment.

“So when you ask me whether I would recant my ways, and return to being the face of evil on the holographic monitor telling the Autobots that all they love will die screaming, understand that you ask me whether I shall return to a strategy that has wrought nothing but failure.” Megatron offers a shrug of his shoulders. “Even Shockwave would consider that illogical.”

"So you'd let the Decepticon name become synonymous with warlords and pirates?"

"I would let it fade into history as a reminder of what happens when one compromises their methods."

“So you just left your army to tear itself apart.” Cobolt says. “While you get to sit here and pretend like you’re above it all.”

“If a machine cannot continue to function without a single part, is it the fault of the part or the machine?”

“...the designer.” Cobolt surmises, finally.

Megatron utters a contented puff of air. “Now, say that said machine is broken in a way that causes a spreading fire. To do nothing will cause the fire to spread. Conversely, attempting to repair the machine, to keep it running, simply provides the fire with more fuel. What do you do?”

“You smother it. Starve it of oxygen.”

“Precisely.” Megatron says, finally. “And so Megatron the Autobot is far more valuable to the cause of peace than Megatron the Tyrant, is he not?”

“...But—”

“Leave me to my thoughts.” Megatron says, finally. “I need to give some to the horrors of the old war, and why a bitter wraith now wears my face.”

Cobolt takes one last look at Megatron, and turns for the door.

Chapter Text

Station 13,
The Empty, Tetractys.

“Is it too much?” Slipstream glances over to her advisor, lounging on a burnished metal throne as she holds the dis-attached metal head aloft. “Be honest with me.”

It’s an ornamental skull, likely harvested from an Autobot M.T.O. as a trophy in the closing centuries of the Great War. It’s a decorative piece, she doesn’t plan on hollowing out the internals and drinking Engex out of it or anything, but Slipstream recognizes that there’s a thin line between ‘projecting an aura of intimidating authority’ and ‘relentless self-parody’ that the self-respecting aesthete among the New Decepticons must distinguish between if one plans to build a base of lasting power in this time of monsters.

Any jumped-up M.T.O. with delusions of grandeur can find five likewise Genericons and take an unguarded planet or raid a shipping lane until they grow bold and do something that draws the ire of the Autobots. But Slipstream is trying to turn the battered remnants of Galvatron’s army into an empire, one that will someday match the heights of the lost Constellate, and so these aesthetic considerations of leadership run far stronger in her mind than she imagines they must have back in the days when Shockwave strung dead trophies from the ceiling to intimidate his enemies and Megatron barked commands from the peak of Fortress Sinister.

Now, Decepticon ‘politics’ has devolved into a tangled web of alliances and intrigue, a complex detente of a hundred warlords and countless petty rulers, all trying to present themselves as the one true inheritor of Megatron’s legacy, and fighting among themselves more than the rest of the galaxy. And so, they are judged by the forces they command, and the forces that they present themselves as commanding. Slipstream has her Skyscorchers and a tendency towards relentless self-criticism, Banzaitron has his Secret Service, Counterpunch has the unfettered might of his own Enforcers, and Tarn— or whatever beast now wears his face, because Slipstream has heard that Megatron himself declared his Justice Division unworthy of existence— commands the all-seeing DJD.

“It’s gauche, Lady Slipstream.” Cull says, arms behind his spindly purple-black frame.

“Explain.”

“It evokes the tired iconography of Megatron holding the head of Optimus Prime aloft.” Cull offers, with a quizzical brow. Slipsream concedes the point, she has seen it painted in Decepticon murals across a thousand desolate worlds. “Which, might I remind you, never happened.”

Slipstream vents air in frustration, tossing the skull away. It must have been far simpler back in the good old days.

A vast metal door creaks open on the far wall, and the footsteps of her Skyscorchers echo through the throne room.

“We have a problem.” Hawk begins, with her usual stubborn indignation.

Slipstream rises to her feet.

“Dear sister, we always have a problem.” She says, folding her arms.

“Tarn has been flushed from his hole.”

Slipstream does find that troubling, and so looks away from the gathered Skyscorchers rather than let her face betray her own apprehension. Perhaps the only reason the warlords have been able to accumulate so much power within this fragile equilibrium is that Tarn has proven to be more concerned with his experiments on Kravort VI than enforcing his particular view of social cohesion upon the various Decepticon factions. Should the DJD throw their weight behind any one candidate and silence any voices to the contrary,

Slipstream imagines that the only solution for it, while preserving her dreams of empire, is that they need to ensure that the voice Tarn follows is her own.

So Slipstream simply says: “Good. He might actually do his job for once.”

She turns to face the assembled Skyscorchers.

“If Tarn is returning to police the Decepticons, as once was his sworn duty, then we must be the ones to bring him in from the cold.” Slipstream decides, finally. “Ambassador Cull, send overtures to Tarn and Counterpunch. It is long past time we made our case for the New Decepticon Empire.”

Swerve’s,
The Lost Light.

[0][2] Days Since The Last Teleporter Malfunction

“—Still bloody stuck in here!” Screechwing batters his little wings against the walls of the ventillation shaft, sending a concerning rattling noise echoing around the walls of Swerve’s Bar.

If they don’t get him out of there soon, Jetflix figures, he might do some actual damage to the bulkhead, if he doesn’t bring the entire ventilation system crashing down first. But she’s still mad at the little bat, and so he can wait in there until this latest crisis resolves itself. Or until she and Auxcord finish their drinks. Whichever comes sooner.

“Can one of you please either get him out or shut him up?” Swerve nudges his head over to the shaft, both of his hands presently occupied tinkering with the exposed wiring on a Legislator laid out on the bar. Jetflix assumes that it’s become fairly obvious, with the teleportation accidents and religious schisms happening in his bar lately, that Swerve knows he’s got a Ten-shaped hole in his security detail. “We’re about to have the entire ship holed up in here.”

“Not the bridge?” Jetflix asks, shooting a sidelong glance over to the bar.

“Well, not to brag, but I know how this crew works.” Swerve says, bragging unconvincingly. “And, on an entirely unrelated note, I also run this pretty popular broadcast on this ship that might’ve intimated that anyone who wants to go on this Earth mission haul cogs to Swerve’s and grab a drink or two while they wait for Rodimus to greenlight the whole thing.”

“So you lied about where the crew was gathering.” Jetflix wipes dust from her ocular receptors. “As a marketing campaign for your bar.”

“I prefer saying that I was ‘pre-emptively truthful.’” Swerve offers a solitary finger-gun, with his other hand ineptly performing delicate engineering work on the Legislator. “Any minute now, Rodimus is gonna run through the door asking why—”

Rodimus's Office,
The Lost Light.

Five Minutes Ago.

“—you left Prowl in charge?!” Rodimus feels like shaking the holographic display in his office.

“...Like I said, we’ll take anyone you can spare.” Arcee says, with a tinge of ‘I Know, But Our Options Are Limited’ in her voice. Luckily for her, Rodimus is already putting the team together in his head. “Bumblebee and Prowl are coordinating things on the ground, but it’s a big city. Ark-26 is on their way, but the Lost Light can get here in half the time.”

“Should we let him out?” Auxcord vents air in a dull sigh, glancing up from the same container of Engex she’s been nursing since the announcement. “It’s been two Cycles.”

“Camian cycles or Furmax ones?” Jetflix ponders, tapping her chin.

Auxcord knows she’s trying to change the subject, and refuses to bite.

“He was trying to help.” Auxcord leans across the table, narrowing her ocular receptors in a particularly pointed glare.

“He eventually attempted an action that might have helped had he proven to be successful. Unfortunately, this was after he fled the bar before the doors closed, strung me along to try and apologize for imagined slights by pretending there was a lockdown switch that doesn’t exist, and—” Jetflix folds her arms. “Saying some incredibly unkind things about my conjunx endura.”

“He still doesn’t deserve to be stuck in a vent listening to Swerve for the next Trimara.”

“...Two more Breems.” Jetflix throws her hands up in mock surrender, conceding the point to Auxcord. She gestures to her bulky, non-retractable wings, along with all her other sharp and pointy kibble. She makes a rough approximation of the size of the vent with her hands. “Besides, I wouldn’t fit in there.”

Auxcord responds to her with that particularly disappointed kind of scowl Jetflix usually gets from someone who doesn’t exactly expect better from her, but is nevertheless annoyed that her initial assessment has been proven entirely correct. She glances over to Jetflix for a moment, offering her a chance to reconsider, and once it’s clear that Jetflix refuses to budge from this perch, Auxcord drags her chair over to the clambers on top of it, setting about using a sonic probe to twirl out the screws trapping the little bat bot in the vents. She coils back her tensor cables and dips her head into the opening, trying to talk Screechwing out of there.

Jetflix calls out to Auxcord to get down from there, because the rest of the crew is starting to filter into Swerve’s awaiting Rodimus’s suitably dramatic entrance, possible dramatic speech, and then a protracted dramatic scramble to volunteer for the dangerous mission, and Jetflix is reasonably sure they’re about to rearrange the tables from ‘casual seating’ to ‘crisis mode.’

So she scoops up their drinks and attempts to deposit them at an empty spot in the bar when she starts to watch the tables retract into the meeting-room setup.

“Aux—” Jetflix calls, but it’s too late. Auxcord’s chair retracts into the ground alongside all the other chairs as she struggles to wrangle Screechwing out of the vents, and Auxcord is left as a pair of white and gold legs dangling from the vent as the others arrive.

Well, that’s now two members of the procurement team stuck in the ventilation system.

It's a somewhat embarrassing fact that Jetflix can't fly outside of her alt-mode, which means tall shelves and ventilation shafts are somewhere outside her usual wheelhouse. So she looks around for someone exceptionally large to help get Auxcord down from there and, more importantly, someone who will not judge them for this sequence of events. She settles on asking after a member of Procurement she knows, almost certainly, will have answered the call.

"Moshers?” Jetflix calls. She looks around, but Moshpit appears conspicuously absent from the gathering of Wide-Shouldered Robots tripping over themselves to be daring and heroic. Which is confusing, to Jetflix, because she’s pretty sure somebody edited that exact description into Moshpit’s Autopedia page.

She’s also pretty sure it was her, but she added little brackets at the end with the word ‘Affectionate’ in them, so they should know she was experiencing a rare moment of sincerity at the bottom of that glass of Engex.

“Just watch,” Swerve beams up at Jetflix, thinking that she’s waiting for Rodimus and not watching the unfolding carnage in the vent shaft. “He’s gonna run through here asking who’s up for a fight.”

Instead, Rodimus walks in all-business. He doesn’t even do a flip as he climbs onto the meeting table.

“Megs—” Rodimus starts, almost instinctively, before putting a hand to his forehead as he remembers that Megatron is both in the brig and the problem here. “Mags. Ratchet. Chromedome. Drift. Hound. Lotty. Rewind. Cyclonus. Whirl. Swerve. You’re up. Anyone else here with face-to-face experience with humans?”

Jetflix expects more hands to go up than her own.

“Jet, you’re with us.”

He looks around the room, obviously looking for literally any good candidate to take charge of the ship while the entire command team is on Earth.

Rodimus winces.

“Thu—” He points, before, in the absence of any other reliable options, glancing over to the ever-reliable Autobot in his alt-mode on the bar. “Toaster has the deck while we’re gone. Right. Now, team two, your job is—”

“I’m bloody well going if she is!” Screechwing hisses, after Auxcord finally wiggles herself free from the vents.

“Thanks for volunteering, Screechwing! Love the attitude.” Rodimus gives a thumbs up. “Alright, Team Two—”

Auxcord is politely raising her hand. Rodimus glances over to her.

“...Is anyone else volunteering to head down with Team One?”

This time, far more hands go up.

“Alright, love the enthusiasm. Does anyone else want to go with Team One,” Rodimus gestures dramatically, thinking he’s sweetening the deal. “On the Rodpod?”

A few hands go down.

In the gaudy yet surprisingly comfortable confines of the Rodpod, Jetflix becomes suddenly aware of the fact that she needs to have been paying better attention to the parameters of this mission roughly a Furmax Cycle ago, if not a Camian one, and becomes a somewhat frantic presence within the Pod in asking the others for details while Screechwing rides on her shoulders. She knows exactly what an ‘EDC presence’ in this city means, given the approximate travel times from Fort Witwicky, and is mentally preparing herself for what will inevitably prove to be an increasingly awkward introduction now that Screechwing has declared his intent to save his own skin by riding on her shoulders for the entire mission.

Also on the dropship, Whirl introduces himself to Jetflix by stating that he “has no weaknesses, and is best friends with the greatest rock band in the history of Earth.”

Well, Jetflix thinks. That’s good to know.

Chapter Text

Castle Destro,
Provincia de Santa Cruz
Argentina.

Ayana’s doing her best to deliver the briefing over the radio.

Ian Noble still misses half of it, through static interference and the deafening hiss of the wind across the plateau, but he gets the gist: Observe Destro, and whoever he’s meeting with, from a distance until they have enough information to engage.

Which suits Ian just fine, because it’s not like he can move from his hiding spot, anyhow.

There’s nothing but mountains and wasteland until they reach the coast. When Director Faireborn told him this mission was dropping them in South America, Ian expected tropical jungles and fruity drinks with umbrellas in them like you see in all the old Cold War spy movies. Instead, he’s laying on his belly in the freezing dirt, getting battered by flecks of dust and salt kicked up by the Falkland current.

Which has a strange sense of irony to it, really.

He’s still got the easiest job out of the three of them. Ayana’s perched on the mountain itself with a linear launcher, ready to shoot a zipline down once they get the go-ahead from central to crash the party. It’s probably one of the reasons why they can barely hear her over the radio.

“This is getting us nowhere. Switch to sublight and sync.” Ayana crackles. Ian taps the device in his ear, and the next part comes through loud and clear: “Any questions, team?”

“Yeah, Mayday.” Ian huffs, adjusting his binoculars in the sparse underbrush. “What possesses someone to move an entire Scottish castle to the arse-end of Argentina?”

“Probably because he doesn’t wanna be found, kid.” Kup calls, a few miles out from the observation site. It would’ve been hard enough to hide the six meter tall giant robot in a jungle, hiding him in the valley would’ve been next to impossible. Not that Kup seemed to mind. If this whole thing goes south, Ian knows, the old man’ll hit the building before he does. Ian’s seen Kup close longer distances in seconds.

“That, or the weather reminds him of home.” Emulator says, from her own vantage point.

Ian still doesn’t know how to feel about the latest addition to the team. Blackrock had called her Beller while he was introducing her to the rest of them, said she was an employee of his, and then promptly said absolutely nothing about why she looked like she was dressed like the lady on the front cover of a Graphics Card box from the 2000s.

Ian went to shake her hand during their introductions, and got zapped so hard it almost took his eyebrows off. It was still a more cordial introduction than she gave to Kup.

Problems with robots, Blackrock had said.

But they’re still short of two members, with ROM mopping up Dire Wraiths in the Angarrix sector, and Blackrock’s stuck in meetings with one President or another, so they’ll take whatever help they can get.

“Easy on the chatter.” Marissa calls, from Headquarters. “What do you see?”

“Fat load of nothing.” Ayana says. “Action Man?”

Ian twists the lenses on his binoculars until the image comes into focus. There’s a meeting on the balcony. A silver-masked figure walks into view, drinks in hand. Ian taps the sides, trying to activate the directional microphone to listen in on the conversation. “I see Destro. South tower. Balcony.”

“Good. Who’s he meeting with?”

That’s harder to judge from ground level. Whoever’s talking to Destro must be shorter than he is. All Ian can see from his vantage point is the top of their heads.

It doesn’t exactly narrow their list of suspects down.

“—I appreciate you both joining me for this meeting nonetheless.” Destro’s voice echoes in his earpiece, which means the microphone is calibrated. “I hope that you will come to understand I am completely sincere in my assurances that I will treat your discography with the utmost care.”

“Sounds like a musician.” Ayana offers.

“Is that in Destro’s playbook?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.” Marissa offers, with a dull sigh.

“Huh?” Ian asks.

“Cold Slither. That Nu Metal band back in the two thousands.” Ayana says, as Destro walks to the other end of the balcony. Ayana pings, twice, having finally gotten visual confirmation of him. “MARS Industries set the whole thing up as a subliminal recruitment tool for Cobra. Ran a sting operation to uncover the whole thing, during my first stint with the Joes.”

“...Ha!”

“Wanna share with the class, Action Man?” Ayana asks.

“Always knew they were industry plants.” Ian smiles. “Never catch the Misfits doing something like—”

“—If I had a laser gun, Miss Gabor, I assure you—” Destro says on the audio feed, suddenly defensive.

“Oh, shit-arse.” Ian mutters, refocusing his lens. That’s Pizzazz, alright, all wild green hair and zebra print fabric with a glowing pink Jem standing beside her, jabbing a finger in the chest of the second-most wanted man on the planet.

“We’ll reconvene this meeting in an hour.” Destro says, obviously fuming. “I’d like to hear whether the rest of your band feel the same way you do about creative control.”

“...We’re gonna miss our chance.” Ayana says. There’s a click-clack in the background, like she’s readying the zipline launcher. “Marissa, are we clear to engage?”

“Negative, Mayday.” Marissa says. “Hold. See where he goes.”

“I see him.” Emulator says. “On the bridge to the East Tower.”

“Get his audio.” Marissa says.

Ian’s focused on the two women on the balcony.

“You think we can trust him?” Pizzazz says, draping her arms over the castle walls.

“Well, I don’t trust anyone who wears a mask.” Jem says, like it's a private joke between them, and Ian notices her pulls her hand to her ear, and says: “Show’s over, Synergy.”

“Bloody hell.” Ian spits, shocked. “Jerrica Benton is Jem.”

“That’s…” Marissa sighs. “Focus on Destro, Action Man.”

“No, hold on. It could be important.” Ayana says. “Benton. Do we have anything on her?”

“Give me a second.” Marissa calls over the headset, pulling up the EDC’s files on her terminal. “She’s about as clean as you can possibly get. Father was a scientist, passed away a few years back. Must run in the family, her grandfather worked for a UN taskforce in the… seventies, I think. Lots of black ink on that file.”

“Anything on her mother’s side?”

“Says here that her mom’s a Jacqueline… O’Ryan. Big name singer in the eighties.”

“Jacqui Orion. Starlight.” Ayana. “Karaoke classic.”

“Passed through the foster system, had her Berlin era, got noticed back in the States. Recorded Mayday’s karaoke standard, had two kids, adopted two more, passed away in a… Hrm.”

“That sounds like foul play.” Ayana retorts.

“No, it’s a Hrm.” Marissa says. “One of the other passengers on that flight sounds familiar. Kessler. I’ll look into it.”

“Any pressure points there?” Ayana says. “Potential Cobra flags.”

“By our standards, she’s practically a saint.”

“And Gabor?”

“Piece of work doesn’t begin to cover it.”

“Does she fit the profile of a Cobra asset?”

“Neo Cobra.” Marissa helpfully corrects her.

“Whatever.”

“Father’s a real American dream story. Worked his way up from the mail room to the CFO of Blackrock. Seems like there’s a rift between them.”

“Public blowup.” Ian offers. “Made the gossip columns. All over TMZ.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Mother’s a lounge singer. Left him for…” Marissa pauses. “Wow.”

“Someone traded up.” Ayana snickers. “Eyes on Destro, Action Man.”

“He’s talking to a… businessman, it looks like. Big cowboy hat.”

“...Doesn’t narrow it down.”

“Abraham Dante.” says Beller on the sublight comms. “He is the chief executive of Epsilon Holdings. He should also be in a medically-induced coma in an EDC facility beneath Fallon, Nevada, but someone freed him six days ago.”

“You know more than you let on, Emulator.”

“...I didn’t say that.” Emulator says, somewhat panicked on the other end of the line. “Who said that?”

“A friend.” Ian’s voice is shot back at him through his earpiece. “It is part of a plan called the Alpha Scenario.”

“Not this blasted scrap again.” Kup says. “Prowl, I swear I’m gonna get your tailpipe and shove it right up—”

“Not that friend.” says Ayana, this time. Ian refocuses his binoculars on the West Tower. Looks like movement. Destro’s Guards. If they don’t move quickly, Destro is going to ruin the charts for the next five years. “But I suggest you move. Quickly.”

“Marissa.” Ayana says. “Permission to rescue the rock stars?”

“...I don’t like this.” Marissa pauses for a moment on the other end of the line. Spooky voice on the other end of the line mimicking their voices or not, people were in danger. They needed to move out, fast. “Unit E, you’re cleared to engage.”

By the time the shooting starts, Ian’s stopped wondering who the voice on their line could be.

Later.

So Pizzazz is in the room for the debriefing.

Pizzazz is not supposed to be in the room for the debriefing, because this is a highly-secretive multi-national task force talking to the President of California or whatever about some guy’s plot to blow up the moon or something, but she’s present by virtue of loudly complaining that she needs to know what’s going on if someone just tried to kill her girlfriend, her band, and her, and enough of the people making decisions agreed with her that she’s allowed to tag along as an ‘unassigned asset’ until she figures out what kind of mess the Creep in the Iron Mask tried to drag her band into.

So Pizzazz is furious. Not just because the British kid who rescued her keeps getting in her face to tell her what a huge fan he is like that’s the most important part of the situation, or because she’s surrounded by alien robots and space cops who just killed a bunch of people on the way to rescuing her, but because someone tried to hurt the people she cares about and she’s pacing around the lobby like she needs to pound someone’s face into the dirt about it.

She’s also terrified. Not in that usual sense she’s terrified, the gnawing weight of expectations and malaise that sticks in her throat and the pit of her stomach and lingers with her as she stares up at the ceiling kind of terror. This is the genuine fight-or-flight-bullets-flying-lizard-brain kind of terror, a kind she’s never felt in any of her fist fights with hecklers or when the wild-haired girl whose face she can’t remember held her shirt to her neck trying to staunch the bleeding after she tried to play through the blood loss after the accident with the razor blade or that one time Jetta blew up her blender and almost took her head off.

That’s a lie: Pizzazz has felt it once before, as she smashed her hands against the windshield of her car until they were bloody and as she felt like the rocks were going to crush her or the waves were going to swallow her or the smoke was going to choke her alive before the flames burned her, trying to scream for help through a crushed trachea.

It’s the helplessness of it that gets to her. She didn’t like it much the first time. She hates it even more, now.

So Pizzazz doesn’t really process any of this, as she stands there fiddling with her alien medal because it’s the most famliar thing she can grasp a hold of right now. She’s just glad everyone made it out of there okay.

“...Jem?” Marissa says, gently grasping the crossguard and dragging it loose from her shaking hand. “You can put the sword down now.”

“Sorry,” Jerrica says. Even behind the glossy facade of Jem, it takes her a second to get back to her practiced smile.

“When did Jem have time to learn to swing a sword like that?”

“A lot of practice.” Jerrica says, dryly. “He’s in a meeting. Should we wait outside?”

“No.” Marissa says, pushing open the doors.

“—movie about a talking tomato, Garrison.”

“His last one won an Oscar.” Marissa says. “President Hauser.”

“Shows you what Hollywood’s coming to.” the weathered man behind the desk says, furrowing his brow. Pizzazz has only seen his face on all the political billboards they post downtown. They put a lot more hours in photoshop into those than she figured. “Agent Mayday, I distinctly recall putting you on this team to stop everything from going to hell.”

“We rescued the hostages and Destro’s on his way to G-10.” Ayana says. “Turns out our friends in the Council have some pretty strict galactic rules about slingshot teleportation.”

Pizzazz awkwardly pockets her Rodimus Star, opting to fiddle with her awful new cellphone instead. To say she has a barrage of unread messages is an understatement, but everyone who isn’t her band can wait until she makes it onto the news.

STORMER: Are you ok?

PIZZAZZ: Probably not
PIZZAZZ: Its you im worried about
PIZZAZZ: Howd Kimber take the news?

STORMER: I haven’t told her
STORMER: She’s back in the hospital for more tests

PIZZAZZ: Today friggin sucks
PIZZAZZ: Keep me posted

STORMER: I’m falling apart, Pizzazz
STORMER: This was messed up

Pizzazz just stares at her phone for a while, trying to figure out how to respond. There’s a world around her, she’s pretty sure, but she’s only getting tiny snippets of it.

“Neo Cobra—”

“Involvement of Non-Aligned Lifeforms—”

“Social media ran with the tidal wave explanation, so we’re doing nothing to suppress that until we can—”

Jerrica snaps her out of it.

“Blackrock,” Jerrica says, folding her arms. “You created this problem by allowing your company to be governed by the whims of executives with an axe to grind. You can’t be surprised when someone steps in to exploit the situation.”

“I know,” the techbro billionaire folds like a cheap suit, raising his hands in surrender. “And I will make this up to you. You have my word.”

“I don’t want your word.” Jerrica says, distinctly sounding like Jerrica through the disguise, when she needs to lay down the law with whatever sleazy music executive is trying to take advantage of Starlight Music being a glorified indie label. “The least you can do is hand over the rights to her back catalog to stop this from happening again—”

While Jerrica works over the executives, Pizzazz figures she needs to look out for her band. Stormer’s gonna be a mess, whatever happens, so Pizzazz starts looking for the fastest routes back from Sacramento and juggling them in her head as she finally types out a reply that sucks but will get the message across.

PIZZAZZ: I know
PIZZAZZ: I’m sorry
PIZZAZZ: Back ASAP

STORMER: It’s not your fault
STORMER: Where are you?
STORMER: They just took you and Jem and left us in the air base

PIZZAZZ: [Attachment: IMG_0113.jpg]

STORMER: I…
STORMER: Please don’t get in trouble

PIZZAZZ: He doesn’t like my movie, apparently

STORMER: LOL
STORMER: I needed that laugh
STORMER: But seriously, don’t get us in trouble with the President

PIZZAZZ: Jem’s handling it
PIZZAZZ: Where are you

STORMER: Home, now
STORMER: Someone from ‘Delta Group’ dropped us off

PIZZAZZ: Cool
PIZZAZZ: Talk to you when I’m out of here

Jerrica has stepped back with a huff, letting the conversation move onto the actual debriefing of why a team of multi-national crazies was holed up outside a Scottish Castle in Argentina to begin with. So Pizzazz glances up from her phone until her eyes start to glaze over, then starts chipping away at her unread messages.

JETTA: p i swear im never lettin u drag me on an international tour again
JETTA: fed UP
JETTA: plus the ginger bird from yo joe or whatevs was proper trying it on with rox
JETTA: put the boots to that

PIZZAZZ: Surprised THAT’S where you draw the line

JETTA: im a woman of principle
JETTA: yr wifey looked proper vicious with that sword tho
JETTA: like rawr

PIZZAZZ: Score one for rich girl fencing lessons

 

JETTA: proper dennys carpark behaviour

PIZZAZZ: Dude
PIZZAZZ: She beat my ass in so many competitions when we were kids
PIZZAZZ: It’s retroactively infuriating
PIZZAZZ: Like I’m just minding my business
PIZZAZZ: Trying to find the Mace I had to hide when we got Mads
PIZZAZZ: And I literally find a photo of me crying because she tossed me on my ass in judo
PIZZAZZ: I literally forgot I did judo for three months

JETTA: proper mark fisher hauntology innit

PIZZAZZ: I think she’s keeping the sword
PIZZAZZ: Rox alright?

JETTA: not our first rodeo p
JETTA: swear half the fam back in hull would eat cobra for breakfast
JETTA: one for behind the music innit

PIZZAZZ: Stay safe
PIZZAZZ: Heading back to LA soon

She thumbs her phone over to check on Blaze.

BLAZE: Um
BLAZE: Pizzazz
BLAZE: Clash got kidnapped by aliens while we were gone

PIZZAZZ: What.

BLAZE: jk we’re fine

PIZZAZZ: Dude.
PIZZAZZ: SO not cool.

BLAZE: [Jemoji: Hug!]

PIZZAZZ: Don't scare me like that
PIZZAZZ: Talk later though

Pizzazz exhales, sharply.

“Dude.” Pizzazz says, finally, glancing over to Jerrica. “I am so glad I only play an action hero in the movies.”

“...I’m going to have to ask you both to leave.” President Hauser says, staring at Pizzazz. “There’s been a situation in Palo Alto. We need to co-ordinate the response.”