16th October 2013
Pass
"…whether or not you want to move back here full-time."
Slipstream looks down at the ruins of the city of Kaon and makes a decision very quickly. This isn't the city where she rose up against her
masters rulers. This isn't the city where she trained for the war that would liberate her comrades.
"This is a giant pile of scrap."
Her partner glances up at her for a moment, only moving his eyes before he goes back to staring out across the… Giant pile of scrap.
"It's a magnificent pile of scrap. The sheer
size of it…"
There's a.. sound, then she sees in the distance-
"Slipstream?"
-
a swarm of swarm of swarm of ow!
She glares down in irritation, pulling her right leg away as her
backstabbing partner lowers his scaled down power spear. "Hey!"
"You were glitching out. What did you see?"
She tests the servos in her right foot where he poked her. Not that they were short on materials for repairs but that
stung!
"I'll rub some oil on it later. Did you spot Autobots?"
With the war…
Technically over after Megatron threw in the towel-. Well, that was what the Autobot's broadcasts said, and they saw Knockout and teams of vehicons making repairs with Autobots in the ruins of Iacon when they over flew the area. Finding out whether it was
true or not would require direct communication of a sort…
The thing about playing both sides against the middle so that you had the space to do your own thing was… It didn't exactly endear you to either of them. More to the point, the victor in a civil war might decide that they had the authority to actually make laws or something, and as accommodating as India had been, she didn't think that they would be prepared to fight it if the Autobots under Optimus Prime and his American allies starting kicking up dust about her and her partner staying on Earth after everyone else left.
And she'd just got the full-body oil bath working just the way she liked it.
"No. Scraplets."
"A
h." He raises his binoculars to his eyes, staring out across the former city with new focus. "Are they heading this way?"
She steels her sockets and engages her magnification systems to take a closer look.
"No. It looks like they're inert. There's not all that much left for them to eat here."
"How worried do we need to be?"
"You don't need to be worried at all. They don't eat humans."
"There is no 'we' without
you, partner."
"I don't need to be worried unless they wake up. Usually-." She
crouches, arm-mounted blasters deploying and tracking the slow-flying watch-
scraplet. "Usually they'll take it in turns to stay awake, and the one that's awake can wake the rest of when there's
food."
"How do you kill them?"
"Lure them into an enclosed space and the hit them with something they can't dodge.
Glass gas and
cryogenic spray were a good choice." Her wings tilt down for a moment. "Of course, back in the
old days they'd just hand some poor clanker a
photon bomb, paint them in energon and drop them into a swarm."
He
pats her foot again, this time with his hand. For a moment she's confused. She hasn't forgotten that he's there and it doesn't look like he wants to direct her attention to something. Instead, he's… Trying to reassure her? About what happened to bots who blew up before his species discovered
fire?
"They didn't drop
me."
He takes his hand away, and she thinks that perhaps she did something wrong. That was the selfish thing to say, wasn't it?
"Does that affect our scavenging mission?"
"I don't
think so. That's the old manufacturing sector. There won't be anything worth taking there that we can actually
move."
"No
transmetal samples?"
"Transmetal samples are
rare. We might not find
any, but we certainly won't find them in the labour pits."
He nods. "
Museums and private laboratories it is. Same for
polydermal grafting?"
"No. We'll need to get into Shockwave's laboratory for that. If any records still exist, that's where they'll be." She takes one last look at the slumbering scraplets, then retracts her blasters into her forearms. "That's also the
dangerous part."
"I know." He exhales sharply, and she feels his irritation through their bond.
And she shares it. Getting the Apex Armour would have been
nice, but instead it got picked up by Starscream and then captured by the Autobots. Plus the fact that the Apex Armour would let him tank shots for her. Getting into a facility with defences built by the greatest mind in the Decepticon army with just her own light frame isn't something she's exactly looking forward to.
Something
twitches in her spark at the idea of Paul being able to exist on her scale, and deal with the world as she does. The alternative… Building her a techno-organic avatar, is… Weird. Not..
bad, having taken an organic as her '
partner' she's fully aware that she's given up the ability to insult 'alternate lifestyle choices' without being a titan-sized hypocrite. Doubly so given that the only reason they haven't gone
further is that he doesn't have the parts.
Had they..? Rushed things?
Maybe. But if you're not prepared to go fast then you shouldn't be a seeker.
She transforms, popping open her canopy as she does so. And she actually feels her servos relax slightly as she feels his weight on her boarding ladder, on the rim of her cockpit and then finally into her chair. A chair she hadn't needed before she met him and just used her cockpit for improved optical sensors, but which she
wouldn't be without.
Canopy closed, she activates her anti-gravity system and ion thrusters. Main engines would make
far too much noise somewhere with scraplets -pit-spawned little miscasts that they are- and…
And fly.
She finds it strange how strange it feels to be flying inside again. The few Earth buildings big enough for her to walk inside certainly didn't have space for
flying. And flying around the broken-apart remains of Junkion wasn't the same thing. Kaon wasn't
repaired by whatever the Autobots did to fix the planet, but it's a lot more
whole than she remembers it in the days before the exodus.
Which means she has to worry about which of Kaon's automated defences got repaired as well.
"Were you cast around here?"
"No."
An odd question. It's not as if she had any great ties to the long-destroyed factory platform where the Quintessons had her built. Then she feels his
concern and realises that he felt the way her thoughts were drifting and decided to distract her. And as she slaloms around Kaon's corridors she can't think of a reason not to go along with it.
"No, but I spent a lot of time in Kaon. You want a tour?"
"I do."
"Okay then. Let's see what I can remember."
