Summary: Thundercracker, like many mechs knew deep in his spark that his entire faction (plus as many of the Autobots) were going to end up in the Pit when they died. Trouble is that hell is not quite what you or he would have expected. In fact, it's worse. Crackfic: horrifying or amusing depending on your point of view. Take your pick. G1
Disclaimer: Any recognisable characters, phrases or words come either from the Discworld or Transformers which both belong to their respective owners and which I am taking the liberty of using without permission to try and create either a mildly humorous or mildly horrifying fanfiction.(Note that there may be references to other works and I can't be bothered to mention/remember them, see if you can spot some of them)
AN: I read the book (Faust) Eric by Terry Pratchett in the library. The hell described in the book interested me and since I had my laptop with me I wrote about two-thirds of this there and then. A week later I continued it and here is the finished piece. It hasn't been reread and edited much so expect some oddness.
A lot of the credit for this version of hell goes to Sir Terry, which I am shamelessly bastardising, but please don't take any offense or take it too seriously - it's satire (at least Sir Terry's version, I'm not quite sure what mine is).
In fact, don't take a lot of this seriously, written as it is in a bizarre frame of mind out of which many strange things emerge. Then again this is fanfiction /dot/ net and strange is kind of normal here.
Another thing to note: With the exception of punctuation and sentence structure, anything that seems like a mistake probably isn't one (i.e. "plain of existence"). That shouldn't stop you from telling me about them though.
On a completely unrelated note: Enjoy. :)
I should warn for six OCs, one of them nicknamed Pumpkin, who are mostly irrelevant to the story but appear anyway.
Oddly enough Thundercracker was not offlined by an Autobot. Instead he fell victim to a much worse fate, one which would be mocked in the Decepticon ranks for many years to come.
It was a one in many millions chance of course. None of the Transformers could quite believe it afterwards that lightning hitting you could have any possibility of affecting your systems beyond frying circuitry and immobilising you (along with considerably topping up your energy levels).
Normally Thundercracker could have survived a fall from even ten thousand feet up in the air; it would have hurt quite a bit, this being a severe understatement, and it would have taken him a fair while to be put back together again, but he would have survived. However since the odds were astronomical against this sort of thing happening, the unthinkable indeed did happen, as they do tend to when the odds are very much not in your favour, and a randomised burst of energy in his processor rapidly unlocked all the failsafes on his barriers between the outer world and his spark, leading to all of them retracting mid-fall.
By then he had reached maximum velocity and the ground was seconds away from slamming quite painfully into his body. His spark-chamber was bared for all the world to see and for the ground to squish quite mercilessly once it realised that Thundercracker was trying to fall through it.
Ten seconds away from impact his processor managed to reboot along with his optics and a moment of panicked realisation set in, not that you could really tell unless you were an expert in reading faces that are ultimately made of unyielding metal and give very little away by way of expression, before acceptance came along with a dull thought of "Oh frag-"
Then the absence of everything arrived -not nothing because nothing is something- in a dull shade of not darkness and not light (not werelight or anything silly like that. It was the absence of light which left you entirely aware of where things were and what colour they portrayed, the only issue being that whether you closed your eyelids or turned off your optics you would still be able to see in a manner of speaking, or knowing as it were).
Thundercracker waited for Something to happen. In his mind Something always had to happen, there was no way around it, as having a working relationship two other mechs, one so vindictive Thundercracker was sure said mech had been a femme at some point in his life and another with a potent inability to stay still and behave, for many, many vorns had proven.
Some moments later it still hadn't departed.
He was beginning to get bored and slightly twitchy. There was no light, no dark, no up, no down, no nothing, no everything, no anything.
This was a similar situation to him walking, or flying, into an ambush; it gave him that exact same feeling and it set the now disembodied Thundercracker more on edge than he should have been, you know, since he was dead.
A moment later and there was instant light. Thundercracker attempted to jump back and shield his optics except it didn't work because he didn't have a body. It was only an instinctive reaction, caused by many years of war and having optics and it now didn't work. Thundercracker felt deeply unsettled and slightly depressed by this as it only helped to highlight the fact that he was dead.
Another instantaneous something occurred, this time he appeared to actually be somewhere. This served to further unseat him; by then he'd become used to Skywarp's mode of preferred transport, even if he still preferred flight. This was a completely foreign mode of transportation to him and he didn't quite know what to make of it.
Nothing, however, trumped the sheer horror he felt when he "saw" the place he was in: it appeared to be a fairly large hallway, just large enough to prickle at the Seeker's inherent claustrophobia without inducing a full out panic. This was not the main cause of his disgust. It was the fact that the walls seemed to be made of some sort of pink organic tissue, and as he watched it his revulsion overturned itself when one protrusion seemed to pulse.
Under more usual circumstances this sight would have already caused several glitches in his systems, forcing them into reboot. At the moment he had no systems, no diagnostics and no code and, exhausted as his capacity for misery and disgust was, the Seeker tried to dive into the realms of apathy and disbelief. Case in point: he tried. Meaning that the moment he'd come close to a state of being that would have blocked out this entire situation he'd also come to a realisation.
The organic muck was also part of the floor ad Thundercracker was no longer non-corporeal.
He was standing on said floor, meaning the muck had got into his thrusters. His thrusters were extremely delicate instruments, without which there would be no flying and no flying equalled an insane Thundercracker. Furthermore because of the delicate nature of said thrusters the work would have to be very slow, very precise and extremely tedious.
Thundercracker let out a sound that was almost a whimper. Activating his thrusters now would mean that the charred organic slime would be even harder to get out; on the other hand, walking onwards would wedge the stuff even further into his thrusters. He was stuck.
The same thing happened the last two times Something happened, out of nowhere someone appeared. This someone was a dainty little femme in the drabbest colour of grey Thundercracker had ever seen, surpassing even Megatron's gunmetal-grey which all Seekers agreed on was exceptionally dull.
She was giving him the smile prostitutes usually reserved for their least liked customers. A human descriptive word for it might be "plastic", oddly though it reminded Thundercracker a lot of Starscream's insincere smiles at their leader and it was the kind of smile that turned his tanks and gave him the odd feeling that Something was about to go terribly wrong.
When she opened her mouth and started in the most saccharine voice he'd ever heard, in a manner reminiscent of addressing a sparkling he knew he had to be in the Pit.
"Welcome to the Pit, where every day is virtually unchanged from the next, and suffering tedium is our motto! For most of the rest of eternity you shall be introduced to our codes, starting from the Code of Behavioural Conduct, Volume One of Thirty, the First Part of the Seven-Part Omnibus. Ahem, Chapter One, Part One, Prologue- By mostly your own fault you have come into the Pit (First Footnote: also known as Hell, the Abyss, the Underworld, Hades), starting one of the least memorable times of your life (Second footnote: this, of course, is only a metaphor, you're not really alive anymore)
The chipper voice continued, droning on and on about all aspects of behaviour in the Pit (or Hell, the Abyss, the Underworld, Hades) and Thundercracker could not block it out. There was something about the voice which made it impossible for him to retreat into himself and brood about his situation. It was like the times when Megatron tore Starscream's wings off; no matter how Thundercracker tried to convince himself to leave that sound of tearing metal always brought him to a stupefied halt. Even Starscream had not been this insufferable with his arrogant speeches as in those there were no redundant footnotes especially designed for those without a dollop of deductive reasoning and common sense, nor were there ridiculously long passages of non-information (that being stuff that tells you very little about nothing of any particular interest, like people who tell you facts about the absolutely mundane).
The short description of this all: Boring. Not the kind of "boring" you find in schools, because even in schools you can find something worth knowing, if only to slightly impress your boss later in life; no, this was the boring found in executive meetings about company policy, also known as excessive bureaucracy.
Thundercracker wished he'd never died.
Some unspecified amount of time later that felt very long and especially tedious and was probably no time at all in the grand scheme of life, the universe and everything, Thundercracker decided that he didn't wish he'd never died- he wished he could die now. The walls would collapse on him and he would be back in not something again, meaning there would be no organic residue that he'd by now given up on trying to scrape off, and most importantly the voice would be gone.
They were now midway through Volume 3 of the Code of Conduct (and he had to be reluctantly impressed by the fact that the chipper voice could make capital letters sound out in its speech), himself having figured out that the femme (or demon or whatever the book said they called themselves) was just as bored as Thundercracker. He'd managed to get her to tell him, in the few and far between short breaks between each Volume, what had happened to the Pit that they talked about in stories. Apparently souls could not actually feel pain, since to feel pain you needed a body to transmit those feelings to your brain. Thus in the Pit torture wasn't really torture, it was just demons hot-pokering people for nostalgia's sake, not really accomplishing much at all.
Since then, the next lead demon to come to power (or king or lord), the same one who currently still ruled despite all attempts on his –erm- not-life, had installed a bureaucratic system of torture with executives and managers and whatnot, endeavouring to torture the "inmates" via boredom.
Boredom, you see, can only be appealing for someone who has had many unwilling adventures and would quite like to settle down for a while and can safely say that they would prefer not to go on another adventure, thank you very much. However when the only thing in sight for your near and distant future is everlasting Ennui, then how can it not be considered torture.
The really evil aspect about it was the demons' roles in it. In the Pit's old system they might have enjoyed themselves, engaging in a bit of good-natured banter with their victims, with the occasional foray into one of many realities to mess with mortal minds (there was one who cropped up repeatedly in several realities who always summoned the same demon and then got harshly pwned for it in hell). The new system had them just as terminally bored as their victims, with the additional threat of being subjected to a lecture by one of their superiors, even an executive if they were unlucky, on Proper and Professional Conduct amongst the Subjects Employees Of the Most Mighty CED (Chief Executive Demon) if their performance on their victims was… less than adequate (a victim begging for excruciating agony over boredom was considered average).
There was no hope of escape or relief from it and once he realised this, he succumbed completely to numbness.
Not that he knew that this realisation would be proven wrong, against all logic, odds and Laws of the Universe.
After all, it wasn't like Luck or Fate to play fair, was it?
In another dimension; well not really, they were in the same dimension, just not the same plain of existence which happened to contain other dimensions of many other descriptions, best left undescribed; there were a group of odd teenagers painting a lopsided star on the floor with lots of little squiggles around it. They were copying the squiggles from a tatty paperback book which had seen many prettier days on a collector's bookshelf, then had thought better of it and had spent the rest of its life as a near-sacred hand-me-down for occultists all over the world in the places they read English and didn't burn witches and books of "ye olde majike" anymore (the list was surprisingly small since the specifications didn't include whether the burnings were state-sanctioned or even unofficially state-sanctioned, thus rendering all the places where burnings took place un- or semi-officially a taboo).
The squiggles didn't look much like the ones in the book, which could maybe account for later events, instead looking rather like tadpoles in spasms of agony. Or sperm, whichever of the two floats your boat. They were occultists, not artists, after all (ignoring the fact that sometimes those things do go hand-in-hand).
Ordinarily they were supposed to draw the symbol in the blood of their sacrifice, however Pumpkin (his real name was so stupid no one called him by it, even to tease him with), whose attic they were using, said his mother would go apeshit if she had to try to clean up blood from wooden flooring. Seeing as they couldn't get a good sacrifice to use anyway (a good thing too since some of them had discovered in science lessons that they were actually quite squeamish and couldn't bear to kill or dissect the poor defenceless little animal in front of them, apart from the fact that they didn't have the slightest idea of how to drain blood from a corpse except to cut it and wait until blood trickles out) and Pumpkin's mother was the person who had given him his horrendous real name and was quite scary, they decided it would be better to use water-soluble paint.
Once they had completed their lopsided star and its accompanying menagerie they set up their tallow candles, which they had managed to procure from a greasy little man at an antiques fair for an extortionate price, and prepared themselves and their scripted lines for the ceremony, having around another six hours to do so until midnight.
The ceremony will not be elaborated on, simply because it involved a lot of nonsensical Latin chanting which is not worth the effort of trying to write it down and even less worth the effort of translating it without having an epileptic fit of pique as a result of the appalling grammar and similar words with completely different meanings which gave the entire ceremony a brilliant humorous subtext (i.e. rather than using the name Cornelius they used corneolus which means "rather horny"). It's enough to say the ceremony was completed with enthusiasm, if not gusto and aplomb too, leaving behind a rather expectant silence.
One would expect an otherworldly being to appear in a flash of light, with some ominous music playing in the background and lightning flashing across the sky whilst a slightly delayed big bang signified the arrival of solid matter where there had only been air before.
Seeing as Thundercracker's spark was not feeling very obliging at the moment, mostly because of the pain of being suddenly ripped from one plain of existence to another without a reliable ferry system and the Laws of the Universe rebelling against his abrupt return to material existence (there was a reason people didn't return from the dead after all), he appeared with a subdued fizzle of the kind your toaster might make when it finally breaks down after years of rather mediocre service. His spark was still bright enough to hurt his summoners' eyes (who exactly thought it was a good idea to summon things in dim candlelight when they knew whatever they summoned was going to appear in a flash of blinding light; they could at least wear bloody sunglasses) but any good medic could have told you that that was not a spark that was as bright as it should be.
Despite its non-corporal form it somehow gave off a mixture of several emotions and attitudes, among them alarm, boredom, sulkiness, disdain, angst and wariness (this is also substantially more expressions than his former face was able to convey).
The teenagers hadn't been expecting anything quite like this; a demon to do their bidding perhaps and rain vengeance upon all the puny mortals who had ever harmed them, or one of the primeval beings that existed in elevated states of being (known to them as the Ascendance and as far as the rest of the world was concerned as complete and utter rubbish) if they were really lucky, who would be able to answer all their relevant questions concerning their (teenage) world and other worlds beyond it.
As shock began to wear off, in some of their eyes, insofar as you believe one can see such things in other people's eyes, began to shine the light of greed. They had made a new discovery which could possibly shake the occult world for many years to come, and fame and fortune and Ascendance could very well be upon them (though it would shake the occult world, once they had revealed it either government scientists or the Transformers, one or the other of the factions, would have had it off them quicker than you could say "Spark").
Unfortunately for them, their summon had other ideas once his own shock had worn off. He had realised he was once again alive and in the real world. He also somehow observed, without eyes, the greedy expressions lighting the faces of some of the fleshies looking at him. Thundercracker did not like this at all and more decisively than ever before in his pre-death life he made a decision.
The five summoners were rather alarmed when the glowing orb thingy (they weren't sure what to call it yet) started moving rather close to the barrier. It seemed to come right up close, to test … something, whether it was their nerve or the barrier they didn't know.
The next moment four of them were watching a glowing afterimage in their retinas whilst one of them lay on the floor, unable to scream as the last of her life faded out of her due to the blackened mess the spark had left behind in her chest. The lack of screaming was resolved a moment later as her friends' slowed minds caught up with real-time and began screaming in synch.
The Laws of the Universe now left Thundercracker's disembodied spark alone, they had been given the life required in exchange for his to be revived and balance had been restored to the universe.
Said spark now moved at a speed similar to what he had achieved in former life in his altmode (some structural memories are hard to shake; for human souls this included an embarrassing amount of bodily functions they would really like to forget about), and he flew on a straight trajectory towards the Decepticon base, mutilating anything that got in his way.
His sparklight grew stronger as he flew, as he recalled memories that he'd never really forgotten, just suppressed in order to keep them untainted by the virulent tedium of the Pit. Skywarp, Starscream, the other Decepticons, the War, the Autobots, this no-longer-so-revolting-planet; all of them reeked of interest and interestingness. Best of all was the sky which he could now fly in again, soaring, falling, gliding, lifting, curving, somersaulting; yes, he could do everything he'd missed and more. He zoomed through a thunderstorm, similar to the one that had offlined him, and only felt more powerful than ever with the lightning coursing through his spark.
Absentmindedly he wondered where his body was. It would be nice be able to properly touch and see things again… then again it was probably with the Decepticons whom Thundercracker had no intention of re-joining. He'd had enough of Megatron's stupidity and stubbornness, Starscream's arrogance and Skywarp's stupidity and cruelty, not to mention the faults of the rest of the army.
On the other hand his only other options were to become an Autobot or at least their prisoner, which would not happen in life or in death; or to remain a disembodied spark, damned to wander for all eternity without a body.
For the second time in his existence, Thundercracker's decision was fast to come and easy to make.
To the Decepticons it was.
AN: I seem to have broken my gridlock of being unable to write much more than 1,3 k words for a single chapter without revising it. Then again this is a oneshot.
I hope you enjoyed yourselves, criticism is welcome.
Eli