My Big Sister the Spider

An AU-TF:A Fic, starring Sari, BlackArachnia and the Decepticons

Summery: Sari's life is not what it could have been. Her father has died and his company has collapsed due to bad management, leaving Sari with nothing but a life on the streets where she has grown in unexpected ways, in order to survive. Can anything save Sari from a cold lonely death on the streets, and help her discover what she really is?

A/N: Welcome to Chapter One Remix. This is just me and My beta fixing up past Mistakes, and making it a all around more enjoyable read for you, the readers. Also, give a hand of thanks to my new beta who has been a great help so far, Zim'sMostLoyalServant! Now then, on with the fic and leave lots of reviews!

Chapter One: I can't cry anymore

Abandoned Factory – Night Time

She huddled closer to the flame, a small figure wrapped in discarded clothing and sheltered in the abandoned factory on the far side of town, surrounded by dusty relics of her past life. Various machines and mechanisms crowded the room, adding an atmosphere tinged with the sense of loneliness.

To one side was the remains of her once hated tutor-bot, built by her father who for some reason did not think to just send her to some public or even a private school. Then there was the robotic pet she had owned; laying on a set of improvised shelves lifelessly, its battery having died a long time ago. She doubted it would even work if it did have a new battery, the metal and plastic that made up the pet having been all but stripped away and lost. She slowly stood up, trying to ignore the pain, both from her body and her stomach and walked over to these two fragments of her past, and remembered the days when they were hated and annoying but still functional. She started to cry as the memories came back, but all that came were dry eyes and choking sobs. No matter how much she wanted to, she could not cry anymore, no tears came and there was no release that normally came with tears.

Standing up again she wobbled her way back to her makeshift fire, and curled up on the floor, trying to get some sleep while she could. She needed to be up earlier tomorrow to try and steal some more food, before she starved. But she could not; as hard as she tried to sleep she stayed wide-awake and alert, and nothing she did was changing that. Getting back up, she made her way into the deeper parts of the abandoned factory, to her special place where she could find a hint of comfort and solace. Coming to the large cast iron door of her special place, she pulled as hard as she could, her eight-year old frame straining to try and move the large metal door; and with a horrible shriek from rusty metal the door gave, slamming open suddenly and knocking her to the cold cement floor.

Getting back up and dusting herself off, she walked in, to the room that held the stored contents of her father's lab. She sat in the over sized chair, where her father used to sit while he worked, and tried to remember the good times with him, before this had happened. But there were so few, so little memories of the good times with her father that she broke down again into a fit of dry sobs in her seat. The sobbing soon changed however, into an angry shouting.

"Why? Why did this have to happen! Why did he... why did he have to die?! Its not fair!"

She picked up the keyboard and threw it across the room, where it collided with the only person that would listen to her. After calming down, she turned around and retrieved the keyboard, and looked up at what some would pitifully call her friend. Staring back down at her was a fearsome visage of metal and crystal red optics, one of the many remains of her fathers work. Or at least that was what most thought. With the keyboard in hand like a precious treasure she sat at the base of the disembodied robot's head in silence, for no other reason then to find some peace under the watchful eye of her guardian. After a moment she quietly stood back up and placed the keyboard back in its niche on her father's desk and left, to once again try and sleep.

A few hours of restless sleep later, and she was ready to leave on her hunt for some food for the day. She had learned early on that she could not store food for a long time in the factory, and with nothing else to do she had taken to stealing it on an almost daily basis. Cramming the hacking kit and her stun gun into her tattered pockets, she took off from the factory in a run, the rising sun in the distance, and headed for a small, automated grocery store not far from her home.

She knew it was better to try and break in right before the robotic stores opened; during the night, the computers that ran them diverted processing power from the security systems to the systems needed to get the store running each day, and that left them vulnerable to her. She had learned to hack into the stores out of necessity, the need for food and the lack of money driving her to learn how to use the tools from her father's lab to break in.

She came to the store, going around the back where she could hear the machines as they started up for the day, and approached the back door. Bringing out her hacking kit she tapped into the stores programming, and soon enough had tricked it into opening the back door and disabling the remaining security systems.

Running inside, she grabbed a few of the recycled plastic bags kept in stock and started grabbing what she could from the storage units, cramming everything she could into the bags to last her the next day or two. She quietly talked to herself from behind her muffler, urging herself to move faster before she was noticed.

"Come on, faster, faster! Gotta get done, gotta get going!"

Finishing up and now with a full set of bags in each hand, she looked around to make sure there was nothing left that she wanted to grab, or that there was anything left to tell the disconcerting eye that she had been here. Turning around to the doorway, she was shocked however, to come face to face with the angry face and voice of a man dressed in a delivery outfit, obviously here to restock the store.

"What do you thing you're doing here?! Come here you brat!"

The man lunged at her, and she barely dodged to the side of the room. Taking out her stun gun on instinct and dropping the bags she shot the man in the back with a bolt of concentrated non-lethal energy and watched him drop to the floor like a spastic puppet without strings, as the man jerked and twisted as the blast played havoc with his nervous system. Panicking, Sari grabbed the dropped bags and ran out into the city and past the truck that the man had most likely come in. She ran without paying attention to where she was going, just wanting to get out of the area as the realization that she had attacked and hurt a man sunk in. Ever since her father had died she had lived on the streets, stealing and working to stay alive, as a person that did not exist as she had been told… but never doing something like this.

Before long her scared legs had carried her far from her home, and to a beach by the lake where she took a moment, and calmed herself. She sat down on an oddly shaped dune in the middle of the beach and started to think about what she would do now, if that man took the time to report her theft and attack on his person. While she sat she felt the dune beneath her shift, and before she knew it she had been thrown from the small sandy bump as the sand slid off of it and - to her surprise again - revealed a large marked box. Carefully setting the bags down she started to examine the box, her eight-year old mind getting the better of her and making her forget the lessons about the snoopy cat and how it had ended. The box was strangely cube-like while not being cube-like, and Sari cursed not having paid attention to geometry class for once so she would know what to call it. The box was lightly colored, a light tan in appearance almost with deeper colored lines running across the surface.

On each side there was a handle, and in the middle there appeared to be some sort of latch or some other such thing. Wondering what was inside she tried to open it, only to fail monumentally and end up with sore fingers. Sari decided to try and take it back with her, but wondered how she was ever going to get it back to the factory. The box was bigger then she was, and looked heavy enough to crush her if she tried to lift it by herself. Looking around she found she was in luck, for there was an old flat bed trolley nearby.

After a time wrestling with the trolley and some scavenged rope from the docks nearby, she had managed to get the box on the trolley and ready to move. She spent the next span of time moving through the city, avoiding people and bots, not wanting to gather attention towards her or her cargo lest someone try to take it away, and by the time she had gotten back to the factory it was dark. She left the bags of food and the cube outside, and carefully looked around the factory, not wanting to be caught unaware by someone. After she was satisfied that there was no one but her and the robots, she dragged everything inside and to the room with her father's equipment.

She set the food by the fireplace on her way by, and continued onwards to the lab room. Once again she struggled with the door, and after getting it open again she dragged the cube and trolley inside. Leaving it in the middle of the room, Sari started searching for something she could use to open the cube in one of the many crates that littered the room, and inadvertently came across her old key card. She was about to throw it away, when she looked at the card and then the cube. The card's job was to open stuff right? Then maybe it would open up the cube. Holding the card in hand she reached out towards the box…

A/N2: And there's the end of Chapter 1, and I hope you enjoyed it. Plz R&R!