Hello Sportsfans!

The idea for this story actually came to me when I bought my new Ironhide action figure a few days ago. I love the old guy who oddly enough reminds me of my father. Cannons and all. I really hope you enjoy the story because I'll be writing it as it actually happens. After all, this is a true story...sort of.

Happy Reading

This is a true story.

No honestly, it is. I swear to you that everything that I'm typing actually did happen.

Okay yeah I know it's gonna sound a little hard to believe but I wouldn't be writing this if it didn't happen. So before you turn off your computer or commit me to the funny farm or run away screaming, just keep your mind open and remember that you are not listening to a crazy person. Hey you never know, maybe this same thing happened to you. Or maybe someone else you know. I'm sure that I'm not the only one on this planet to have been held at gunpoint by a seriously confused Autobot that also happens to be a Hasbro collectable.

That's right. You read that correctly. I said Hasbro. You know, that toy company that's been manufacturing Transformer toys for over twenty years? Yeah that one.

Hey….where are you going? I told you to keep an open mind! Will you just sit and listen to me for a few more minutes. Please? It's not going to kill you or anything. I'm the one that has to deal with an overly temperamental weapons specialist and a kamikaze plastic jetfighter that is hell-bent on destroying "human scum." You know if he wasn't a foot tall I would have shipped myself off into the witness protection program and would be living in Alaska right now but I'm getting away ahead of myself.

Okay, so let me start from the beginning cause yeah, you know the beginning is always the best place to start.

Right, so here goes nothing. And remember….THIS DID HAPPEN!

And here we go.

It all started on the night when I was supposed to be writing my second massive term paper. For the past week I had been procrastinating my little heart out, doing absolutely nothing and enjoying every minute of it. But I'm not in the fourth year of my undergraduate degree for nothing and sooner or later I had to get started on the monsters that are term papers. Remember kids, procrastinating will not get your essays done. Only you can get essays done and no matter how hard you wish, pray and dream that magically your assignments will become asexual and do themselves, it ain't ever gonna happen.

So, I was sitting there at my computer, chewing on the tip of my tongue and wondering how the hell I was going to start that 10 page research monstrosity. It could have been worse you know. It could have been 20 pages. I had one of those mothers last semester and I ended up living in my own filth for a week as I tried to write that thing. It wasn't pretty.

Anyways, I was sitting there doing dick all while time kept running out on me like a bad case of tropical diarrhea. I had two days in which to complete this essay because since I left it to the last minute, I not only had this one to do, but also another ten pager due a day after the first one was due. University sucks major donkey balls but that's nothing new. While I was debating whether or not to touch my keyboard I had my new Transformers score playing on my stereo. God that music is great. Listening to it gave me this great idea that I could use to waste even more time and it was so good that I couldn't help but follow through with it. I grabbed the keys to my mother's monster SUV that I have happily dubbed the Vininator because it's built and actually kind of looks like Vin Diesel, and ran out of the house before my mother could ask me where I was going.

I was going to go for a drive. Just around a few blocks so that I could clear my head while listening to some music as loud as I wanted without having my mother's shrieking voice telling me off for playing it so loud. I figured why the hell not? I was in no mood to start writing so an extra half an hour of slacking wasn't going to hurt. So off I go, peeling out of my driveway like Han Solo going to light speed, and luckily I remembered to bring my Transformers soundtrack along because the sound system in the Vin is simply out of this world. So I pop in the cd, fiddle with the bass until car is vibrating with the cellos and off I go, driving along on my merry way without a clue as to where I was going. I was driving for the hell of it and it felt good.

Now this is when things started to go a little weird. I didn't have a preset destination in mind but ten minutes later I found myself sitting in the parking lot of my local Toys R Us. How weird is that? I had no intention of going to a toy store. I'm a 22 year old stressed out University student not some 6 year old spawn of Satan so why the hell was I sitting in that damn parking lot? I don't know! I honestly don't have a clue as to what I was doing there. But it gets even weirder. Oh yeah.

I got out of the car.

I dunno why I did but it was like there was some strange invisible tractor beam that was pulling me into the store and the next thing I know I was standing awe-struck in front of the massive, and I mean massive, Transformers display. It was huge! I've never seen so many Hasbro toys in one place before. They even had a television that was playing the Transformers movie.

"Whoa." I remember saying that because I sounded like Neo for a moment.

I gave the entire display a critical once over to see if there was anything interesting on sale. The thing was, besides the tiny Bumblebee collectables you could get for an insane amount of money, all of the toys there were all Decepticons or a few Autobots that never made it into the film.

Now if they had the Optimus Prime transformer then I would have bought that sucker faster than you can say "Holy Crap Batman" but just my luck they were sold out. But it wasn't just him. Oh no. There were out of Bumblebee, Jazz, Ratchet and Ironhide. Typical huh? All of the cool guys are already taken and you're left with the scraps.

"Excuse me, do you have any of the Autobot transformer toys in the back?" I asked a passing sales person before he could bolt. The store was dead but still no one wanted to help me. Gotta love retail.

"Huh…I dunno." He had this glazed look to his face as if the hamster in his head had died and the wheel was turning on its own.

"Ummm, would it be possible if you could go check for me? Please?" I had my best pity look on but he still remained phased.

"Huh….sure." He turned around and trudged off as if I had sent him to face his death in front of a firing squad or something. But at least he had gone to check. Or at least I think he did because I never saw him again. Maybe he got lost in the back room and couldn't find his way out. Or maybe a huge stack of boxes collapsed on top of his head and to this day he is still trying to dig himself free. I don't know. What I do know is that I waited for a good ten minutes and when he hadn't come back I decided to leave. I still had a paper to write.

"You feelin' lucky, punk?"

"Excuse me?" I was ready to backhand however it was that was growling in my ear but when I turned around there was no one behind me. The entire aisle was empty with the exception of myself and the Transformers display. Great, now I was hearing voices.

"H'oooookay." I just rolled my eyes and looked down to see that my shoe was untied. Putting safety first I bent over and retied the laces.

"Just kidding. I just wanted to show you my cannons."

There was that damn voice again!

"What?" I half-spun on my knees and brought my arms up to do some weird kung-fu karate chop to the guy's knees but instead of seeing those said knees I was face to face with a bunch of Decepticon toys that were sitting idly on the shelf.

"Um hello?" I looked high and low, up and down the aisle but once again I just ended proving to myself that the place was deserted. The girl up at the cash gave me this weird look before she went back to filing her nails and that was about it for human contact. I went back to the Transformers wall and looked at it carefully. And then it hit me. The movie was playing! NARF!

"Smart one Sarah." Here I was thinking that I was about to get butt raped by some big Texan in the middle of a toy store when the voice had been coming from the television the entire time. On the small screen Optimus was beating the proverbial whatnot out of Bonecrusher and all I could do was call myself a mental retard.

And then something landed on me.

When the box fell on my feet I'm not going to lie, I screamed. Just a little scream. Not one of those earsplitting glass shattering shrieks of terror that I can let rip on occasion. It was just a little yeep! The ones you make when you're startled by something but are lucky enough to keep your mouth shut so that no one else will hear you.

It took me about half a second to realize that it had fallen off the top shelf, which was so high that I couldn't even reach it on tip-toe. It was a Transformers box, one of those bigger ones that housed one of the collectable toys that everyone was always after. I figured that it would have been rude of me to just walk away so I picked up the box and tried to find an empty spot to put the toy with the rest of his Decepticon buddies but all of the shelves were packed and the one that the box had fallen from was too high for me to reach.

"Now where do you belong?" I looked down at the box, figuring that it was another Barricade but instead of seeing the black and white cop car all I saw was one big black truck.

It was Ironhide!

"No way." I couldn't believe it. Okay this wasn't the discovery of a lifetime here but what were the chances that the last Ironhide toy was going to fall right on top of me from a mountain of toys? Well he was no Optimus but he was still an Autobot and after now spending a good twenty minutes in the store I wasn't about to leave empty handed. I had the last Ironhide in my hands and he was coming home with me.

I noticed that the box looked like it had gone through a war. It was held shut with a ton of clear tape and the clear plastic front was all scratched and dented. I guess there had been a bunch of kids who fought over the toy and ruined the packaging. Kids always do stupid stuff like that. I worried that the truck inside would have been damaged but after looking it over from every angle I saw that it was untouched. The plastic wires were still wrapped around the hood and cab of the plastic Topkick and held it in place. Looks like the kids never got a chance to utterly destroy the toy so in the spirit of charity I decided that I would cough up thirty dollars and bring this old soldier home. If I didn't buy him then who would? Especially when it was housed in such a battered box.

I kept saying that to myself in order to justify spending money I barely had on a kid's toy as I brought the Ironhide toy up to the open cash register and plunked it down in front of the cashier.

She gave me an uncertain look as she eyed the toy and then me but I just gave her a sheepish smile and shrugged.

"It's for my little brother. I promised I'd get him one." That seemed to be good enough for her as she went about scanning the barcode into her till. She didn't have to know that I didn't have a little brother.

I handed her my debit card and she rang me up. It honestly hurt to punch in my PIN number because I knew that once I got that month's bank statement I was going to cry. I had just spent over three hundred big ones on an Ibanez guitar and now I was paying for a useless child's toy when I should have been saving my hard earned cash. Ironhide wasn't even my favorite Autobot. That title was reserved for Rattrap and Prime. Hey I'm more of a Beast Wars girl so get over it.

And so with that the cashier handed me my receipt and the plastic bag with the toy in it. I didn't even look at her as I booted it out of that store, keeping my head low so that no one in the parking lot would get a clear look at my face. It honestly felt like I had walked into an Adult Film store and bought myself porn or something. An adult like myself buying toys? Nerdy boy toys? God, how low could I go?

Not low enough as it now seems.

I hurried to the Vin and tossed the toy onto the passenger seat and quickly buckled in and sped off towards home while the Arrival of the Autobots song played on the stereo. I never get tired of listening to that song. With the deep chords from the bass and the singing of cellos, it's as moving and inspirational as Beethoven's 5th.

I was actually ahhhing along with the vocals as I pulled up into my driveway and when I put the Vin in park I had a serious brain wave. I still can't believe that it didn't hit me before hand. I mean, all the signs were there, why didn't I realized what I was getting into before I went ahead and bought that damn toy.

You see the thing that struck me as really odd was that the voice. The one I had heard was a Texan's voice. Okay nothing big and scary right? We all know that the original Ironhide was voiced by Peter Cullen and he gave the character a distinctive western drawl. Yet in the film Ironhide comes off as sounding like a big brassy Brit instead of a bow-legged cowboy.

But that wasn't the half of it. I had seen the Transformers movie enough times to recite the lines in my sleep and sure the lines that I had heard were Ironhide's. Who else would go on about his cannons? But those lines were spoken near the middle of the film in that classic scene when all the Autobots show up and transform for the first time and look like God's gift to automotive kind.

Yet I had watched Optimus beat the energonic snot out of a Decepticon. That happened at the end of the movie.

So if the film wasn't what had said those words…then who did?