Update: Fixed some typos. Added chapter name.

Author's Note: Hello, and thank you for reading this pointless text at the top. I am Squirrelznflight, a fan of many things who one days hopes to become a writer. I hope you enjoy the story to come, and I hope it brings back memories of yearning to fight alongside the Transformers despite the limitations of the human body… a constraint that we can overcome only by our greatest strength, the endless horizons of the mind.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Transformers… and yet here I am coming up with plot ideas and themes up the wazoo and staying up until midnight typing out a story from which I will never profit. Why? Because writing rocks. Thanks to the creators of the Transformers for making this possible.

::When a sentence is enclosed by two colons on each end, it's either a commlink message or a computerized alert.::

Only Human

The suit took three years to construct. It was all metal, wires, and a little bit of paint, designed to look like a black knight from the myths, and it stood almost as tall as the Autobots' leader, Optimus Prime. Heavy armor covered its entire boxy frame, especially around the chest, and under that were carefully designed mechanisms to keep the human within safe from impact as she managed the controls and the onboard computer. It had a feed which showed input from the optic sensors on the helm, and a vocalizer. Shoulder-mounted weapons with automatic targeting were the last addition, along with a solar-powered battery that, once fully charged, could keep it running for a month.

No, it was the transforming bit that was the problem. If it weren't for that, the suit would fool even a real Transformer. It still might. It would have to do.

The young engineer who built it climbed within the control center in her suit's chest, and metal plating closed behind her. She strapped herself in and grabbed hold of the controls, a helmet like the larger one of her suit on her head, displaying information and the feed from the suit's optic plates. Sensors caught her voice as she made her robot self walk forward and into the sun.

"I'm not weak," she said quietly, the vocalizer making her words come out deep and loud in a male mech's voice, her first words as a Transformer. She strode forward, the suit's metal footfalls pounding against the earth, and then began to run, faster than she ever could as a human, across the fields beyond her house. "Not weak," she yelled, a smile that no one could see spreading across her face. "Look!"

She took a flying leap then, just because she could, with her new power, and just kept running when she landed. It was incredible. It was exhilarating. It was absolutely heartbreaking, but she pushed that away.

I can fool them into thinking I'm one of them, she thought, so why not fool myself while I'm at it?

And then the power plant came into view.

It was amazing how the explosion from Wheeljack's lab coincided perfectly with the sounding of the alarm.

The lead Autobot engineer had been working on a device which would fire homing lasers ever since coming out of recharge early that morning. Perceptor thought it was a lost cause, but he was helping all the same, mostly just to see if his old friend could pull it off before Ratchet got wind and made him move on to something less volatile, preferably with a chance of explosion at less than eighty percent. Somehow, though, after running the statistics for this particular operation himself, Perceptor was starting to see where the chief medic was coming from, and said so.

"Nonsense!" Wheeljack told him distractedly, not even glancing up from his workbench. "Just think back to the artificially intelligent smoothie maker I built last Tuesday for Carly."

"You're right," conceded Perceptor. "At least that one had the decency to explode in Megatron's face after he stole it thinking it was actually of some use."

Wheeljack, unfortunately, missed the humor, and indeed the entire rebuttal, as he was no longer paying attention to anything but his work. However, he did choose that moment to start talking to himself again. "All right, now I just need to add this bit in and--"

"Wheeljack--"

"—screw a few bolts in here--"

"Wheeljack!"

"—and then take out the insulation on this end--"

"Take out the insulation?! Are you mad? That puts your chance of an explosion at--"

But the Autobots' favorite, most infamous inventor was not listening. "…then just got to heat this bit up so I can…"

Perceptor leapt behind the nearest stack of parts as an open torch sprouted from one of Wheeljack's fingers, getting there just before Wheeljack said, "Uh… oops."

BOOM! The room shook, and a brief wave of heat swept outwards from the workbench. A few pieces of shrapnel clattered across the floor.

Perceptor, still intact, got up to inspect the damage.

As explosions in Wheeljack's lab went, this one wasn't that bad. It had taken out everything right around the workbench, flung tools against the walls, toppled a few shelves, and blew off a plate of armor on Wheeljack's right hand. The inventor himself, knocked flat on his back, was trying to wipe soot from his optics with the one good hand.

"Here," said Perceptor, helping him up. "Let's find that piece of metal again and get you to Ratchet."

BEEEEEP… BEEEEEEP.... BEEEEEEEEP…

"Hey, are my ears ringing," asked Wheeljack, "or is that the alarm?"

"It sounds like the siren we installed for special alerts," said Perceptor as they sprinted for the command center.

"The one for direct attacks on the power plant, you mean," said Wheeljack. He was still clutching his damaged hand and leaving a hideous trail of splattered energon behind them in the corridor from the injury.

"That's right," Perceptor said as they turned another corner, almost skidding into the wall before righting himself. "Ratchet will be at the command center, too, so have him take care of that when we get there."

Wheeljack winced. "Right."

It was a standard Decepticon attack on the power plant. Megatron and his forces were leeching energy from it again and threatening the city in the process, so of course the Autobots showed up to stop them, led by Optimus Prime.

What made it a non-standard attack was the fact that the Decepticons were already fighting when the Autobots arrived. Optimus Prime screeched to a halt and transformed. He took in the scene of 'Cons ducking for cover, shooting at random and then looking to see if they'd hit anything, and generally being completely disorganized and in full panic mode and said, "Autobots, what is going on?!"

Starscream answered that question by stumbling out of the building and yelling, "Stop shooting, you fools! There's only one enemy!" The crowd stopped panicking long enough to listen, so he went on, "Yes, you heard me! You're all in a panic over ONE MECH! He lost me in the storage area, but we can still catch him… Follow me, Decepticons!" He turned and raced back in, followed with some hesitation by his comrades.

"Autobots, move in," said Optimus Prime. "We need to deal with the Decepticons and find out who was attacking them before we arrived."

"Maybe he's another Autobot," suggested Jazz.

"Or maybe he's an unstable renegade," snapped Ironhide, glaring.

"Regardless," said Prowl, "we're wasting time. Jazz, come on. You're with me."

Inside the plant, generators hummed with power. Partially filled energon cubes lay discarded on the floor, barely filled. Whatever happened must have cut the 'Cons off early in the operation. The room was bare of the enemy, so the team just moved past it to the storage facility just off the main plant. There, boxes were stacked to the ceiling, forming a kind of labyrinth, so the Autobots split up to search and set off running towards the nearest explosions and Decepticon shouts.

Sideswipe and Sunstreaker had of course paired up and were trying to zero in on Starscream's voice through the din. The idiot was yelling orders that obviously weren't being followed, but they did show his complete ignorance of the situation.

"What an idiot," Sideswipe commented as he leapt over a large, fallen box.

"What else is new?" snorted Sunstreaker. He made the mistake of squinting for effect and almost barreled into his twin, who had stopped. "Hey, watch it!"

"Hold on, I coulda sworn he was…" Sideswipe's voice trailed off. They were at an intersection, just far enough back to be unable to see anyone who might be lurking around the corner. He realized this just as a blue fist collided with his face. He flew backwards, knocking down Sunstreaker as well.

"Ha! Autobots!" snickered Starscream as he advanced.

Sunstreaker shook his brother and yelled for him to get up, but it was no good. The bot had been knocked into recharge, and he was pinning Sunstreaker down, and the other voices he heard were too far away to help. The warehouse must have been huge; he could barely hear Optimus yelling something heroic at Megatron, or Jazz making an ill-timed joke to Prowl. He might have heard Ironhide grumbling about something, but it was too faint.

Sunstreaker raised his blaster as Starscream charged his Nul-Ray, even though he knew it would probably misfire at this range. He was fully prepared to shoot—and so was Starscream—when something amazing happened. The wall of boxes next to Starscream came crashing down. The Seeker barely had time to glance up in shock at the avalanche before he was buried. Sunstreaker recorded the sight for future enjoyment.

Then Sideswipe stirred. "Uh…huh…?"

"Glad you're up, buddy," said Sunstreaker. "Now could you please get off of me?"

"Don't…don't mind if I do." Sideswipe stood up shakily, allowing Sunstreaker to rise as well. "What was that?"

"Gee, man, I think it was a fist."

"No, not that." Sideswipe pointed at the boxes. "THAT."

"Oh." Sunstreaker shrugged. "I dunno. It just…fell."

"Well, I'm glad to hear gravity saved our butts."

"Ha! Yeah." The yellow twin grinned. "Come on. We'd better move." The two set off down the aisle in search of more 'Cons.

Meanwhile, Wheeljack and Ratchet were charging down another corridor after finishing off Thundercracker. Wheeljack kept glancing at his right hand.

"I knew I shouldn't have let you come," growled Ratchet. "That hand feel all right?"

"Yeah, fine," answered Wheeljack. "It's just a little numb." He stopped. "Hey, Ratchet… wait a second. Are you getting a weird energy reading?"

Ratchet, stopped too, turned to look at him. "Yeah, now that you mention it," he answered, tiling his head to the side. "I just assumed it was the electrical equipment when we walked in, but…"

"No." Wheeljack concentrated. "It feels like something big and moving—because the reading grows and fades—that's cycling a whole lot of energy."

"You think it's a droid, like on Cybertron?"

"No… different. More primitive. Can you feel a Spark in its field?"

"Hold on." Ratchet focused on his specialized Medic-bot sensors. "No, I don't think so. I'd have to get close to be sure, though."

"You think Megatron could be staging this?"

"I think we'd better find Optimus." Ratchet heaved a sigh as they turned to keep moving through the maze of boxes. "I don't like this."

"Tell me, Megatron!" boomed Optimus. "Who, or what, attacked you?"

The Autobot leader had Megatron at gunpoint, trapped against a metal wall at the far end of the warehouse. The 'Con leader's Fusion Cannon had been damaged when Optimus got hold of it earlier in the fight, so there was no way he could fight back with any hope of success.

Megatron snarled and looked around for an escape route or a weapon. Finding none, he turned his eyes back to Optimus. "There was just one," he began slowly, his voice grating like it always did, like every word was forcibly dragged from his vocalizer. "Just one mech, about your size, Optimus, but black. He had quick-firing weapons on his shoulders that… seemed to hit us all at once. Only Starscream and I saw him before he disappeared and ran for the warehouse." Megatron coughed suddenly, and Optimus saw that there was a wound in his chest. It was narrow and clean as from a precision weapon.

"Had you seen him before, Megatron?"

"No."

"Why did he attack you, then?"

"What, isn't he one of your accursed Autobots?" Megatron jibed, then coughed again. He leaned back against the wall, clearly weakened.

"That's something I'd like to know myself," replied Optimus, to which Megatron replied with a slow shake of the head.

"You'd better hope so, Optimus. You'd better hope---" Megatron coughed. "…you'd better hope he's on your side." The villain laughed quietly as he slid down the wall to the floor and fell unconscious as another explosion rocked the building.

Well, there it is—the first chapter. I don't know when my next update will be, but thank you for reading up to here. Stay creative everybody!