Standard 'not mine' disclaimer applies here
This story takes place after the fanfic "The Secrets of Sector Seven". The OC humans in the following story were introduced in that story where they were fleshed out and given their backstories. They are briefly reintroduced here. If you don't like OC in your TF fic, then please just stop reading and find something more your liking. There are no OC Transformers, but the entire story is based on a loose conglomeration of the TF multiverse...which include the first movie, GI, hints of Beast Wars, the prequel novel, and the comic book. The story is somewhat Prowl centric, but many will be introduced and some will be killed.
A brief overview: OPs team lands on Earth and the movie events happen. Afterward Jazz's shell is stolen by a human modified by Sector Seven and using the power of the Allspark brings him back to life. They reunite with the others and discover her friends have joined with the Decepticons who are intent of using her to bring back Megatron. During the course of the battle, they discover that Prowl somehow appeared on Earth as well, but was captured by Sector Seven and used as a 'training aid' for their operatives. One team escaped with him and managed to contact Prowls crew, who arrive during the final battle in Houston between the Autobots and the Decepticons. The human who'd found Jazz discovers the Key, and needs to be brought to Cybertron....and that is where this story begins....
The Secrets of Cybertron
Stage I – Journey
"...boring."
The human guests of the starship Orion had tried cards first. Poker in all its various forms, rummy, go fish...all tried. All had failed. Then they'd tried something a bit more intellectual. Chess, Othello, and several types of puzzles ranging from checkers to Mensa difficulty were next to fall. Video games were next. War games, strategy games, action games, fighting games, and even staple RPG games like Final Fantasy, Oblivion and Resistance soon found themselves with every puzzle, every quest solved. It simply wasn't enough.
Next, the group had reprogrammed the bridge computer with a full array of quite colorful and quite human curse words, only to use at the most inappropriate times. Hot Rod, under orders, reprogrammed it quickly, but thanks to Zoe's intimate relationship with the AllSpark, his doing so was neither easy, nor quick.
Later Springer had awoken from a peaceful recharge when he'd rammed his head into the ceiling of his quarters. Startled, he'd realized the artificial gravity was somehow turned off. With the thought that there was some sort of emergency, he contacted Arcee, who was on watch. She denied any sort of malfunction; it was a local problem. Once stated, Springer knew. He made his way into the cargo bay and found the twins, Hot Rod and the kids playing a game of low gravity dodge ball.
The next time trouble arose, the humans were innocent of the crimes and Arcee had been the one to run through the ship alarmed from the shouts. She'd burst into Hot Rods quarters to find him glued to his berth. She suspected the kids initially but both Springer and Prowl had them cornered in an exhaustive session of Cybertronian military strategy, tactics, and battle readiness. They'd assured her that the kids had not left their optics for the past several hours. That left only the true culprits…the Twins, Sunstreaker and Sideswipe.
Their punishment was to clean out the intake vents on the hyperspace hydrogen collectors, which from what Jamie understood tended to become very nasty. Indeed, Sideswipe was left in a sour mood and Sunstreaker was more ass then usual afterwards.
The punishment of the twins didn't stop Hot Rod from trying to get even. After Harley helped him molecularly change the color of fluid in the wash racks to electric pink, it was Springer that turned a dazzling shade of pink instead of the twins, and Harley and Hot Rod got to clean up the mess.
Eventually they'd exhausted their mental stimuli and they'd moved to on to physical training. Unfortunately that turned quickly into horseplay and the ex-agents of Sector Seven found out the hard way that breaking one or two tiny insignificant ionizing replication clusters that just so happened to control the attitude and pitch of a ship traveling through hyperspace caused Prowl to come completely unglued.
Rather than put Prowl's diodes in a bunch, the humans decided on less stressful ways of occupying their time. Hunter suggested they team up and see who could better detail Sunstreaker and Sideswipe. This quickly degenerated into something vaguely sexual that included spark chambers and two very content, very shiny, Lamborghinis.
Prowl hadn't found that amusing either, neither had Arcee, who wound up repairing the twin's frazzled circuits. Springer, however, had found it intriguing although he'd not admit to that aloud. Hot Rod, on the other hand, had asked if he could be next.
To soothe over Prowl, the humans decided to clean the ship, from stem to stern. They'd even waxed the floors, which almost made the commander smile.
Almost.
Now bereft of ideas to occupy their time, the humans lay sprawled out across the cargo bay counting rivets in the ceiling.
All four were once operatives for the now-defunct, now underground, Sector Seven research division of the United States Government. Sector Seven's primary mission had been to reverse engineer the captured Decepticon leader Megatron. In this they were greatly successful. Most of the advantages of the modern age had come from him.
That included the technology to 'build' these particular four humans.
Team three consisted of Hunter and her twin brother Harley, and also Jamie. Each had been genetically grown and gene-spliced to create 'perfect' human specimens. They were hardier, faster, stronger, smarter. Their bodies processed energy at nearly 99% efficiency and they resisted most toxins, viruses, and disease. They were also traitors.
Just like the fourth and final human that now graced the cargo bay floor, Zoe. A member of Team five, Zoe was born human, but somewhere along the way she'd been upgraded with cybernetic systems engineered based upon technology stolen from Megatron. She and her team Alex and Simon had eventually fled the Sectors net along with a billion dollars worth of advanced technology, not the least of which was their own bodies.
The Sector hadn't been very happy about that and pursued the young adults relentlessly. However, both teams, built for conflict, and trained to be black operatives, proved difficult to track and retrieve. Zoe and Team five had eluded contact for nearly a year, but then the Autobots and Decepticons had come to Earth and the secrets within Sector Seven had been revealed, and their exile seemed to be at an end.
But nothing was ever that simple. With the robots came a whole new set of problems. Team three had gone rogue along with the captured NBE-3…Prowl. While the Sector was scrambling to find their rogue operatives, Team five had found the Sectors other 'dirty little secret' which happened to be the Allspark. It had reached out to the three agents and washed its life-giving, cosmic energies over their partially mechanical bodies and turning Zoe into its herald.
It wasn't something she was totally against, even though it significantly complicated her life. The AllSpark had its own…for lack of a better word…music that sang to her constantly. It wasn't distracting, just always…there. But, because of its power, she had meet these mechanical beings that became her new family, her new friends, and for one of them, her lover.
She wasn't against it at all.
The discovery of the AllSpark threw the Earth into a war greater than anything they had ever known, or prepared for. In the late 60s, Sector Seven had been able to build a space ship and launch it secretly. The ship had been lost when it passed into an anomaly. Ghost-1 had been their first attempt at something greater. Humans seemed to small and insignicant when compared against the Cybertronians, against the vastness of space. But, despite it all, a mere human had destroyed the greatest leader of the Decepticon forces, and now…four more humans were on their way, across space, to plant the seeds to rebuild the Cybertronian homeworld.
They were not alone. With them was Springer, the leader of the Impactors. Theirs was a Autobot mercenary squadron built to take on the jobs that the regular special forces couldn't, or wouldn't take. Many called them a suicide squadron, but so far, that moniker was inaccurate.
This was not Springer's ship, nor was this his regular team. When news of Prowl's disappearance circulated around the Autobot ranks, not only had Springer taken it personally, he'd insisted on leading the team to find him.
It wasn't until later they'd learned about Earth, the AllSpark and Sector Seven.
The crew of the Orion scoured the galaxy for both the Allspark and for Prowl for nearly ten thousand years. He was much more than just the second in command for the Autobot forces, he was a friend and leader. He was also known as NBE-3.
Prowl was the second non-biological entity Sector Seven had captured, but the third they come across pre-Mission City. The first being Megatron, the second was Bumblebee when he'd first arrived on Earth in his search for the descendents of Archibald Whitwicky. Prowl had been meant as a test subject, a play toy for the Sectors pet projects.
The Orion had come after their leader and their captain and in doing so, fated four young humans to a few weeks of boredom aboard a ship that flew silently through the void of empty space.
They knew they would use the space bridge technology the Autobots had set up. It would cut their travel time down from centuries to only weeks, but the Autobots were un-aging mechanical constructs. The humans were young, active, easily amused, and easily bored.
One might have thought months, not weeks had passed, by the amount of lethargy present in the cargo bay at this particular moment. Even Arcee had turned a worried optic towards the 'kids' as the robotic crew called the operatives. Unfortunately, 'the kids' usually included Hot Rod, Sunstreaker, and Sideswipe as well.
Arcee leaned against the doorframe watching Jamie take a laser engraver to the smooth metallic floors and carve out intricate geometric shapes. Nearby, Zoe watched as Harley took stacks of isolinear chips and stacked them on their sides in ever expanding, ever multiplying rows. She studied the pattern of stacked chips with a frown. The pattern was intrinsically unsound. Should even one chip fall, in either direction, it would start a chain reaction that would in turn, knock down every other chip in the pattern. There had to be hundreds of chips in the pattern so far, color coded and arranged in various shapes, words, and lines.
Hunter seemed content to sleep and it made Arcee wonder if that much sleep was healthy for a human.
A presence beside her made her turn slightly. Prowl joined her in the doorway and gazed at the humans too. "...are those the chips for the navigational computer?"
Arcee nodded, "And the secondary sensor array, and the tactical computer, and the energon dispensers, and the stasis regulators." She paused a moment in thought. "They didn't touch the weapons systems or the shield generators though."
Prowl frowned. "Well at least we know where their priorities are." His shoulders slumped a bit. "Arcee…when did I inherit all these sparklings?"
She placed a slender hand on his arm soothingly. "Well…Hot Rod is still young, and the twins are….well….they haven't changed. And the humans ARE sparklings." She winked. "Seriously commander, you're just out of practice. In a breem or two you'll feel right back at home in command."
He suppressed a sigh. It was true, despite how he felt he SHOULD feel, the fact remained that he'd been out of sorts for ten thousand years. During that time, his comrades had grown up, moved on, changed, while he remained the same. A part of him wondered how the others would have accepted the humans ten thousand years ago as opposed to how easily they seemed to integrate now.
Had his subordinates simply grew beyond his ability to lead? Had they left him behind? A small part of him wanted to answer yes but a larger part wanted to kick himself. He'd never before had these feelings of self-doubt and they seemed foreign to him now. Could it be his own contact with the humans brought about such a change in his basic programming?
His optics wandered over to Jamie as the human now practiced his Cybertronian glyphs on a touch pad under Sideswipe's tutelage. He owed his spark to Jamie, that part was certain, and to a slightly lesser extent Harley and Hunter. They had risked their freedom and their lives to rescue him and he knew that somehow he'd repay that. Zoe was Jazz's sparkmate, and Jazz was...his friend. But...he just didn't feel like himself. The grumpy, no-nonsense commander who would have wrote a dozen reports by now on the antics of his crew. Today...he just felt tired.
"Will they be like this the entire trip?" He asked finally, a note of defeatism in his vocalizer.
Arcee shrugged. "Who knows. When we picked them up and got shunted to Nebulos, they ran out of things to do there too." She tilted her head in thought. "Lessee...Hunter managed to steal a shuttle and land it on the roof of the Nubulosan governor's house. Oh and Harley reprogrammed the Talosian communication grid computers to edit out everyone's clothing who appeared on the monitors." She chuckled. "Talosians have very strange anatomy."
The Nissan skyline shook his head. "And Springer was ok with all this?"
"Of course not." She laughed. "But he did find it amusing...he just didn't admit it right away." She turned back towards her superior officer. "Listen commander...it's going to take time to –"
"I think I've wasted enough time already don't you?" He said snappishly, though he regretted it instantly at Arcee's startled expression. She snapped her mouth shut and he felt like a heel. "I don't....I mean....I didn't...that came out wrong..."
She waved off any further apology. "Commander," she said gently. "What happened to you? All those vorns, where have you been?"
Springer's voice cut in now, and Prowl turned a bit, not surprised that the commando had been able to approach without notice. "It might make you feel better to talk about it."
"I think he just needs to make a plan like he always does, and then kick some Decepti-tail all the way back to their maker." Hot Rot put in.
It was only now that Prowl realized everyone, even the humans, had stopped to listen in. Springer might be right. Besides, he was curious as well as to what had transpired in the interim as well.
"I'm not much of a story teller." Prowl confessed.
Hunter smiled. "That's ok, commander."She'd never called him commander before and the show of respect did quite a bit to lighten his spirits. "Just tell us like it is and leave the 'pretty' to Sunny."
Sunstreaker immediately plucked her from the ground and kept her in the flat of his hand comfortably. "Don't hate."
"Fine," he conceded. Hopefully this would, not only, keep the hyperactive humans settled for a while, but also would serve a therapeutic device as well. "I can't tell a story as well as Kup, but...it all started about ten thousand of your years ago..."