Bumblebee: A Mech Out Of His Time.
Summary: When Wheeljack's experiments with spacebridging go awry, Sam and Bumblebee, who have come to observe, get caught up in the backlash. When they recover from the aftereffects, they find they seem not only to be out of place, but out of time
Continuity: Movieverse.
Crossover: Transformers/Dinotopia.
Disclaimer: Transformers and all associated characters belong to Dreamworks/Paramount and Hasbro. Dinotopia and all canon characters are the intellectual property of James Gurney. No claims on these are made and no infringement of copyright is intended. However, Fiona Raven and her family are the joint intellectual property of myself and MeowthTwo on this site.
A/N: A bunny from Reflections of Reality that tickled my creative interest. As a fan of the Dinotopia books, I decided to see if I could mix two of my interests.
Bumblebee: A Mech Out Of His Time.
Chapter One: Wheeljack.
"Sam, are you sure you want to see this?" Ratchet asked as the human boy climbed into Bumblebee's hands. "Wheeljack's experiments have a certain reputation for going bang when they are not supposed to. Even the Decepticons scatter if they see him wielding unknown machinery in the field, and yet you want to go and watch?"
"Bumblebee said that as the technology of spacebridging is fairly well known, it should be safer than if he was experimenting with something he wasn't familiar with," Sam said. "Anyway, isn't this his third session, nothing's blown up so far, and Bumblebee says it shouldn't be too unsafe."
"I said it was a good sign," Bumblebee corrected him.
"Well, if it looks like things are getting dangerous or out of control, 'Bee and I'll scarper," Sam said.
"If you get enough warning to," Ratchet said drily, but didn't try to stop them. Bumblebee had been present for some of Wheeljack's experiments, and had seen the effects, so he trusted him to keep Sam out of the way. Turning back to the work on the table in front of him, Ratchet continued looking through the processor clusters of both Megatron and Starscream.
After the big battle in Chicago, the Autobots had quickly claimed the bodies of the dead Decepticons, and corralled up any live ones, as much as to stop the humans getting advanced technology as much as out of respect for the dead. Nobody had been more surprised than Ratchet when both Megatron's and Starscream's Sparks had turned out to be still feebly alight. Ratchet had quickly transferred each Spark into a special unit designed for the purpose of keeping and nurturing Sparks whose bodies could not sustain them, and was working on putting the two Decepticons back together while their Sparks were strengthening in the units they were placed in.
Starscream's face had required extensive rebuilding, Ratchet having to melt down and re-shape much of the original, and he had two new optics for the head, to replace those that had been destroyed. He was now going through the processors and memory chips of Starscream to salvage what he could. Most had been protected by being deep inside Starscream's head, but some parts were damaged. Ratchet was confident that as long as the processors hadn't been scrambled, he could save the Decepticon Seeker with little or no change to his personality.
With Megatron, he had a different problem, for although Optimus had decapitated Megatron fairly cleanly, the Decepticon leader had received substantial damage two years before in Egypt, and some parts were either slagged, corrupted, or missing. No matter what Ratchet did, Megatron would have gaps in his memory. However, during his investigations, Ratchet had found a piece of severely corrupted programming in Megatron's processors, a corruption that had been growing, and destroying Megatron's original programming.
Ratchet did not know exactly when the corruption had occurred, nor what had originally caused it, but he thought it unlikely to have occurred since Megatron's arrival on Earth. This pointed towards possible damage by exposure to weapons fire on Cybertron, or possibly he had encountered something else that had caused the original damage. Ratchet wondered if he had found what had caused Megatron to turn from a benign Lord High Protector and champion of the opressed into a tyrant who seemed to kill for the sake of killing, and wanted to destroy every Autobot and non-Cybertronian, be they mech, femme, or youngling of their kind.
If Ratchet did not remove the corrupted data, and reactivated the mech, it would eventually destroy Megatron's personality and possibly even cause the silver mech to self-immolate, turning his violence and love of destruction on himself. However, in removing the damage, Ratchet might end up changing Megatron's personality. Ratchet sighed, and made his decision. Humans understood cancer of the body, and what Megatron was suffering from could be likened to a cancer of the mind, if left untreated it would eventually destroy him. He would have to deal with it, as carefully as he could, and hope enough of Megatron's original personality remained.
He bent to his work, putting his earlier concerns about Sam and Bumblebee and Wheeljack aside for the time being.
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"Hi," Sam said to Wheeljack, as Bumblebee carried him in. The experimenter-mech, who was bent over an odd-looking contraption he'd set up about one of the space pillars, nodded acknowledgement as he made an adjustment to part of the complicated-looking set-up that dominated the middle of the room. He straightened up and then said "I wonder if you two could help me? I have a small component that I need to install, but my fingers are too large. Could you, Sam, put it in?"
Sam eyed the device warily. "Will it be safe? Ratchet said your experiments have a tendency to go wrong."
"They do not!" the inventor said huffily. "Well, okay, sometimes. Often. But not this time." He pointed to a lever built into the outside of the mechanism. "Until that lever is thrown, nothing will happen."
"Okay," Sam said, listening as Wheeljack told him what connections to make. Once Wheeljack was sure Sam understood, Bumblebee took Sam inside the horseshoe-shaped bank of equipment and lifted Sam up to the small aperture Wheeljack was having problems with, just as the Twins, chuckling and giving each other playful shoves, came in, and Sideswipe said "Okay, what you blowin' up this time, Jack?" Wheeljack moved to intercept them.
"Nothing, with luck," Wheeljack said sourly as Sam finished connecting up the part required and wriggled out into Bumblebee's waiting hands.
"Yeah, right," Sunstreaker said, reaching to give Wheeljack a friendly shove. Seeing it coming, Wheeljack backed off, and lost his balance as his legs stopped short against something – the lever.
As Wheeljack fell back over it, his weight brought it down. "Sam, Bee get out of there, it's not calibrated properly!" he said, fighting to be heard against the rising whine of the device powering up.
"What?" Sam shouted, and in desperation, Wheeljack commed the warning to 'Bee, who scooped up his human charge and started running to get out of the machine's influence. The whine reached its highest pitch at that moment, and then there was a bang, and the room began to fill with foul black acrid smoke as something within the equipment overheated and exploded.
Luckily, the room had in-built fire suppression equipment, and foam spurted out and covered the equipment, stifling the fire before it could take hold, and everyone except Ratchet rushed to help clear up and check everyone was okay.
A quick check quickly established that Wheeljack and the Twins were all unharmed, but a quick search and a scan of all the foam quickly established that Sam and Bumblebee had apparently vanished into thin air.
"They must have been spacebridged somewhere by your device, Wheeljack," Optimus said. "Where have they gone?"
"I hadn't set it, Optimus," Wheeljack said. "I thought that would be safest, I assumed that without setting co-ordinates, nothing would go anywhere until I had, but it seems I was wrong." He looked at Optimus worriedly.
"I have no idea where they've gone."
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"Oof!" Sam said as Bumblebee stumbled and fell. The Autobot held Sam carefully and rolled to absorb impact while keeping hold of Sam so he only got an unpleasant jolt. The Autobot let Sam down to the ground and got up as Sam blinked, his eyes adjusting to the light, which was dimmer than in Wheeljack's lab, but wasn't too dim.
He whistled as he looked around the room, his eyes now adjusted to the light. He could see the cathedral like proportions of where he stood, the towering rock formations that didn't look entirely natural, that seemed to be carved from great stalagmites. Some of these had met the corresponding stalactites on the roof, giving the cave a pillared appearance, others had been carved into towers, one was a pyramid, now to his eyes shaped by human hands. He saw flights of steps, some human proportioned, others seeming to be scaled up, and Sam wondered what might have used them. He got his answers as he saw a large flat area, littered with robots, most quadrupedal, having recognisable shapes, and some were easily as big as 'Bee, but they were immobile, a layer of dust showing that they had not been disturbed in some time.
"Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore." The voice of Dorothy from 'The Wizard of Oz' came from 'Bee's speaker, jolting Sam's attention back to his Autobot friend.
"You said it, buddy," Sam said.
