Dark Designs
It had been eons since she had been fully awake like this. Not since the time of the war against the Alliance, thirty million cycles ago had she been conscious. And not since it was her own flesh and blood, her niece of all people who had turned out to be the chosen one that would be her downfall, and the one to seal her within this infernal prison.
She got herself up from the rocky outcrop that was her tomb in this place of limbo, and stretched out her powers as far as she could reach. The darkness had gone, all but eliminated, but for one little spark she could still feel 'outside'. She could no longer feel the close presence of her beloved Deukalion, but she did feel the close presence of somebody else, a somebody who was not afraid, who delved into the dark reaches of his own mind and took what he wanted for his own.
This made her smile; another kindred spirit, just as strong, powerful and ambitious as her own. And best of all, he had within him the dark spark, part of the essence belonging to her beloved Deukalion. She wondered how he came across it, and then realized her beloved may have chosen a new herald at some stage while she had been gone. She smiled; this one was still naïve and unknown to his true potential.
'I will remedy that soon enough.' she thought. And she knew she would be the one to bring it out, but she needed time to bind him to her will, if that was at all possible; this one would be difficult, very difficult to tame. She could sense his mind, the mere presence of it made her feel slightly excited, wanting to embrace it and tame this dark power within him. But most important of all, he could provide her with an anchor to the outside world so that she could work her power and forge her way out of this prison.
She looked around her prison and at the confines of her state of limbo. She also looked at herself. Once again she was without a body but still managed to retain a form, a semblance of a humanoid image of living dark energy. She knew that once again she must find a way out of her prison and find her ever loyal mechanoid Deathstrike, wondering where it would be right now. She pressed the power of her mind hard against the weakest point she could finding this prison, with all the strength she could muster. Time had made this prison's walls weaker. 'There,' she thought to herself, 'Now that's the first step over and done with. Now to go and find my precious darklings.'
This time around she had not been imprisoned again with her precious brood that were known to her and most of her old enemies as the Necromancers. A vicious bunch of alien metamorphic techno-organic creatures; the representation of the very worst the Cybredian species could be, made with genetic engineering. This time her darklings were incarcerated in suspended animation somewhere within the confines of the Alliance military. But she would be with them again.
She had taken a few, way back when in her time, of the best Cybredian specimens she could find and she imbued them all with her dark power, maxing out their physical structures beyond what their species could handle and turning them into something different and using all the science of genetic engineering she had at her disposal to fix them that way. They were all male and in the times of loneliness she quite often used them for her own brood, bedding them as she saw fit. Nowadays she had been without a body for a long time and could not enjoy the pleasures of the physical life she once had. And so she set out to find herself a willing host, or perhaps if she was lucky, her old host, as it may still yet live in the form of Deathstrike.
At one stage she had managed to project her mind outside this prison in order to try and obtain certain secrets from a Bioroid base on Earth, but that had been a drastic failure, and her precious Deathstrike had been locked away.
Once again outside in the real world after she had forced her power levels down to zero, she turned to look at what had been her prison, a black hole. 'How inventive,' she thought, 'but there is no one who can make a prison strong enough to hold a will the likes that I have. No one, not even you Ellane Duragano, if indeed you are still operating. Once I find you I will exact my revenge on you and be done with you permanently.' She laughed amusingly. Then she sped her immortal spirit towards her new destination.
First she would visit someone else before she freed her Necromancers or obtain Deathstrike and gain a valuable ally. Or at least someone who was only valuable to her till he lived out his usefulness.
Back on Earth, Ella Drake was resting offline in her personal quarters at the Dragon Mountain Military Base, deep below the surface, where she and the other Transformers from the Delta system were currently abiding secretly away from the humans and Cybertronians on Earth.
She came online with a start. Thinking for just a nanosecond that she had felt something; just a little something, she had not felt in a very long time.
She thought she had heard someone call her old name; a name that had hardly been used in almost 30 millions years. Only those who knew her true identity ever called her that and not very many knew she even existed at all, regarding her existence as a mere myth. No one in the Alliance of planets had ever believed anyone could live for more than a few thousand years unless you were fully mechanoid, but even then they didn't live forever either.
She was older than 30 million years now, way older and every thousand years she reformatted her system to adapt to everything she had learnt anew up till that point. She wasn't a full machine, but rather a highly advanced biomechanical techno-organic stand alone system. All she knew was that she was an individual with a purpose; a purpose that quite often led to her sacrificing herself and a few individuals around her just to save the many and keep certain things going around her.
She had great power and it was often the responsibility and the lack of freedom that went along with that power that sometimes annoyed her, took away her right to have a normal life. Most of the time she felt more like a tool than a free thinking individual.
When the impression had passed, when she thought she had only imagined her name being called, she went back to her rest cycle, and let her mind drift off to long ago during the war, and also to thoughts of her beloved husband Rodine.
Two female Transformers on the base beneath Ella Drake's home had been going over some data entries and also conversing about their return from the Delta system.
They had been on a mission for Ella once again and had to retrieve a precious cargo that Ella had been given charge of, despite it not being her choice.
It happened to be a prisoner that had been causing some trouble amongst the residents of a Transformers settlement within the Delta system, on Delta Nine to be exact, an area that was often frequented by Decepticons and other mechanoids of the criminal persuasion.
The individual had been trying to lead an uprising to take over the present establishment on one of the outlying planets. He had succeeded to a part but had gotten himself captured and then put on trial. None of the Delta Nine residents really cared that he was gone; they just went back to their normal business, as usual, and forgot about the ambitious and pretentious upstart.
At the trial, which these two Earth side Transformers had attended, and after some negotiations, Ella had to take him into her care as he had invoked an age old honour she could not refuse. She really didn't have a choice, someone had told the prisoner to mention her name in a special circumstance to get him out of going to jail. She had had to go along with it ruefully, till she found out who the individual was. Now that she once again had this individual in her possession, she'd be unlikely to ever let him out of her site again, as he possessed the same soul mind as one of her long deceased sons.
The two individuals, Freefall and Sound Track had put their unconscious prisoner in stasis repair. Ella had requested that he immediately be upgraded from his old Cybertronian form with its F111 Eagle alternate mode to what they commonly used the technology that the Bioroids were accustomed to. Ella needed him for what was to come.
Once they had finished with the prisoner, they returned to their ship to start unpacking their supplies. That was when they noticed the return of their comrades from their day out on the town.
Sound Track had to contend with her younger sister Joyride giving her a blow by blow chat about the entire day, as she usually did. She was tired and wanted to sit back and relax, but she just let her sister rave on.
Freefall on the other hand just snickered in her mind at Sound Track's predicament and returned to the medical bay area to oversee the transformation of the prisoner.
Once Freefall had left Sound Track conversed with her sister for a bit. "Ok, ya'll can tell me whaht happened later Casey, ah'm just tired and not in tha mood ta listen alrahght. Ah'm goin' down to tha rec room if any o' ya'll 're wantin' me ok."
She leaves the shuttle bay and her sister behind and heads for some relaxation elsewhere on the base. Casey follows quickly behind, not wanting to be forgotten and left out.
Downstairs, elsewhere on the base, and earlier in the day, a young individual was in the medical bay getting an overhaul. She was in for her monthly upgrades and being attended to by her Aunt Gail.
Her own mother had been a brilliant scientist and her father a military soldier. Her mother had been the one to engineer a program from borrowed alien technology, namely Bioroid technology that the US government had gotten hold of.
Her daughter Laura had been sick from cancer from when she was very young, and the US government military had wanted Dr Rayleigh Banks to make it into a cybernetic super serum that once injected into the human body would make the super soldiers that they could use in the military. She had objected to this and instead, using her brilliant intelligence to change the nanyte technology to target and utilize cancer cells within an individual for that purpose.
The process had been incomplete however, as years ago in a fight between Autobots and Decepticons, Laura's mother had been killed and the information wiped from her hard drives in the event of her death. This was much to the chagrin of her father who wanted the technology his wife was working on for the military to help fight the Decepticons. Laura had been receiving the prototype treatments. It had saved her life from ever dying of cancer, but it had also turned her completely into a synthetic machine, a complete human Cyborg. It was her family secret; her father knew but even he wouldn't let the military use his daughter as a soldier.
The other problem was, that Ella had helped Dr. Banks with the experiment under secrecy and loaned her some cybernetic DNA from an actual Autobot to allow Laura to survive the conversion process completely.
Even though a teenager in high school now, Laura's Cybernetic systems had begun to change and evolve as she came of age and needed to be watched more than ever, and get upgrades on a more regular basis.
The upgrades did not take very long, and being that it was a Sunday afternoon before school went back for the week; Laura went and joined her friends at the local mall to hang out for the afternoon. As far as anyone even knew she was receiving treatments for her old cancerous condition from years ago.
Elsewhere in town, outside a local shopping centre, a young woman named Laura was having a late afternoon lunch with her friends, while watching the New York news report from the TV sets of a local store.
"Wow, did you see those luscious femmes the Autobots have on their team?" Ryan commented excitedly.
"No we didn't, Ry," replied Christine, in a dry tone. "We womenfolk have better things to do than drool over femmes like you do!" Christine had not looked at the screen at all. Ryan had only caught a small glimpse of them, but it hadn't taken Laura long to recognise the femmes at all. They were her friends, ones she had often seen in and around the interior of the hidden underground Dragon Mountain Base where she often got her treatments.
Laura smiled at this comment before taking a sip of her coffee. She had seen the earlier news break when the first helicopter left the scene, but had only just caught the action of the battle from another news network.
She had seen some other friends in this battle too. Burnout, Sunstar, Vanguard, and some of Flashdance's animecha. She knew who they were, but Ryan and Christine did not. Her friends just thought they were new Autobot recruits, and she was glad no one had captured them in their biomodes, to recognize them in their human forms and faces.
All they knew about her family was that her aunt and uncle worked on the local Dragon Valley Military Base, and that they weren't allowed in. Her aunt and Uncle worked at the base to keep Ella and the others apprised of what the Earth Military was up to.
They also didn't know that Laura had been in another base, an underground one, but was sworn to secrecy. She felt guilty that she had to hide the Deltronians from her friends, especially since they were big fans of the Autobots, and what they were doing to protect the planet. She knew that Ryan and Christine had become tech students at high school to join the EDC, so they'd have the chance to work with the Autobots one day. But that day may come sooner than Laura thought.
She, however, had just gotten another of her usual headaches even though she had just had an upgrade that morning. 'It's all part of being an imperfect human.' she thought, 'but then again, I stopped being human ages ago.' Her friends didn't know this about her either. They didn't know that their best friend was in fact a machine. She had to inject herself with certain chemicals at some times, and her friends just thought she was diabetic, or that she was till suffering from the same sickness in her youth; they never suspected, and she never told them if they didn't ask. And they never did.
There exists a secret underground base in Dragon Valley Mountain. In it lives a variety of mechanoid, cybernetic, alien and human life forms. This place is situated in the vicinity of Olympus National Park in Washington State, north western USA.
Some individuals were now relaxing in the rec room. A smaller group of mechanoids had taken to one corner of the area and were busily chatting with each other. While there were many others here in the various parts of the room, they were in their own group.
"It's nae like I've tried it b'fore lass, 'tis just nae my thing." says Rusty. She had finished her oil bath and reverted to her human biomode and joined the others here.
These biomodes were a more highly advanced version of the present Pretender shells the Cybertronians currently used.
"This coming from someone whose fan belt is even more pockmarked than a randy human male!" exclaims Vanguard, who as Vanessa had also reverted to her biomode after cleaning herself up.
"Over amorous as I may be lass, least I didnae go s'far as te have childr'n as a human, like ye did." Retorts Rusty.
"And it's the best thing I ever did!" laughs Vanessa. Rusty murmurs and scoffs at her team mates comment. "Not that you'd ever want to be responsible for anyone but yourself, lil' Miss Hussy!"
Sound Track was nearby strumming away on her guitar, also in her biomode. She had noticed that her team had become slightly inebriated. It was usually Rusty and Casey who argued the most as they were the best of friends, but Casey had instead gone upstairs to do some computer work Ella had asked her to finish off. Instead Rusty had gotten drunk along with Vanessa and they had started arguing about biological urges and processes.
Mirage had declined Felicia's offer to join them in the rec room, and instead wandered around seeing everything he could, so he could report back to Jazz at Autobot base, as he had been allowed to by the femmes. After talking to Ella they had been allowed to let him wander freely as she saw no harm in the Autobots knowing about them now.
Sound Track had spied him wandering around with his cloak on. She knew who he was. Even though she was fully blind, she could see through cloaking shields like her twin sister Felicia could, where Flick saw with light, she saw with sounds. She thought nothing of his wanderings, as he was a known Autobot and no immediate threat to them as far as she knew, so she let him go.
But now he was here in the rec room looking around, still with his cloak on. And after touring what he could in the base, he ended up joining them. He was currently not enjoying the topic of conversation, and was glad he'd missed the most of it much to his chagrin.
On Charr, Galvatron was pondering his soldiers' success on Earth. Doubtful though he was of their success, he was desperately in need of an energy source for energon for his plans of universal domination and of course for the survival of his Decepticons. As he sat back on the throne in his throne room, he noticed Cyclonus and Scourge coming in quietly.
He chose to ignore them, and thought back to the days before the beginning of the war when he was just a mining mech on the mining outpost C-12, to when he was still Megatron. He remembered how it all went from bad to worse when he had let out his dark side. That simple beginning was what had started it all. The Senate trying to control and subdue information, and all the secrets that they had kept at the time; it had led him to actions that had created the Decepticons as a result. In his opinion, it was their right to freedom and power, what they deserved to have. Then it had somehow changed along the way, and the Autobots had taken the stand against him, the weak willed pawns of the Senate, as he thought of them. But he knew they had become something else, these warriors of Primus.
'Sentinel Prime was so easy to deal with.' he thought to himself, 'all his prattling on about Primus only knew what.' He sighed. Not even Optimus Prime was a challenge to him anymore. As Galvatron, he was by far the strongest, but he missed all of those epic battles that he had fought against Prime in the past. He hated what Prime represented, but at the same time respected him secretly for being able to fight him on par with his own power, way back when. But now he was becoming somewhat bored. He was the most powerful Transformer in the universe, as far as he was concerned, thanks to Unicron, but now he wanted more. He wanted what he deserved, universal domination, with him as the figurehead. But time and again the Autobots seemed to thwart his plans, and now they were so desperately low on energon he and his Decepticon soldiers.
'If that is all you require, then you need only ask. Ask and you shall receive!' said a definitely feminine voice in his head. He sat up in his throne, startled at the interruption to his silent repose.
It had also startled Scourge and Cyclonus, who thought that with the return of the other Decepticons and the failure of their mission on Earth, they were about to receive their punishment.
"Come outside if you dare!" Said the female voice amusingly and out loud for all to hear. The other Decepticons were grateful for the chance of a diversion from them failing their current mission, grateful that Galvatron's wrath had been distracted and his attention had been momentarily taken off of them, they watched keenly.
Galvatron set his sights on a small, human looking female. "No one dares Galvatron, fleshling, no one!" He targeted her with his fusion cannon, ready to fire. But just as he was charging it up he noticed something. She wasn't a fleshling at all.
"Fleshling?!" She replied quizzically, and then smirked at him, removing her hood. She was still in her energy form, having not yet recovered Deathstrike or another suitable body to inhabit. But this did not diminish her power in the slightest.
In the second it took him to slightly lower his arm mounted cannon, her strike was with a savage fury and speed unknown to Galvatron, and she hit him with black lightning from her fingertips. As the pain ravaged through his body, he came to remember a certain thrill at the amount of pain he was experiencing, and was somewhat comforted by the dark surges in his system. She smiled at him as if she had read his thoughts, and stopped with the black lightning.
She walked away, turning her back to him. "That was for insulting my person, for calling me a 'fleshling', an organoid, of all the nerve! We mechanoid life forms are by far the most superior and fit to survive and inherit this universe as our own." She continued to look away. "Perhaps we can come to some agreement, Galvatron. If you help me, then the power of the entire universe will be at the tips of our digits, to use as we see fit." She saw to it to appeal to his nature of being above all others and wanting to control them.
He was already smiling at the like mindedness that he and this being shared. He got up, becoming more interested in what she had to say. He put aside the urge to eviscerate her for humiliating him in front of his soldiers. They were all watching him now. Little did he know that at the present moment she was pure dark energy, and any attempt to do anything to her personally would only backfire.
He continued to ignore them, and asked her directly, "Tell me more of your dark power, when you touched me I felt the darkness within me surge out of control." He was careful to appeal to her, of what he had seen of her nature so far, in order to get more information.
"We will see," she said. "But first, as a gesture of good will between us I offer you this..." She turned and, as she motioned her hand, energon cubes appeared. More than any they'd seen for a long time. And it wasn't the usual energon, it was a different colour, but they didn't care, this was energon and it was free. The Decepticons who had been idly watching Galvatron and the female being converse, grabbed what they could amidst a scuffle of fighting, and started drinking happily. They noticed straight away it tasted different than usual but it was far stronger than anything they had even had in the past. It unknowingly made them stronger than usual and gave them twice the firepower, as they soon found out.
"You will all need your strength for the road that lies ahead," she said, looking at Galvatron. "Especially you."
He looked at her with a measure of mistrust, but he was quite willing to use her to achieve his own goals of universal domination if she was so willing to freely provide him and his soldiers with all of this energon. That and he was curious about her dark power and why it had inflamed him so.
She turned away and put her hood on again, thinking to herself, 'He's just the same as he ever was.' and sighed, as she remembered times of long ago when she was with her beloved Deukalion. She knew Galvatron was not him, but he now had his power flowing through his circuits, and she reminded herself to keep her head together around this one; he would need to be watched at all times. And she would also need to watch herself; she knew she craved a physical form for this dark power to interact with, but she needed to find a body first to do anything of the sort, she would have to wait till she was able to get hold of Deathstrike.
Which was why she quietly left Galvatron when he and his Decepticons were not looking, and she went in search of where Deathstrike was now being imprisoned as she saw it, by the Alliance Military. When the time was right, she would reap her revenge upon them. In the meantime, she also reached her mind out to her still loyal subjects to let them know of her return.
Meanwhile, back at Dragon Mountain, The femmes were still roughly conversing about all manner of things. Until Ella, the base caretaker joined them. She had pointed out Mirage, and while some were not bothered by him being there cloaked, Ella asked him to sit with the others with his cloaking device off and join in the conversation.
He asked all manner of questions of all of them regarding the base and what they do and how long they've been there for. He wasn't happy about the time frame they gave, now knowing that they had been on Earth, though not all of them, but at least the base, long before he and his brethren ever set foot on Earth.
"But why didn't you come and help us in our fight? We've lost so many good people in our war, extra help could've saved them?" he was rather distressed at their lack of camaraderie for fellow Transformers until Ella explained why.
"It is not our war Mirage and we are not Cybertronians. Vanguard for the most part is, or at least was till the Deltronians rebuilt her, but still we have our own matters to attend to while here on Earth."
He did not like the answer but he tried to get other information, "And what about these biomodes?, I don't know much about the Pretender shells that Jazz and Bumblebee and some others have but I know that they can only currently mimic biological life forms in appearance only?"
"While ours can mimic any biological or mechanical life form on any level, depending on how much you want it to once it is set to a form reflecting the individual." Answers Vanguard.
"How so?"
"We'll explain it to ya another time Mirage." She answers back.
Just then the base shakes and an explosion is heard up above. None of the others bat an optic over it, but Mirage asks, "What was that?"
Sunstar had since rejoined them after having finished her medical reports. She had been in her biomode as Stella, reading a local newspaper. Without moving it from in front of her she states plainly, "It is just our resident mad scientist, most likely the good Doctor has blown himself or his lab apart again."
Before Mirage is about to ask about it, a couple of race cars come screaming through the rec room. And at the same time, a large and tall black female mechanoid unit walks in, this mechanoid sees the two others racing around. One is already out of site outside the rec room, and the other is within the room and within her firing distance. She promptly fires on the green Charger and does not worry about the silver one.
"Humph." Is all she says.
Mirage looks on in horror as he notices both cars were Decepticons. "You have their kind here?"
"All kinds are welcome here Mirage, not just Autobots and Decepticons. I try not to discriminate. Besides Crash is a former Decepticon, as are a few others around here." She quickly looks to Casey who avoids her eyesight. Ella watches out of the corner of her optics as the green Charger that had been bombed, starts pulling itself together. The green charger starts to reverse from the wall it had careened into after it had been shot and transformed. It was still burning and charred in some parts.
"Yo dudette, could ya like have not shot me in the rear fender! It's like I get trippin' for days in my engine revvin' ya know." Says the green mechanoid to the black unmarked female. She just stares back at him unremorsefully.
Ella smirks and says to Mirage, "This is Crashcourse. He has the ability to reform himself after being blown apart by just about anything." Just as she says it, his mechanoid body finishes healing itself and he is whole once again. "He may be Decepticon but he's also one of the best chemists we have here." She looks between Mirage and Crashcourse for a moment then says to Crashcourse, "you'd better get down to the lab and see if the good Doctor needs help okay Crash'."
"I'm like so there! Splash ya later dudettes!" he waves to the others and runs out of the room.
Sound Track, better known in her biomode as Sonny speaks. "Well Mirage, ah think we'd best get going so ya'll can get home and make a report ta Jazz and tha others 'bout what ya'll've seen here t'day, eh?"
Mirage nodded and followed the others out.
After they had gone, it was Freefall and Ella who had remained behind.
Is he ready yet?" Ella asked of her old friend.
"Yes friend Ella. the other answers in her customary Russian language.
"Good." was Ella's response. "Then I will talk to him and see how much of me he actually remembers. He didn't succumb to the memory wipe like the others did back on Cybertron all those years ago; she knew it was because of his spark.
They both made their way to the medical bay where the prisoner was being kept. They both noticed straight away that he was online and glaring down at both of them.
"I demand that you release me at once." came the prisoners' usual egotistical verbalisation.
Ella stared him down straight away letting him know that she was not intimidated.
He had cottoned onto the description of her appearance given to him by another mechanoid before his trial. "You must be Ella?"
"Yes, that is correct." She watches his faceplate for a moment. "You do not remember me do you?"
"Should I?"
She changes the tone of her vocaliser to match that of an individual she used to be a long time ago on Cybertron, "How about now?"
"You!" This prompts the prisoner to start trying to break free on his own. "When I get free I am going to terminate you and savour every micron of it, you miserable traitorous witch. You left me to do on that miserable place so long ago, I…" He quickly stops when he realises he was remembering things that were not from his lifetime as a Decepticon and wandered where the thoughts had come from.
In his confusion Ella reacts, "No, I'm afraid you won't…" she pushes a button to settle him down, more straps come out of the chair and tie him down, which another lever comes from the ceiling and attaches a black restraint collar to his neck. "...Starscream."
When the collar clicks into place, he immediately goes offline and his newly upgraded Pretender shell activates and shifts him into his new human sized body. Ella is not at all shocked to see the familiar face before her of his humanoid form; it is the spitting image of her long dead fourth son, Starion.
He slowly and gingerly wakes up and is released from his confines in the chair and begins to move, glaring at Ella all the while.
She ignores him and looks up to Freefall, "Do not let him out of your site for now, those are standing orders." The large black female mechanoid reverts to her human form and nods. She then escorts Starscream out of the room to his new quarters.
Ella watches as they leave, listening to Starscream's protests for Freefall to let him go, which are ignored.
She decides to stay in the medical bay and attend to some patients there.
"I see that whiney ol' prat hasn't changed a bit." Says a voice from behind a newspaper lying down on one of the other beds nearby.
"No he hasn't Ray!" Ella wanders over to talk to her old friend, "But perhaps being here he may learn to finally behave."
"I doubt it." Was the dry response from the half human Cyborg on the bed before her.