A/N: I own several copies of the Transformers comic books and an Optimus Prime toy. I do not own the Transformers. *sob* We're getting to the rest of the story, I promise. It's going a tad slow for the first day but I want to do as good of a job as possible, and setting up the story takes time. I believe in quality over quantity. Hopefully, though, the pace will pick up soon with a visit from everyone's favorite caffeine-infused Decepticon in a couple of chapters. Guess who. ^.^
They reached the campus with Optimus in the lead, Lily seated comfortably in his cab. "Where are we to go?" Optimus asked her. Lily looked up at his radio sleepily and blinked.
"What? Oh, sorry. It's getting a bit late for me. Our dorm is right up there. Although I'm not sure where you can park - you chose a rather large alternate mode of transportation. No offense."
"None taken," Optimus replied, and parked behind the dorm. He stuck out a tad around the small cars and trucks. The rest of his crew parked alongside him; Ironhide parked to his right and Ultra Magnus to his left. Savannah exited Ironhide's alt mode and patted the top of his cab lightly.
"Watch yourself, now," Ironhide said. "I am not a canine."
Savannah grinned as Lily exited Optimus's cab. "Aw, I didn't mean it like that, Hidey," she said.
"Hidey?" Ratchet asked from the corner of the parking lot. Had he been in his main form, he would have been grinning. "How sweet, Ironhide. You haven't even known her for 15 minutes and you already have a pet name."
"Don't test me," Ironhide muttered. "You will not call me that again, femme."
"Femme?" Savannah asked, screwing her face up in confusion.
"You are a female, are you not?" Perceptor asked. "That's what we call our females."
"You have women?" Lily asked.
Everyone was silent for a few moments before Optimus spoke. "We did, at one point," he said, a sad note in his voice. "Unfortunately, a couple of vorns ago Megatron killed them and all of our sparklings in an attack on our youth sectors."
"More like genocide," Ultra Magnus added.
"Oh my god," Lily said, open mouth covered with one hand. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know..."
"It's fine," Optimus said and a tender hand rested on her shoulder. She jumped and whirled around. A tall man, about six-foot-five-inches, with raven hair and light blue eyes set in a strong-jawed face stared back at her. "It was a long time ago, and we've had a long time to cope. Despite the tragedy it represents."
"How did you do that?" Savannah asked. Lily elbowed her.
"Hey! His race just died!"
Savannah gave a dirty glare to her friend. "He said himself that it was a long time ago."
Lily sighed in exasperation and looked down at the cracks in the concrete at her feet. The man smiled wanly. "These are what we call holoforms. They're the graphical representative of ourselves, and they would be what we would look like had we been human."
"Cool!" Savannah exclaimed. "Do all of you have them?"
"Yes," Ratchet said, "but you can see them in the morning. It's time for you to go to bed now."
Savannah's jaw dropped. "But- What...? We're college students. We don't need a bedtime."
"Be as it may," Optimus said, "Ratchet's right. If you want to do well in your studies, you should go into recharge so you can wake up refreshed."
"What's-?"
"Recharge is sleep," Lily said, cutting off Savannah's question before she had a chance to finish it. "Now let's go. I'm tired anyway."
"Fine," Savannah said, and the two walked to their dorm room after saying goodnight to their new guardians.
The next morning, a loud ringing woke Lily up from her sleep. She blinked a couple of times and swallowed thickly before drawing her uncovered feet back into the covers and flipping on her back with a groan. She blindly grasped for her cell phone and accepted the call before looking at the caller ID. "Who is it?" she asked, her words slurring together from grogginess.
"Good morning, Lily," Optimus said. "Have you had a pleasant recharge?"
"I would have," the girl mumbled to herself. "I guess so."
Lily could practically hear a smile on the other end of the line. "Good, then. We have a few rules to explain that we cannot discuss over this phone line. Please get dressed and come down here as soon as possible so that we can talk to you and Savannah."
"All right," Lily said. Optimus hung up and Lily got out of bed with a moan of annoyance. After changing into some shorts and a purple tank top and slipping on some flip-flops, she set to the task of waking up Savannah. How the girl even managed to sleep through the ringer on Lily's phone, Lily had no idea. It was insanity, really, how much Savannah could sleep through things. She shook her roommate several times and eventually resorted to jumping on the bed. A hand wrapping around her ankle made the girl give a squeal as she stopped bouncing. It was only Lily's latest target, who had woken up looking like the living dead. Her hair stuck out at all sorts of angles and her green eyes had crusted over with sleep. "Don't do that to me!" Lily exclaimed. "You scared the daylights out of me!"
"How do you think that I feel?" Savannah asked.
Suddenly the door burst open as Lily opened her mouth to retort. Savannah bolted up in bed as the two girls stared at the door. Lily finally freed Savannah's hand from her ankle, resulting in a flip-flop to the face when a man with dirty blond hair and light blue eyes burst in the room. "What's going on in here?" he asked, peeling the flip-flop from the side of his head with an unreadable expression.
The two girls looked at each other briefly. They had just met Ratchet's holoform. "Uh, nothing?" Savannah asked meekly.
"We heard a scream and thought you were in trouble," Ratchet said with a huff, walking over and handing Lily her flip-flop. "Don't do that. It's dangerous."
"We won't," Lily said as she accepted the shoe. She slipped it on and slid off the bed. "Sorry."
"As well you should be," Ratchet said. "Now come on, now. We need to lay down some ground rules."
"Goodie," Savannah muttered as she got out of her bed and walked to the closet.
Ratchet cocked his head to the right, much like a dog. "What was that?"
"Are you going to leave or not?" Savannah asked, covering herself with a shirt and pair of shorts.
"Why would I?" the medic asked in response.
"Uh, duh? Because I'm changing in here?"
"I don't see what that has to do with anything," Ratchet said.
Lily decided to step in before the situation got any more ugly than it had in the past five minutes. "Ratchet, girls in our species like privacy. We feel uncomfortable changing in front of other people, especially people of the opposite gender. The fact that you chose a male holoform doesn't help thing at all."
Ratchet sighed. "I'll be outside." He left the room, standing guard in the hall while Savannah changed. The two girls exited the room and Ratchet escorted them down the hallway. "Optimus and the others are planning to meet us in the commons, underneath those huge trees. It should be a huge group."
"What do they want to talk about anyway?" Lily asked, curiosity getting the best of her.
"Your safety," Ratchet said, "as well as the rest of your lives. You want to finish up college and have social lives, do you not?"
"Yup," Savannah said. "Definitely."
"Well then," Ratchet said, "we need to have that talk. Otherwise you'll just be protected until the Decepticon threat passes. You won't have any other options to do anything." He let that sentence hang over their heads until they reached the commons, where a large group of men sat in the grass underneath a massive oak tree. A couple had laptops and were typing furiously at the keyboards. Another had an mp3 player and was head-banging to unheard tunes. The others were all talking to each other. Everyone became silent when Ratchet approached with Lily and Savannah.
"Hello," Optimus said to them. "It is good to see you this morning."
"You as well, Optimus," Lily said. Savannah echoed her faintly.
"Come and have a seat." The leader patted the grass beside him and the two girls sat in the semi-circle of Autobot holoforms. "Before we start, we better introduce everyone so you know who to look for when you run into trouble. I've taken the liberty of registering your guardians as students at this campus. Sideswipe, take those things out of your ears. You can't hear us." Ironhide simultaneously yanked Sideswipe's ear-buds out of his ears and slapped him upside the head. The twin protested with a "hey!" but it went unheeded. Everyone's attention reverted to Optimus. "You all know my holoform. Beside me is Sunstreaker-" A sullen blond with a slightly aquiline nose looked up at the sound of his name. "-and next to him is his twin Sideswipe."
"Hey there," a bouncier redheaded version of Sunstreaker said, waving. "Nice to meet you. Again, that is."
"I'm Ironhide," a buff, stocky man with black buzz-cut hair said. A faint scar covered the right side of his face, a reminder of an old wound, but Lily had to strain to see it. "The one that won't shut up next to me is Ultra Magnus." This comment drew chuckles from many of the Autobots and the girls included, as Ultra Magnus hadn't said anything. He frowned slightly in response to Ironhide's barb but didn't say anything.
"Nice to meet you," Ultra Magnus said. Lily raised her eyebrows at the sound of his voice and Magnus laughed. "I sound like Optimus, don't I? We're brothers." Now that she noticed, Lily could see the resemblance between the two. Not only did they share the same coloring, but they also had the same strong, squared jaws and significant height. Lily had though that Optimus was tall at six-foot-five, but Magnus looked to be at least two inches taller. He should play basketball, she thought with a ghost of a smile.
Optimus's voice pulled her from her train of thought. "Now, Lily, you are a biochemistry major, right?" Lily nodded. "And Savannah is obtaining a major in journalism." Savannah also nodded. "What are your schedules for this semester?"
"I have Introduction to Biology at 10 AM on Mondays and Wednesdays, with a lab on Fridays. US Government is on Mondays and Wednesdays at 2:20 PM, and Introduction to Chemistry is at 1 PM on Tuesdays with a lab on Thursday. Anatomy and Physiology is at 3 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Not to mention I clean glass in the labs at 4:30 every afternoon. I don't have anything on the weekends."
"There are laboratories involved?" a man asked from beside Ironhide. The speaker in question had brown hair with a shock of white streaked down the middle, curving around the right side of his head. It didn't make him look old; rather, he looked almost rebellious.
"Heaven help us!" Ratchet said, throwing his hands up in the air and rolling his eyes. "Wheeljack in a lab."
"Uh, what's wrong with - Wheeljack, is it? - in labs?" Lily asked, suddenly nervous.
"There's nothing wrong with it at all," Wheeljack responded. "I just…well, have a tendency..." He looked down at the grass beside him, blushing slightly.
"Almost everything he touches explodes," a red-haired man beside Optimus said bluntly. "I'm Perceptor. Ratchet and I keep Wheeljack from doing anything too crazy."
Lily gulped thickly. "You'll...be there for my labs when he's there, right?"
Several of the Autobot holoforms chuckled and even more smiled at her question. "I'm not that bad, am I, mechs?" Wheeljack asked in dismay. "Anybody?"
"We'll be there," Ratchet confirmed, a smile teasing at the corners of his lips. "Now Savannah, what's your schedule like?"
"I have US Gov with Lily on Mondays and Wednesdays. I also take Communication in Society those days at 3:50 PM. Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays I take Media Writing and Editing at 11:20 and Art Appreciation I at 2:30. And generally my sorority will have parties on Fridays or Saturdays, but it's no guarantee."
"Does everybody have that?" Optimus asked, and the others confirmed the information. "All right, then. We'll switch out guardians every once in a while, but we'll let you know when we do. We'll stay within shouting distance at all times." Optimus pulled some small objects out of his back pocket and gave one SIM card to each. "These will encrypt your cell phone calls so you can ring us without a Decepticon threat. Don't hesitate to use them." The girls each took them and placed them in their phones. "All right, then. Remember, if anybody asks about us, we're just your classmates. Let's get to class, everybody. Good luck."