"Strongarm, there you are!" Bumblebee called out, only noticing Fixit when edged out from behind the femme. Strongarm approached her leader, only barely avoiding a sour stare over to where everyone was worshiping the new arrival.
"Listen, I was thinking you and Sideswipe could give Windblade a tour of the area," Bumblebee went on, missing how her optics darkened at the suggestion. "Show her where all the main landmarks are, fill her in on the Decepticon situation, that kinda thing."
Strongarm's lips tightened, her optics finally relenting to a hard glare at the mingle of crimson plating some way behind Bee. "I see Sideswipe is still giving her the 'examination'," she said, biting each word as it came out.
Again, Bumblebee overlooked her acidity and followed her optics over with a shrug. "Maybe reds like to stick together."
Strongarm knitted her eyeridges together, crossing her servos over with no mind to looking childish. "More like punks like to stick together," she huffed.
Bumblebee turned back to her, finally taking notice of her attitude with a frown. "There's nothing wrong with being jealous, Strongarm, but don't take it out on Sides, alright?"
Strongarm's resent dissolved in a bubbling cloud of defensiveness covering her faceplate. "I am not jealo-" She cut herself off in a groan, pressing a hand to her forehelm as the processor behind it started to ache. "He's welcome to do whatever he fragging likes." With heavy servos by her sides, she started to push past Bee. "No protoform off my back."
"Well, at least be nice to Windblade," Bumblebee asked, prompting her to look over her shoulder at his turbopuppy optics. "Please?"
His plea had a spectacularly minimal effect on Strongarm's mood. "Oh, I'll be on my best behavior, sir. But, if say Grimlock ended up accidentally stepping on her, well, that wouldn't be my fault." She was only half-joking and they both knew it. She hefted her irritation on her shoulders and glanced around. "Come on, Fixit, let's get this over wi-"
The rust-brown plating was hard to see against the scrapyard background, but she eventually picked the strangely-bright outline out when electricity prickled along it, and a very small yelp caught in her audios.
"Fixit, were you shocking yourself?" she asked, looking down at his guilty gaze and his prod-servo still sparking against his other arm.
"Just... resetting a circuit shortage!" he explained with a fringe of nervous laughter. "It's gondala now- gone, I-I mean." The laughter increased tenfold, not helping the pounding in Strongarm's helm. She rubbed at it again with a sigh.
"Do me a favour, Fixit. Keep that thing turned on and use it if Windblade tries to shake your servo." She was headed for the source of the ache herself before Fixit had time to decide whether she was serious or not.
Kicking up dirt with every step, Strongarm didn't put herself in a rush to make everyone's new favourite messiah's acquaintance again. Even so, she was in distance of the other Autobots in less than a klick with Fixit following behind.
"Hey, Strongarm!" Grimlock bellowed, waving over at her with the enthusiasm of an overcharged sparkling. "Windblade was talking about what Primus sounds like!" He hunched over and placed a hand near his mouth as if shielding it from view, his voice lowered to a very poor whisper. "I always thought he sounded like a reaaaally cranky grandsire."
Strongarm couldn't stop a smile breaking her bitter mask, but it only lasted for as long as it took for her to notice Sideswipe looking at Windblade like she was Optimus reborn. The punch to get his attention was less friendly and more 'stop being a fragging embarrassment'.
"Ow!" Sideswipe hissed and rubbed his servo plating. "What the Pi-oh, there you are." His anger sizzled out when he saw the blue of Strongarm's biolights glaring at him. Strongarm would have preferred the anger to the complete neutralness he regarded her with, as if he didn't have any emotion left to waste.
"Sorry to pull you away from yet another riveting story, I'm sure." She crossed her servos over again, tilting her helm to Windblade beside him. "Bumblebee wants us to show Windblade around."
Sideswipe gave a wide-optic-raised-eyeridge look that Strongarm really wanted to punch, "Uh, actually..." He rubbed a hand behind his helm crest, still glancing aside at Windblade who didn't seem to even be listening. "We were just talking about taking a patrol ourselves." Strongarm was expecting that before it even came out, yet the urge to punch still increased dramatically as Sideswipe's mouth still rammed on. "I was gonna show her around the forest and-"
"Is that... a Minicon?" Windblade interrupted, peds carrying her past Sides' as she stared beyond Strongarm at where Fixit milled near Grimlock. Sides' train of thought had crashed, from his flickering optics and slight pout at not being in the spotlight of attention. It took several nanoklicks for it to get itself back on track, and by then Windblade was out of his reach.
"Oh, yeah, that's Fixit," he said with a heavy hint of dismissal. "He came with the hoard of unleashed Decepticons. Drift also has his own two, but... he's a little protective of them."
Windblade only acknowledged him with a hum, slowly approaching Fixit and making Strongarm tense with every step. "I've... never seen one of them before."
She called herself a messenger of Primus, and she didn't even know all of his children? Strongarm didn't know if she should feel smug at proof towards Windblade not actually knowing everything, or unease at how intensely she looked at Fixit. Strongarm had never seen a gestalt before, but that didn't mean she'd look like an Insecticon on the hunt if she ever met one.
Fixit didn't seem to relish the attention either, and not just from Strongarm's warnings about Windblade. Even so, he cleared his vocaliser and slowly rolled forward, stretching his drill out towards her in the closest thing to a handshake he could manage.
"Nice to meet you, ma'- GAAAH!" Instead of reaching for his servo, Windblade grabbed Fixit's waist and lifted him up as if he was a sack of scrap parts. The move was so sudden, a lightening strike of red and black plating, that Windblade had disappeared behind a valley of junk piles by the time Strongarm's blasters deployed.
As expected, Sideswipe didn't even have his out, instead calling after her in a plea of confusion. "Windblade, what the... what are you doing!?"
A chorus of mad giggles answered him from behind a stack of barren car chassis'. "Proving that you're all even dumber than we thought!"
Strongarm was already ordering the pursuit after her, with no time to ask questions. Fixit's cries for help left a trail for her and Grimlock to follow, with the Dinobot barreling through the heaps as if they were paper. The metal carnage eliminated the maze of junk, but it still took precious nanoklicks to scale it all and find Windblade when she finally stopped her chase; absolutely mad, clutching a squirming Fixit in her servos, pinning his drill uselessly against her chestplates as she tapped a digit to the side of her helm.
"I have the armour, mistress. My co-ordinates are 583-"
Fixit's optics locked onto Strongarm barreling towards him, and he managed to orient his prod against part of Windblade's plating. A shock charred through the armour and sent him to the ground with a shrill shriek of pain above him.
"You little glitch!" With her face twisted even uglier than usual, Windblade's voice had gone up several octaves, and not just from the electricity still sparkling along her servo. Glancing wildly, Fixit thought he saw pink underneath the burned crimson before he found enough sense to start getting himself away from her.
"You completely ruined my-!" Windblade's whine was silenced very forcefully by a fist slamming in her mouth, knocking her on her back and skidding across the ground.
"Primus knows, I've been waiting to do that," Strongarm sighed through an overdue grin, brushing her knuckles off on her chestplates.
Sideswipe had finally caught up with them, doubled over with vents heaving. "You just... punched his prophet... I think he knows that pretty well." He kept himself upright with servos on his knees, but his exhaustion didn't convince Strongarm to lighten her glare.
"Oh, lay off it, Sides, it was obvious she was full of slag from the very beginning." She nodded to Grimlock and then to where Windblade was twitching in the dirt, leaving him to properly detain her. Then she knelt down to Fixit's level with a look that was one part worry and two parts confusion.
"Are you alright, Fixit?" she asked, flicking a clump of dirt clinging to the top of his helm.
His optics had dimmed and his frame still shivered slightly, but he smiled at her. "F-Fine... I'm fine." He didn't seem capable of saying much more- Primus knew how badly his vocaliser must have been glitching. Then again, maybe it was best she didn't think too much about Primus for now.
With a look at Grimlock standing over Windblade, Strongarm remembered something she'd overheard. "Did she call you... armour?"
A forlorn roar boomed ahead of them before Fixit could reply, and then came the thud of a very large Dinobot collapsing. Now Sideswipe had the sense to pull his blasters out, almost beating Strongarm on the draw as they aimed at the shifting shape starting to rise up from the dust.
In a whirl of shimmering plates, Windblade was gone, replaced by a rosy nightmare with fluttering wings and a mask below blazing green optics.
"Just give me the armour, guys... and no-one has to get hurt," she lilted. How could a voice like a teenspark's sound so menacing?
Sideswipe seemed especially baffled, as if he was expecting Windblade to leap out of the foreigner's frame like it was some big prank. Even so he kept his aim steady, almost winning back a fraction of all the goodwill he lost on Strongarm's part from all his aftkissing. Whatever happened to Grimlock had left him completely immobile, barely twitching a leg, and Bumblebee would only notice the mess when it was being cleaned up.
"What do you mean 'armour'?" Sideswipe asked, saving Strongarm the trouble of repeating her question.
The mystery villain giggled again, a sound like glass shards tinkling together. "The Kamu... the Minicon, you scraphead!" She swept her greedy gaze across, searching for him. "You're not using him, so just... let me take him off your servos. You won't even miss him, promise!" she chirped, framing her faceplate with her servos and revealing a fan of thin, almost translucent pink plates fanning out from her waist.
Strongarm was in the very strong mood to just shoot her and be done with it, even without the satisfaction of it being Windblade's face. Fixit, meanwhile, was tapping very incessantly on her leg as he stood behind it.
"A little occupied here, Fixit-"
"Just listen please, ma'am," Fixit whispered back, either nerves or glitches accelerating his vocaliser. "Something's gonna happen that... I can't really explain. But just... trust me, okay?"
Strongarm raised an eyeridge, turning her attention away from the pink pile of giggles in her aim and not-so-much trusting Sideswipe to keep her away. At this rate, she figured they were beyond the realm of explanations for anything. "I... I guess? What're you-"
He was wrapping around her before she could finish.