I will be as brief as possible.

Thank you to all who favorited, followed, and reviewed my story (and myself). All your efforts are greatly appreciated, especially those of you who immediately responded to my pleas for help.

I apologize if this seems a little dry or short, but unfortunately, I am on a tight schedule.

Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers. Sadly. Please RR&R.

Chapter 3: Awakening

As much as I would love to claim that I am a morning person, I'm really not. Unless something scares the shit out of me enough, I'll either end up being extremely cranky and irritable or just super quiet.

Thankfully though, when I jolted up from my spot on the floor some hours later, wide awake, it was the latter. Of course right after that, I then became all too aware of them feeling of all the dirt and grime on my person and I couldn't suppress the slight twinge of irritation that I felt. God did I want a hot shower.

Checking over myself, I noted that a majority of my scrapes and bruises had started to heal nicely, already scabbing over and fading to a greenish-yellow color.

Then, I looked over to where my brother lay in the darkness. Moving closer so I could see him better in the dimming light of the glow-stick, my expression softened at the look of absolute peace on my slumbering sibling's face. Despite being cut up and bruised like I was but less so, (much to my relief), he looked absolutely tranquil. And even after all we've been through, he still manages to retain a look of pure innocence, even if it was just while he sleeps.

Though I couldn't see it, I knew that there was a melancholy smile on my face.

I was just thankful that at least one of us made it out of there with a little less mental scarring.

Getting up silently and stretching my aching muscles, I grabbed the weakened glow-stick and made my way over to the robot, thinking of my unusual dream. Already, some of the details were starting to fade away, but the flashes of blurred images that flooded my mind after the being had touched my forehead were still as vibrant and fresh as ever. It was like someone had permanently tattooed them to the inside my skull for my brain to look at forevermore.

The bot lay on its flat bed of rock like a corpse in its tomb. Blue-green light was cast around it, giving it an eerie look.

The image flickered.

Now I was looking down on the bot, from overhead where I could see its chest. A hand reached out as if to touch a certain point on the metallic body.

Again, the image flickered and changed.

There was an orb-like thing hooked up to multiple wires and tubes inside some kind of box, but the sphere looked lifeless and dead.

Another flicker.

Lightning arced all over, tingling my senses.

A fourth flicker.

There was blackness but I got the impression of pain and heard the sound of something beating like a heart but was not a heart exactly.

A fifth and final flicker.

Silver, a playful smile, and vibrant blue eyes that seemed to glow as they stared right back at me.

I shook my head, trying to clear the images away.

Approaching the gigantic, prone, and listless figure, I allowed my eyes to rove over the form of the robot. From what I could tell in the poor green lighting, he was a lovely shade of gleaming sliver.

I paused.

Wait, he? Since when did I start thinking that the robot was a 'he'?

Now looking back over at the body shape of the robot, I admitted that it did have a masculine look to it.

Shrugging, I continued my perusal of the robot.

In general, the bot was obviously modeled with the visage of a human in mind. Giant metal being though he may be, he was only about seventeen feet tall or so by the looks of him, which was tiny compared to the bot from my dream but still larger than I was.

Carefully, I climbed up next to him onto the flat slab of rock that served as a bed of some kind for the silver giant, so I could get a closer look.

His head was shaped a bit like a cat's with two little fins sticking up on either side like a helmet and came down on either side of his face. His face however, was colored a darker shade of grey like gunmetal. He had a slightly pointed face with a protrusion on his chin like he had a small goatee there or a helmet strap. Where his eyes should have been, there was some sort of clear-ish visor that covered the area and curved down in the middle to form a point over his nose. Aside from that, what little I could see of the robot's mouth was shaped in an emotionless expression that just did not sit well with me; I felt like it should be stretched in a mischievous smirk with the visor lit up.

Ignoring that thought, I persisted in my visual scan of the metal titan.

In my opinion, he was a little odd looking as a couple of his features reminded me of a car. For example, he had tires in the areas that served as his shoulder-joints and heels. On his chest, he had two headlights on either side and the parted, honeycomb-shaped grill of a car in the middle. Not to mention that he had rear lights on his thighs and another set of lights on his forearms. And finally, though it was hard to tell with him lying down, there looked to be some sort of rear wing sticking up behind his head. He basically seemed to be coated from head to toe in silver, metal, car-like armor. Oddly enough though, the only exposed areas, which revealed multiple wires hidden underneath, were in the same tender places that humans had as well like the joints, the stomach, and the areas on his shoulders around his neck. There was even a faint indented line, like an outline of an old scar, that ran along him from either side, right above where his hips would be, and divided the bot in two.

But I knew, that this metal titan wasn't someone's scrapyard creation. Just by looking at him, from his mysteriously visored helm, to his four polished digits on either hand that were shaped like claws, to his pointed feet, I just knew that this guy was not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill, robot.

Anyways, despite the fact that the robot was laid down to look like it was sleeping, with its clawed digits folded over its chest, I couldn't help but notice how lifeless it looked. It was like I was looking at a corpse almost.

I shook my head at the stray thought. That couldn't be right because it wasn't alive. Right?

Without even realizing it, I had made a move to reach out and touch the armor on its left leg.

But before I could however, a voice sang from behind me, "I would be more careful if I were you sis."

I yelped loudly as I jumped, whirling around to face the source of the voice. Of course, in my haste, I forgot that I stood near the edge of the raised platform and accidentally misstepped, suddenly finding myself falling backwards.

Thankfully, a pair of hands caught me before I could hurt myself.

"Told you," Lunick said with a look.

I leveled a glare at him. "Don't do that!"

He just raised a brow in response, the corner of his lips twitching.

I rolled my eyes and sighed exasperatedly, pulling myself out of his hold.

We weren't mad at each other if that is what you're thinking.

As brother and sister, we were close. But as twin brother and sister, I'd like to think that made us even closer, especially after what we had went through together at the hands of our pursuers. We rarely, if ever, got into fights with each other as we depended a lot on one another for things. Basically in a sense, we were the epitome of that mysterious twin connection that others talk about having, though we technically couldn't read each other's minds like everyone thought.

"So what do you think?" I asked, cutting right to the chase.

In the dim light, I saw as Lunick frowned in contemplation. "Honestly, I don't know," he admitted, brows furrowed. "After our search last night, I think the only choice we have is to go back to where we came in and try the other tunnels."

Before falling asleep, Lunick and I had searched the cavern thoroughly from top to bottom in case this was a trap. The only things our efforts had revealed, however, was that the cave was clean and that there was only one way in and out of here, and that was the way we had come in.

"That is, unless we want to try climbing rock walls without a harness," my twin added in an offhanded tone.

I tilted my head to the side a bit in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"There's a large chute near the back that I think leads directly back to the surface," he told me. "But it's too high up for either of us to even reach, let alone climb since it's pretty wide."

"Basically, we'd have to be insane to even try, right?" I summed up.

Lunick nodded slowly, and I could tell that he was thinking pretty hard. Of the two of us, I would have to say that Lunick is the smartest. For one, he's more tech-savvy than I am and knows a lot of stuff about a great number of things. In fact, he was the one who engineered our escape from our captors.

As for myself, I'm more suited for making split-second decisions at the last second and using my fists to muscle our way out of sticky situations. I was the one who was knocking out guards and keeping them distracted while my brother did whatever to make our flight possible.

Essentially, he was the brain of the operations and I was merely the brawn.

"Come on," I said, grabbing him and pulling him along. "Let's have some breakfast."

A little reluctantly, Lunick listened, allowing me to pull him back to our sleeping spot among the strange blue crystals and earthen teeth.

Anyways, our 'breakfast' consisted of one nutrition bar and three gulps of water each. Sad, I'll admit, but we had no idea how long we would be there, so we had to start rationing.

"So what do you think of the bot?" I asked, after swallowing a mouthful of packed oatmeal, nuts, and raisins. I had decided not to mention my weird dream as this place freaked me out enough already.

As he sat across from me, Lunick thoughtfully tapped the half-eaten bar in his hand on the underside of his chin a couple times before answering. "It's pretty advanced," he admitted in a tone that suggested that he would have liked to take a closer look at it if he had the chance. "Crack another light stick if you can, would you? This old one looks ready to die soon."

I complied, pulling another clear cylinder from our shared pack, and cracking it. A pale blue light lit up the area some more, making their surroundings take on a light, teal-blue hue from the combined light of the fading green glow stick and the new one.

"That's better," I sighed contentedly, setting the lights in between us. "And you're telling me. I may not be a tech genie like you, but even I can tell you that much." Then, I frowned a bit as another thought occurred to me. "I don't think that even they have something this advanced."

Despite the fact that the last part came out as a whisper, my brother still heard, and his expression morphed into something a kin to my own as he nodded in agreement. "Yeah, but if this thing belongs to someone, why leave it here?"

Resting my chin on one of my fists, I tried to think. "Fear of the government, perhaps?" I pondered aloud.

Lunick nodded thoughtfully, taking a sip of water.

We both knew all too well what the government was capable of. It was possible that if they had something as advanced as this in their hands that there would be death in the streets. The government would try to weaponize it for potential militia uses, and when they did, the results would undoubtedly be catastrophic. Certain people would hear about it and try to take it for themselves so they could gain power. While other countries, when they got wind of this, they would probably either see this act as a prelude to war or an attempt to gain more power and feel threatened. Pretty soon, everyone would be going to defcon-1, and…Well you get the point. With something like this, the United States would probably always have the upper hand with such a major advantage over other countries. Never mind harnessing nuclear fusion energy or curing cancer with one pill, we'd always have an easy win, no matter the fight. And there would just be no telling what they would do with any form of extremely advanced technology.

But one thing my brother and I knew well was that absolute power tends to corrupt people. So whoever made this robot probably wanted to ensure that that didn't happen.

"But it still doesn't add up though," Lunick said, drawing me out of my thoughts. Swallowing the last bite of his food before stuffing the empty wrapper into one of the pockets of our bag, he got up and walked over to the silver titan. "This thing is way more advanced than anything I've ever seen. Even the current technology we humans possess today doesn't compare to this. Its lightyears ahead of anything we have. Even now, it would probably take us centuries to come up with tech that could compare to this."

I raised a brow at him, mimicking his actions and coming to stand beside him.. "What are you trying to say?" I asked my twin curiously, wondering where he was going with this.

He sighed, putting his hand on his head like he had a headache. "What I'm trying to say is, however impossible it may seem, I do not think that this bot was man made."

I blinked owlishly. "It's alien? As in, not of this this earth, type of alien?"

Still studying the automaton, Lunick nodded solemnly, as if he couldn't believe it himself.

Had I been a normal person, I probably would have scoffed, told my brother that he was crazy, and booked him a nice padded cell in a mental asylum with a straight jacket and a cart-load of pills. As it was, however, I knew only that I trusted my brother's judgement. And if he said that something was alien, then I believed him without question. Besides, he was the tech genie, so he knew what he was talking about.

Now looking at it from this angle, I had a sudden mental flash from my dream. Silver robot, bed of rock, and a blue-green light…

"I wonder…" I softly voiced aloud, walking towards the bot as if in a trance.

"Uh sis?" my twin questioned, though I didn't respond.

Climbing up onto the raised platform, I then proceeded to pull myself up onto the robot and straddle his chassis.

"Sis?" my brother tried again but to no avail.

I looked down at my hand, and I realized that it was just like the hand I had seen in those images from my dream.

As if some unknown force was guiding my hand, I reached out and touched a single digit to the middle of the silver bot's chest-plates. As soon as my finger came into contact with the cool metal, I saw a small flicker of static jump from my hand to the robot's chest; I smartly withdrew my hand. Immediately after, as if I had triggered some hidden mechanism, there was a whir of machinery before a single perfect seam appeared in the metal.

"Sol?" Lunick called, starting to sound worried. But I just ignored him.

Digging my nails into the seam, I forced the plates to part, revealing a small cavity behind them. In the center of the compartment there sat this kind of dead, blackened-looking orb that was hooked up to multiple different wires and tubes. It reminded me of a heart, but it wasn't beating for some reason, and I got the feeling that this thing didn't pump blood anyway.

Listening intently to what my body was telling me to do, I reached out again, this time hovering my hand over the lifeless sphere.

As for what happened next, well let's just say that all hell broke loose.

As if in response to my actions, I immediately felt as a huge wave of something rose up inside of me, building up in size and intensity, before coming crashing down in a combination of agony and relief.

At the same time as the climax of the wave however, as if by magic or some other mysterious force of nature, I screamed silently in agony as rays of energy arced like lightning out of my hand and into the orb, reigniting it.

"Solana!" Lunick yelled.

And that's when it happened: the robot's entire frame shook and shuddered underneath me, coughing and venting like it was trying to breathe. I could feel as the entire metal being twitched and whirred underneath me, scaring the living daylights out of me as the chest-plates snapped closed over the bright blue orb.

And like an idiot, I just sat there on top of it, gaping, and watching the whole damn thing happen before my very eyes.

Entranced, I watched in awe-filled horror as the visor on the robots face seemed to gradually online, flickering a bit before completely lighting up blue. Then, like horror movie scene, the silver titan slowly tilted his head up and looked Straight. At. Me.

Visor brightening a bit, the robot's lips then contorted into an equally bright smile as he focused on me and said in unmistakably masculine voice, "What's crackin' lil lady?"

I did the only sane thing a person could do: I screamed.

Well I hope you folks enjoyed that cuz I am tired! Whew!

Anyways, you know the drill so please feed the review monster.

As for the question from the previous chapter, I will remain open to your answers for about a month. For those of you who almost never read the author's notes, the question is this: Who do you think is older, Jazz or Barricade? It is vital for this story as no one bothers to participate in my polls.

Again, I apologize if this seems a little dry or short, but I am on a tight schedule, unfortunately for you lot. I probably won't be able to update this for at least a week (seven days). So please do not get used to this special treatment and bear with me.

Hope you lot are all having a lovely summer! Please review, favorite and follow, and check out and vote on my polls!

See you all next time in Chapter 4 of Through the Darkness: "What's Crackin' Lil Humans?"