So I decided to invent something... tell me what you think of this idea. I have no idea if it's come up before-there are too many continuities to keep up with. Heh.
Chapter Four
"Wouldn't someone see TAVI land?"
I was trailing Sam and Mikaela into the dorms. I was apparently sharing a room with her, across from Sam's. Since the Decepticons knew where Sam had been, he'd had to switch colleges and end up with a brand-new, NEST-MADE identity.
"Probably not," Mikaela said.
TAVI was masquerading as a pale grey Lincoln Navigator-lifted, I knew, from the image of a friend's mother's car. Her "windows" were screens, showing an image of the car's interior filled with our stuff, conveniently angled so that it looked convincing when we leaned in to pick up bags. It also had the ability to refresh in realtime, so it looked flawless. Until you squinted. Which, hopefully, no one was doing.
"We landed far enough off any main thoroughfares," Sam said. "I'm pretty sure it's fine. No one would expect me to have gone from Princeton to Portland, it's just too random."
"Random," I muttered, "the word that describes my life."
"This way," Sam said, veering in the direction of a typically disorganized mass of college-age kids headed toward one of several dorm buildings.
"No one saw TAVI land because everyone's preoccupied with Alaska," Sam said.
"Sam, don't be tactless," Mikaela snapped.
"Look, no, it's not tactless," I said. "It's honest." I was preoccupied with Alaska. But I was biased. "People think it's North Korea, but they know about Decepticons now. They should know better."
"Not everyone knows about or believes in Decepticons," Mikaela said.
"And that's just what the Decepticons want. Hit the Air Force base in Anchorage, make sure America blames North Korea, nukes fly ... er, you get the picture ..."
I shivered. "I could have lived without it."
"And since it would be humans doing all the fighting, what the Autobots could do to try to get them to see reason would be extremely limited," Sam said. "Decepticons start World War III, Optimus can't do shit."
I really hated the way this was going. "They're counting a lot on humanity's natural mistrust and love of fighting," I said. "Maybe somehow ..." But I knew even as I started to say it that the odds were ridiculous. Humans were notoriously unreasonable creatures.
"Is it wise?" Mikaela asked us as we approached the entrance. "Talking in the middle of all this?" She gestured.
I would never go back home. I would never see my parents again, or my siblings and my cousins and my grandparents. Lorelei's family was gone, every random face I had ever seen in that town was gone. Half the population of a state was gone, in the blink of an eye. It was unthinkable, unacceptable-it could not go without punishment. At any cost, I had said. What would I give away-most of which I didn't have the right to give away-before that was accomplished? How much would it take from the world? How was I to know? What kind of useless Chronicler was I, if I couldn't stop such a silly, wasteful blunder? And if I was the best that could be sent back here, what did that say about my Order?
What if there were no others left? What if I was spared by some twist of fortune?
"Marie." Someone's hand was on my shoulder, and my first instinct was to jerk back. What would happen to the next person that touched me? Could I stand the answer?
"Marie, keep moving," Mikaela said gently. "You can't just stand on the steps. We almost have all the stuff in."
I ordered my feet to follow her, commanding my mind to track the distinctive sound and scent pattern that each person exhibited. Everyone smelled and sounded distinctly different from one another, so much so that you couldn't mask your particular signature. I've always had heightened senses, but I only realized they were different a few years ago. I had written it off to my blindness.
How many things that I had always taken for granted would show themselves to be signs of something greater, something potentially impossible to accept? What would it take to find what someone wise had once called "a place of looking through?" In the terminology of a very ancient race, a place of looking through was a point in time of understanding, a shatterpoint of present and future timelines that one could shed clarity upon. Was that now? Or had that already come and gone, and I had simply been too idiotic to see it? Knots of foreboding twisted in my stomach, each one symbolizing something I couldn't allow myself to ignore.
Damn being a Chronicler, and damn all those who revered the position. It wasn't fair of me to think it, but no one had to know what I was thinking. And what was your mind, if not your last sanctuary, where you could have every thought you could never say?
"Last load of stuff," Mikaela said, setting her boxes down beside her bed. She turned to look at me. "Marie? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," I said, such a practiced, easy response. I'd even gotten the timing and tone right. But somehow, I wasn't fooling her.
"It was horrible, what happened in Alaska. Half the state is literally gone, I mean ..." Her voice trailed off. Everyone knew what came next-fallout, cancer, mutation ...
"But that's not just it, is it?" she asked.
"That's a lot to take in," I said.
"You're the Chronicler," she said.
I winced. "Damned shit example of one," I muttered, and bent over a box.
"Don't do that. Do you think you should have seen this coming?" she asked.
My head snapped up. "What do you think? Hmmm, Decepticons find Chronicler, Decepticons attack in the one manner assured to cause maximum short- and long-term damage. You'd think it would be an obvious logical progression."
Mikaela reached down, by the sound of it to plug something into the wall. "That's not always the way it-oh shit!"
"Defective socket?" It was Sam standing in the doorway. He whirled to get someone's attention.
I could smell smoke already. Whatever she had plugged in was fried. Without thinking, I leapt across the room, saw the cord, and clamped down on it with both hands. There was a shocking sensation, like a thousand pins and needles running against my hands.
Mikaela reached for me, but Sam was in the room already, and he pulled her back. "If you touch her-was
Then the lights flickered and went out completely. From the exclamations across the building, the entire dorm was out. There was an odd sound, that kind of eerie crackle that broken light bulbs make, and then the lights were back on and everything was humming to life.
Calmly, I pulled the cord out of the wall and held it up. "This is kinda screwed," I said, running my hands back along its singed surface to its other end. "Good thing you didn't have anything plugged into it." I reached down and passed a hand in front the wall socket. "I hope it's usable now. I'm not entirely-was
"Marie! What the hell?" Mikaela asked.
And then I realized what I had done.
I dropped the cord and spun around. Mikaela reached out tentatively, and I offered her my hands.
"No burns," she said. I felt my palms, and sure enough, they were smooth and cool to the touch.
"What. The hell," I said, stunned.
A tiny Autobot-Firefly-leapt up on to my shoulder. Optimus had told me, "Firefly adopts someone every few centuries. It is interesting that it should be you." She was babbling something: "Static, Static, she is Static!"
"What the hell is a Static?" Sam asked her.
Firefly, an eight-inch semi-humanoid figure with way too many arms and a magnificent double set of wings, flicked two sets of arms and her upper wings at him. "You know not Static? Backward you creatures can be." She buzzed into the air, a blur of tiny limbs creating a breeze that stirred my hair. "Static," she said as if she was speaking to a child, "is organic gifted by Essence with essential control. Know you not of Static, Sam? Know you should of Static, you who knows the mind of that which was before knowing. Only happened six times in history, six times in over ten million years. But Allspark is gone, there be no Static."
"The Matrix is back," Sam said. "Maybe that has something to do with it."
"Why it not make you Static, then, you who saw through time?" Firefly asked, buzzing around in front of his face. "Strange is way of ancient things."
"You can say that again," Mikaela said.
"I'm a Chronicler," I said. "Not a Static."
"Be not utterly ridiculous," Firefly said. "Static is Static til Static body ends. Nothing change that, ever."
"How old are you, Firefly?" Sam asked.
"Old enough that I see all six Static," she said. "I know them all. Most good, but one be very, very bad."
"Wait, are you older than Optimus?" I asked.
"Maybe. Very likely," she said. She dropped on to the table and transformed in a blur of folding limbs, becoming a sleek little iPhone. An earphone extracted itself out of the proper port and gestured at me.
"I wish she wouldn't do that," Mikaela said.
I picked Firefly up, slid her into my pocket, and put her earphone in, whereupon she instantly resumed her endless chatter.
"Firefly! Calm down!" I said. "I can't think in the middle of all that noise! God, for ten million years, you're still a little kid at heart. Er, Spark. Oh, what the hell." Sam snickered.
"Don't you think we should tell Optimus about this?" Mikaela asked.
"What you think he do?" Firefly said through her speaker, which sounded odd coming from my pocket. "Swoop down like"-she made a noise that I can only guess was a word in another language-"and fix everything?"
"I dunno, maybe!" I retorted, thoroughly sick of everyone either treating me with ridiculous deference or like some sort of poisonous spider. "He's Optimus Prime, after all!" If they expected Optimus to come neutralize this weird shit in an instant, they probably had another think coming. By now he was on the other side of the world with TAVI, perpetrating even more weird shit, so we would just have to live with it. More accurately, I would have to live with it, unless someone had a reliable personality transplant technique working and someone else wanted to try it out for a day. Because if that was the case, they were welcome to it.
Naturally, I kept my mouth shut.
"OK, good point," Sam said. "Someone send him a message anyway, he'll hear it when he can. Otherwise, we have to pretend to be completely normal kids."
"Yeah, if I don't go around putting out electrical fires," I muttered, and then had to laugh at the image that brought to mind.
"It's a good thing I have an extra one of these," Mikaela said, flicking the ruined phone charger into the trash can.
"Throw sand on it for good measure," I said.
"Sand? Where do you see sand?"
"Wait, my teleporter's broken," I said. "And don't use the black stuff that's covering half of Alaska. I'm not sure I can cure radiation sickness."
"I don't want to be immortal," Mikaela said.
"Ask Optimus about that," Sam muttered.
"I'm older than he is!" Firefly chimed in.
"Close enough," I retorted. "Besides, you sleep through most of the interesting stuff."
"Do not!"
"Yeah, she was awake for the Static," Sam said.
"I don't know about you," Mikaela said, "but I have like, fifty million boxes of stuff ..."
"I do too," I said, "but mine are mostly electronics."
"Out," Mikaela said, "while girls unpack."
"Don't catch anything on fire," Sam said as he beat a hasty retreat.
"Then don't make me," I replied, but the door was already closing behind him.
What? Static? My muses are strange ...
Firefly? Where the hell did that come from?
I do random things at god thirty in the morning.
And Marie needs to get over her spaz-ness, and since I just used that as a word, I need sleep. No more writing tonight.