Disclaimer: No own no sue
Notes: The story decided to run away from my original idea during NaNo crunching, but hey let's see where this will take us.
Bumblebee had been a scout and loyal soldier to Optimus Prime for centuries, the war having let him see worlds and events that were fascinating and horrifying at the same time. His attention to detail and ability to immerse himself in alien cultures, be they organic or otherwise, had been the major factor in his involvement as part of the small team to find the Allspark. Yet, he was at a loss for everything happening about him now as he watched these mechs that made no sense in software or hardware moving about. His initial assimilation of this worlds culture and knowledge to keep hidden had included various clips and soundbites of the 'Transformers' as the organics had taken to calling them, but without having ever gotten close enough for even a cursory scan to confirm or deny anything he had moved under the assumption of the group of mechs being nothing more then advanced A.I.'s of this young world.
The humans, as the organics called themselves as a race, were making technological discoveries in leaps and bounds that had at first made no sense to his logic circuits when he had read the history of the race when not pursuing or eluding Barricade and the humans themselves. In a hundred years time they went from primitive carbon based fuel sources to environmental induced energy resources. Quantum theory almost to the point of practical application had also stunned him and sent Ironhide and Ratchet into a slight fit of such when he had sent a quick encrypted data packet of everything he was learning. If the carbon dating was accurate to a decade about their history as a species then they should not have been this advance yet. They should only have been at the stage of unmanned space probes, not slowly working on practical applications to terraform several of the neighboring planets to their own blue one while coming ever closer to worm hole traversing and hyper space jumps.
This along with the honest to Primus sparked mechs that had never set foot off this planet and if his scans were right few had reached their first Vorn, and even then only one had passed that cornerstone which would have been about the time their newly sparked would have finished integrating all of their main and subsystems to have them efficient and ready to go out and be on their own and away from their Assimilators. It was enough to make him just lock up his logic parameters and ask Optimus what to do, but considering his last brush with Barricade and the human that he was becoming overly protective of even with his mission objectives he instead decided to watch instead. Noting the similarities these mechs had to their organic species siblings as the young one called Groove had mentioned, making them even stranger to him as his processors kept trying to correlate what he was seeing with examples of typical Cybertronian behavior.
They were tactile for one thing. He had barely been amongst them for two earth hours and could see such interactions as blaringly obvious. Cybertronians were not tactile creatures, instead relying on transmissions and energy fields of various wavelengths to give comfort and show of emotions. Their movements and processing completely efficient in everyway and only 'showing' emotions and social obligations on a visual level when dealing with other races, as they internalized most of their displays. Not this group, who like their organic counterparts on this world were not always logical and excessive in their displays of emotions and movements. Internal communication only used for long distance communication. The Transformers preferring to walk down a hallway to talk face to face with one another or with a human, when a Cybertronian would have used a short wave data burst for the same objective as it cost less energy and was quicker. Something that caused him no amount of reworking in his expectations as he compiled the sub-routines that would make him see these mechs as alien and not kin so as to give his poor programs a chance to recalibrate and not crash from the wrongness. Especially when the little red and white mech that had a helo alt mode had clambered over the back of the oldest of the group. The black and white paint job with the four doors of his altmode connected in a strange pattern like the wings of one of the avian species of organics upon this planet had barely twitched when the smaller mech had done so.
That one was his real problem in keeping from a glitch. As he displayed the more efficient characteristics of a Cybertronian, which was quickly shattered when he would give a small smile or laugh and join in the chatter of the others that were in the odd medbay that would have made Ratchet throw a fit in confusion, especially when he had no qualms in physically handling the smaller mechs in much the same way Bumblebee had observed older children of the organic species would act when dealing with a younger child under their watch.
He almost had a spark attack when he had lost track of Sam for two seconds just because of the fact that a great many of these alien mechs seemed to not know their own size or were not thinking of such when they interacted with the humans without the use of the strange holomatter projections. Especially when the humans for the most part also seemed to ignore the vast difference in size between them and the transformers.
The display and the readings he gained from the scans he did when one of them used or turned off the holomatter had sent surges through his circuits. He was hoping that the heavily encoded and scrambled data he was sending directly to Optimus would not confirm his own speculations of what he was witnessing. However he was afraid that Primus and the Allspark were laughing at him somehow in all of this.
Captain William Lennox was not a man normally given to nerves or displays of nerves. He was a Ranger and was one of the few survivors of an attack by a hostile and apparently alien that was a lot like the transformers that roamed about Nevada and other parts of the United States. But being in the personal space of two of the more inquisitive of the bunch and their human personifications, solid holograms a part of his mind that was still a teen into science fiction novels giddily piped up, would make anyone start to twitch though.
Especially as the smaller of the two had his human form close enough that they were probably trading air. Something he'd probably remember years from now and laugh at the sheer goofiness of it all, as the large blue eyes, made more so by the comically huge lenses of jewelry inspecting goggles blinked and scanned over him. While the red frame that was the robot half was inspecting the weapons and other items that he and his team had on them during their encounter with the killer helicopter from hell.
"Fascinating there's trace amounts of sub atomic particles radiating at a quantum level of unknown origin with hints of atmospheric elements."
"Space Dust!"
The shout of space dust made the rambling of the small and far too close at times red hologram, Perception or something was his name, make sense. Even if the one who had called out the answer was the other robot and his human form that was crawling over a piece of wreckage from Qatar. Cheerful green, red, and white armor mimicked in the clothing and hair coloration of the larger robot, Wheeljack as that one didn't go off into scientific rambling that made getting a name seem like a term paper. The two geeks, because their limb flailing and technobabble as they looked over everything when they were not being told off by the on site physician, who finally came to Will's rescue by grabbing the human avatar of Percy by the scruff of the neck and moved him out of the way, just had that science loving air about them that nerd or geek squad had to be used to describe them.
Distantly he was already finding the two amusing as the red one would babble in a language that may or may not have been English to whoever looked like they were interested, and even then most often the smaller of the two would just talk to his tools or the items he was studying. While the more reserved, in that he wasn't trying to attempt merging himself with Will or one of his men, would joking 'translate' what the other was saying for the rest of them to understand. In a way that you could tell this was a normal occurrence, especially when several of the suits that had appeared as well seemed to tune both out with ease.
'You'll have to excuse 'Jack and Perceptor. They're scientist to the core and this whole incident is making them overly hyper in their observations."
"Aliens Mr. Banacheck! Robotic Aliens! That have basic similarities to us Transformers. Think what we could learn!"
Banacheck just gave a small tight lipped smile at this before turning back to Will. The serious look making Will go from a relax stance into automatic parade rest. He didn't need his mind link open to know what was being said with that look alone.
How much of what they can learn would be taught in mass casualties?