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Commander Starscream stood looking through the large transparent viewscreen that made up the entire side of the Decepticon warship-turned-military-base known as the Victory. It had been not long ago that the Decepticon exploration vessel met its Autobot equivalent, the Axalon, in battle. The magnificent black and orange Decepticon ship had somehow fallen to the small Autobot ship, despite its vastly superior firepower. Nonetheless, its commanders made due; building the ship into the floor of the ocean on which it fell. Mere years later it had become a sprawling complex with many tubes carrying magma from inside the earth into the ship for refinement and its myriad of energon mining tunnels spreading out in all directions.
Starscream's optics beamed with pride as he watched over his handiwork, and indeed it was his handiwork. While Megatron had battled the Autobots over even the smallest shred of information about the location of more warriors or energon, while Soundwave spied upon the Autobots so much that Starscream often feared he was becoming one, while Flatline and Tarantulas wasted their time with creating new , less efficient, forms of weaponry, Starscream and his armada had been rebuilding their base from the ground up.
And yet, for all his trouble, all he got was yelled at and defied at every turn. Where would Megatron's war be without energon to refuel on? Where would the doc bots' gadgets be without the raw materials he salvaged. Where would Soundwave be without his...
"Commander Starscream."
"Gah! Don't shoot!" Starscream flinched and held his hands in the air as he turned to face the speaker. Starscream lowered his hands in embarrassment when he saw that it was Soundwave, "Oh. Soundwave. Of course. I was just, erm, stretching."
"Uh huh," the brown and white bot replied; the fact that he did not believe Starscream painfully obvious in his voice, "Is Lord Megatron back yet?"
"You just asked me that 20 cycles ago!"
"That is irrelevant."
Starscream pinched the bridge of his beak-like nose, and sighed, "No Soundwave, Lord Megatron is not back yet, nor will he be back anytime soon. Understand?" Mere seconds after Starscream finished the sentence, the command room's main door slid open to reveal a tall silver bot with a black and red holo-cape billowing out behind him. Soundwave saluted, while the air commander just sat there with his faceplates turning red, whether from anger or embarrassment it was hard to be sure, "It seems that I stand corrected. Lord Megatron, back so soon? May I suppose that you beat those worthless Autobots to scrap and claimed the prize. After all, the great Megatron would never return empty handed."
The silver bot glanced at Starscream with a look of contempt and growled, "Shut up, Starscream."
"Of course, Lord Megatron," Starscream scurried out of his master's way.
Soundwave walked to his leader's side and reported, "Lord Megatron, I have discovered something in the course of my usual patrols that may be useful," he sent Megatron a copy of the file for Jack Darby, "This human seems to have connections to the Autobots or, at the very least, Sector seven. It may be possible to use him to gain access to Sector Seven Operation: Polyphemus and the related NBE. An additional warrior would be very beneficial to our cause."
"Well done, Soundwave," the Decepticon leader replied with a denta baring grin. He turned to his air commander, "Starscream, send Bonecrusher to procure the organic."
"Yes, my liege," Starcream replied with a bow. Megatron turned and exited the room, and as soon as he was gone, Starscream turned to Soundwave and growled, "We want it alive, don't we? There is no way I'm sending Bonecrusher to do that. He would smash the fleshy, then where would we be? I would advise a more tactical method," He pointed a talon-like finger at Soundwave and grinned evilly, "You will get the human's femme batch initiator and leave a ransom note... or something. We will make the organic come to us."
June Darby sat on the massive floral sofa that took up most of her living room staring at the clock on the baby-blue living room wall. She glanced at the large sheet she had been trying to concentrate on embroidering ever since Jack left to help Carmine earlier that night, but she just could not seem to put her all into it. She looked back up at the clock, it was less than a minute since last time she checked. Frustrated, she pushed her needles into a pincushion and folded the sheet back into a more manageable square before tucking it under her arm and standing to her feet.
She started walking towards her walk in closet, but stopped in her tracks when she heard a car pull into the driveway. She tossed the fabric on the kitchen table on the way to the door. June opened the door; expecting to see her son's off-white sedan sitting on the gravel path. The car she saw was not her son's. It was a brown and white detective coupé that was slowly and nearly silently extending three leathery tendrils over the lawn towards the house.
"No!" June gasped as she slammed the door and turned to run for the kitchen. She crashed into the coat-rack, and it clattered to the floor. She ignored the ache that it left in her shoulder and opened the door to the dinning room, but before she could enter, something grabbed her leg and pulled her to the floor. As it pulled her to the door, she grabbed onto the door frame; pulling herself through the entrance. After she was in the dining room, she struggled to her feet just long enough to grab a steak knife. She rolled over on her back the moment the tentacle pulled her back to the floor and slashed at the appendage with the knife.
It released her momentarily and she scrambled to her feet. She burst into the kitchen, placed the knife on the island, pulled the phone from its cradle, and immediately began dialing an emergency number that her late husband had given her. She didn't have enough time to fully dial the number before the tendril yanked her off of her feet with such force that it left her breathless and began dragging her to the door. She grabbed onto the coat-rack with one hand and the extra weight slowed the creature down enough for her to finish the call. June's grip faltered and the tentacle pulled her into the car's interior.
Agent William Fowler sat at his desk in Sector Seven HQ, filing paperwork for the latest bit of trouble the Autobots had managed to get themselves into. He sighed as he wrote down the name of the Autobot spy: Mirage. He always found a way to sneak out and partake in some illegal activity, usually street racing. The other Autobot that had caused the trouble wasn't out of the ordinary for something like this either, but for an entirely different reason. Arcee would always go with Mirage or Bumblebee on their escapades to make sure that they didn't do anything too troublesome.
Fowler was thankful for her thoughtfulness, but sometimes he wondered if it was really worth the extra trouble. He set his pencil down next the the paper where he was writing the first draft for his report and pinched the bridge of his nose. He really did like helping the bots and wouldn't feel quite right doing anything else, but sometimes they really got on his nerves. Whether it was Mirage or Bumblebee racing someone on the freeway, Prime's lack of understanding about the American legal system, or Tankor and his habit of taking matters into his own hands, there was always some kind of complaint he was forced to deal with.
He was rudely jolted from his reviree by the sound of a ringing phone. He snatched it up and held it to his ear, "This is Agent William Fowler, how can I help you?" No reply, "Hello?" There was no answer yet again, but this time there were sounds of struggling on the other side "Okay, who in Ben Franklin's wig are you? Do you think you can just prank call federal offices?"
There was the sound of a revving engine and a screamed, single word reply, "HELP!"
"June?" The line went dead, "June!"
