PART 7

#Historical discovery

Dark energon had long been an infamous myth, rumored to be the blood of the ungodly Unicron himself, and venomous to the surface of Cybertron, the physical incarnation of Primus. Eventhough no one could prove its existence or provide an actual sample of the resource, more often than not mecha believed the tell-tale stories of victims who couldn't resist the urge of power, or "Unicron's whispers" as some religious cult would have claimed, and consumed dark energon, the fluid of Primus' own rival. God got enraged with their defiance, and thus rejected them the holy source of Energon, instead diluting it into the most contaminated solution, to wreak havoc on the frame of any Cybertronian, including himself. His inconsiderate and cruel deed caused an entire apocalypse to the cybernetic civilization, starving those who remained any sense of self-preservation to an eventual deactivation and torturing those who couldn't refrain themselves with the combustible reaction caused by fusion of Dark energon and Cybernetic matter. In the end, only those few who survived learnt the lesson, that was to never consume Dark energon.

It was just a mere tell-tale story made up during times of war when energon rations were limited, mecha got creative enough to tingle with the unknown, and some less fortunate than others happened to create poisonous substitution of the life-granting juice. Shockwave would have never put an ounce worth of his faith in such a fairytale, until he witnessed its capability in front of his optics.

As he injected two droplets of the unidentified glowing substance that Orion sent him into a bug, it went completely haywire and maniac. As if electrocuted with extra-heavy voltage, his readings on the experimental creature's vitals spiked to an implausible peak, accompanying with a surge of static charge, powerful enough to shatter glass, before the bug imploded within itself, splashing fluids over the transparent observation screen.

The stains of liquid was purple in colour, matching the myth perfectly.

Running a few more tests just to be certain, Shockwave wasn't even shocked to read affirmative reports on every monitor.

There wasn't any more room for doubts. Dark energon did exist, and he was in possession of a sample of the substance. It would be very simple to just hand this over to the government and become the greatest scientist that Cybertron had ever known of, with a contribution so magnificent that he would be remembered for millenias to come. And so he almost did.

Until he realized what it meant.

Dark energon's existence wasn't exclusive to him only, no. Far from it. At least 13 other mecha, whether deactivated or not, knew about this substance. Not to mention the mech behind everything, senator Ratbat himself, and it would be both foolish and naïve to trust that those few were the only ones. Going public with his not-so-authentic discovery would alarm them into caution, and Enforcers wouldn't stand a chance to catch the rest of them ever again after they lie low. Besides, he was affirmative that there must be a production line of this hazardly dangerous substance hidden somewhere, and such an unstable energy source must be under the supervision of qualified experts, who know the safety procedures and follow a certain code of precaution, to minimize the off-chance of any unwanted incidents occuring. If a few droplets on a three-nanometer-long bug caused a combustion of that size, he wouldn't want to leave it to chance for one of a planetary scale to happen.

As he hypothesized more onto the matter, the myth suddenly made so much sense. No longer a fabricated waste of time, but a religious divergence of a catastrophe that erased the Cybertronians' civilization and restart them from the beginning of a looping cycle, caused by unintentional maltreatment of Dark energon. And the myth wasn't an unofficial war-time story, it was a lesson, to descending inhabitants of the planet, not to make the same fatal mistake again.

So he did more and more experiments, measurements, tests and assessments on various fields. The more he delved into the fluid, the more fascinated he was. Not only was it remarkably radioactive and combustible, but also extremly exuberant, to an extent that any amount of consumption, even down to one sub-atomic particle, would stimulate an immense power discharge, potential of shocking the frame into overcharge. A devastating and lethal overcharge, as it corrupts a mech's own coding and dissolves the host's protoform into its primal components.

As almighty and destructive as it might be, everything had its own weakness, and Shockwave was proud of himself to declare the deadly substance's vulnerability to water. According to his theories and experimental records, if deliquesced in dihydrogen oxyde with an exact ratio, not only would it allow unhazardous consumption of highly-concentrated energy, but it would also realized a possibility of matter-altering on a sub-atomic level.

His findings was nothing short of miraculous or magical.

Too pre-occupied with a brilliant scientific breakthrough though, had he completely forgotten to check in regularly with Orion through their shared radio frequency.

If he had, he would have seen Orion's most recent message, a frantically scribbled note, written in a hurry.

"Trap, tracker on suitcase. Dispose it, hide everything. Run.

They're coming for you."