The blaring screech of the hull breach warning persisted despite the vacuum of space flooding through the ship. At least Fixit's hesitant whimpers drowned out some of the siren's whines, and his tense wires kept Strongarm's cramped digits clamped around the door handle even when she finally felt like she didn't have to hold on for her spark's sake.

Optics slitting open, taking in the snapped circuitry and trails of smoke from broken machines and panels littering one end of the ship, she only noticed what was weighing her chest down when she felt something groaning and- yes, drooling- against the uncovered protoform. Shoving against the huge rack of antlers pinning her down only made Thunderhoof groan louder and burrow deeper into her cleavage, as if he could hide from the mayhem.

"Don't wanna get up… five more klicks, Mama..." He only got five more nanoklicks of peace before a hard knee in his stomach finally shifted him off of her and poor shuddering Fixit. Now free of several tonnes of lazy concussed Decepticon, Strongarm managed to pull herself upright with a mighty heave just as she heard Wheeljack's voice from somewhere in the chaos.

"So much for starship insurance… you alright, Strongarm?" There was only a slight strain to his voice, and she sighed in relief even as her bulky shoulders stubbornly tried to drag her back down to the floor

"Yeah... just a few moments of sheer terror I'll be reliving in recharge." With far more effort than she should have needed she craned her neck back towards the source of her sire's whispered curses, steadying herself on a support strut that sharply bent down from the ceiling when it should have been holding the damn thing up. Wheeljack must have been thrown back from his seat during the crash, currently sitting upside down against a wall with his legs dangling over his helm. She reached forward to grab a ped and pull her sire forward into a more dignified position before she toppled over him. He staggered as he regained his footing on the sloped ground, looking fresh from a Praxus bar crawl complete with optics looking in two different directions at once. They managed to re-orient as he shook his helm, carnage and ruin blurring together into something he could worry about much later.

"Ey, Bambi! You still with us?" he called out as he slid down the incline towards what was left of the steering wheel, narrowly avoiding scorched armour from a burst of sparks to his right.

"He's up here, Dad," Strongarm said, nudging a ped at the frame still twitching and moaning mournfully on the floor. She couldn't have done too much damage to him, but the sight made her wish she'd pulled her leg back just a little before slamming it into him.

"Ugh... issat you, Unicron?" Thunderhoof mumbled, pushing himself up on a servo as the other rubbed at the shallow dent in his abdomen.

"See the crash didn't do too much damage to his processor, at least," Wheeljack muttered, waiting for the thankfully intact diagnostic system to finish scanning. Still swimming in dizziness, Thunderhoof grabbed onto the nearest support to help himself stand- first Strongarm's leg, and then her servo as she rolled her optics and offered it to him.

"So, Dad, what the frag just happened?" she asked, letting Thunderhoof regain his composure in his own time with his antlers pressed against one of the crumpled walls.

"Well, for one thing, your new boyfriend's just made my comm system as useful as a Corvicon in a diamond mine," Wheeljack reported, kicking the shattered console as if it would suddenly spring back to life with the threat of his wrath.

"That doesn't explain how the engines decided to break mid-flight, though," Strongarm pointed out, too paranoid about the whole situation to even bother arguing with the disturbing boyfriend assumption.

"No, it doesn't..." Wheeljack frowned, checking the only monitor that wasn't littered with cracks all over its surface. "And another thing, we're only a few thousand miles out from Earth. Must have crashed on its moon with the lower gravity slowin' the impact. Talk about a lucky landin'."

Strongarm hissed through her vents, not feeling lucky at all. "What's the plan, then?"

"Check what the frag went wrong with the engines and then fix the comm system," Wheeljack said, wringing his digits together as he stretched his servos out. "But first... I'm gonna go have a nap."

"Dad!"

"Naps make everything better, sweetspark!" Wheeljack asserted, already digging his way to his quarters at the mostly-intact rear of the ship. "It's a proven fact, don't argue with science. I learned not to when I lost that one bet with Perceptor..."

Strongarm was still in the shock of remembering that dealing with her sire was like dealing with a five vorn old sparkling- which actually explained a lot about how she felt about Sideswipe, but she had better things to worry about for now. "And what the Pit are we supposed to do?!" she asked, throwing a servo in Thunderhoof's direction while the mech tried to keep himself balanced against dizziness and the weight of his own antlers throwing him every which way.

Wheeljack gripped the doorway to his quarters as he turned to face her, practically hanging from it. "Uh... explore? Make yourself a little more decent? Smack him round the head a little?" He shrugged with one of his well worn lopsided smiles. "You're a big girl, Strongarm, ya' don't need me always tellin' you what to do. It's not like there's anythin' dangerous around. Just... don't kill the hitchhiker. And no flirting!" He was barricaded behind the door before she could protest. With a pout threatening to show itself and her peds itching to kick something, she stormed past the jammed-open cargo door and into the bare expanse of dust and darkness waiting outside.

"Unbelievable..." She crossed her servos just below Fixit's optics and kicked a fair-sized rock far enough to almost lift off into space, while Thunderhoof grunted as he followed her into the lunar wasteland. He shortly wandered off on his own, making a path around the wreckage of the Jackhammer before stopping short.

"Woah..." The Decepticon's voice, eerily subdued from afar, prompted Strongarm to go in his direction even though her heels struggled to find purchase in the dust under them. Fixit was the first to see whatever it was that caught Thunderhoof's attention, his shock prickling along her protoform, but at first all she saw was the hissing wreck of what should have been carting them to the nearest outpost in the Kuiper Belt. Then she rounded the ship and saw; beyond the plume of smoke coiling from the Jackhammer's engines and its warped hull was an immense orb interrupting the lonely blackness of space. She walked slowly with peds crunching on millennias worth of celestial rock over to Thunderhoof's side, optics widening as they tried to match the size of the planet dominating the horizon.

Whips of white and grey swirled above endless blue splashed with green, scorched pale orange and pure ice nesting at the poles, submerged in darkness and sparkling with the life of a million cities; from this vantage point, Earth looked as beautiful as any one of Cybertron's ancient lost colonies. Even without thinking of her team somewhere leagues below on the patchwork of continents and remembering how often she'd cursed it, Strongarm regretted having to leave it behind so soon. She finally understood why her sire had always been so fond of it, if this was what he saw every time he came and went.

Even Thunderhoof, the one who almost created a black hole trying to leave the planet, had to look on in awe. At least for the few klicks he could keep his wandering optics off her chestplates. Strongarm counted, and it took a full klick before he noticed her (and Fixit) glaring at him.

"What are you looking at?" she asked, while he pulled off the worst impression of an innocent mech she'd ever seen, complete with avoiding her stare and rubbing the back of his neck.

"Well, since ya' asked-"

"Don't answer, actually." If anything, she should have been blaming Fixit for making her so attention-grabbing in the first place.

"I'm not thinkin' anythin' bad," Thunderhoof protested, actually managing to look at her optics now."Well, not too bad, but... ya' look a lil' pale, is all."

Strongarm snorted, shielding her chest with firmly crossed servos. "Maybe it's cause we all almost died in a fiery burst of fuel and ship plating?" she suggested.

"Well, ya' got a point, but-" Whether Thunderhoof had said anymore and she just didn't notice or he'd stopped talking altogether, Strongarm couldn't tell past a sudden wave of nausea and a sharp pain in her energon tanks. She lurched, forced over by the intense pain and a hollowness that didn't belong, staggering in the dust as her helm felt like it would fly right off her shoulders. At least, Thunderhoof's expression made that seem the case.

"Uh... you okay?" Either he really was as slow as he looked, or he was just terrified of her still being able to bodyslam him while her internals tried to chew each other to pieces.

"I'm ffffine... just... a little dizzy..."

According to Fixit's gasp along her own fading consciousness and his low whimper, she was not fine at all. "Oh, no... Strongarm, I'm so sorry, forgive me, I... I forgot about-"

"Forgot what?!" she growled, practically clawing at her spark chamber as it burned with her processor. Just before she fell to her knees, the armour encasing her suddenly shifted, covering much more of her protoform than it usually did. She felt her nudity recede; now her chestplates and midsection weren't on full display for the whole galaxy, and though the plating looked thicker and more robust it felt more fragile than the coverings that held on tight to those few inches of her protoform. Her nausea slipped away the more her plates moved, until there was barely a shadow left behind of the agony that had been clawing her helm apart. Looking down at her reconfigured state with rapidly clearing optics, she also noted something like the skirt that Twirl wore around her hips- not as obnoxiously bright or wide, thank Primus, but still unnaturally flaring out over her thighs.

At least she wasn't about to die in a dust grave now, and Wheeljack would certainly appreciate her following his suggestion of decency (as ironic as it was coming from him). Most of all, she felt the usual weight of her winglets on her back but they weren't nearly as heavy as Fixit made them. The relief shook through her so much that she actually accepted help to stand from Thunderhoof without the usual warranted wariness.

Still recovering from the attack, Strongarm's voice was slow to arrive in her vocaliser. "You... could do that this whole time?" she asked Fixit, who was still whimpering away as he finalised his new form on her frame.

"It's the low-energy state of the Life Fibers, when they're not..." He paused, gulping somehow without a mouth. "Well… draining your energon."

Clarity hit Strongarm with another pulse of dizziness, implications chasing realisation in a furious race to her vocaliser. "You've been drinking from me?!"

"N-Not me, it's the Fibers!" he protested, practically shivering all over her. "T-They need it from the host, else they don't work properly. You can still wear them like this... they just won't help you in combat."

Even if her systems weren't about to shut down now, Strongarm still felt like strangling Primus. Not only did these things steal her dignity and turn her into an unbalanced laughing stock, they were also actively out to kill her.

"I'm so sorry, Strongarm," Fixit went on blindly. "It's been so long since I've been worn by anyone, I, uh... I guess I've forgotten a few of the safety procedures..."

Strongarm breathed in deep, ignoring the grit that clogged in her vents as she tried to calm herself down with empty air cycles. "Anything else you'd like to share before I end up having another near-death experience?" she asked through clenched denta.

"Just that... I won't do it again. I promise," he said meekly.

Thunderhoof, silent with a raised eyeridge through the heated exchange, now chose to voice what was troubling him now. "So it's a... vampire Minicon infested with alien parasites?" he asked.

While what energon she had left was still boiling, Strongarm didn't bother with telling him to shut the frag up.