Chapter Eleven: Little Bot in the Big City
The fact remained that Sam was running across some very curious issues -- namely: the difference between 'possible' and 'Sam being able to do it'.
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He was speared over and through with thousands of cables-wires-metal-lines, hanging suspended and stiff like a puppet-unused-but-displayed and yet not in pain. Gentle energy pulsed-pulsed-pulsed into him and left him like a generator motor making gas into electricity -- in washed the ice-cold-cold blue sparking energy, rippling inoverthrough the wires and into him and it was cold only until his body warmed it and it pulsed out in gentle warm whiteandyellow colors, breaking out across thousands and thousands of little wires-cables-lines leading somewhere he couldn't see and didn't care.
"It's through, then?" he asked, almost plantively.
All things have come together. The Process is complete. Life is ... here.
"This is going to get really messy," he replied solemnly. "You know that, right? It's not going to be neat or ... perfect. Not the first time."
There is no other applicable choice. Life must continue -- life must ... evolve. The two are not as separate as first appear.
"Oh." A frisson of surprise. "Well, okay, then."
Another wash of cold energy transformed through him. He was somehow prepared when a second wave followed the first, and then a third, stronger. It seared through him, crackling, not transforming and leaving. Then a fourth rippled down the lines, on the outside of the cables-wires-lines, and it wrapped around him until it plunged like an intangible fist into his chest. The wires-cables-lines mattered not at all in the face of pain through every last molecule (becomes a substances, becomes a cell) of him, vibrating like water spitting from a hot oiled pan.
Wake up, child. The time has come. I am ready. We are prepared for what is to come.
(as two become one shall two and one again)
Wake.
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Systems initialized. IIIIIIIIII
CPC start up. Connecting ... Completed. Running stability check. ... completed. Stabilized. Running capacity check. ... completed. Memory Usage: 000.0000011%
Current Capacity: 15% and rising.
Logic Circuit startup ... Connecting .... Completed. Analyzing Systems. Running Systems Check. Running ... Completed. Memory Usage: 000.0000012% Current Capacity: 30% and rising.
Laser Core powering. Analyzing radiation patterns. ... completed. Writing subprogram codes ... loading ... completed. Initializing ... completed. Analyzing .... stabilized. Systems go.
Connecting. Analyzing seity files. Affiliation: UNKNOWN. Connecting data files.
Error. File replication detected. Error. Incomplete/Corrupted files. Error. Incomplete/Corrupted Files. Err
Systems Crash in 5
the darkness pulsed-notpulsed, a shot of bottle lightning blue. it touched everything and everything touched it -- and the frozen mechanics flickered back to life.
Data Files Located. Anomalous Data located. Assimilating data ... Complete. Additional Subroutines created.
Analyzing Data Files. Primary Files Analyzed. Primary Files: Incomplete. Initializing IM APP. Connected. Secondary Files: encrypted. Locked.
Connecting subseity files. Error: Secondary Files located. Error: Incomplete/Corrupted files. Error: Incomplete/Corrupted Files. Err
Systems Crash in 5
that pulse-unpulse of bottle lightning blue and things reasserted themselves.
Connected. Subseity files analyzed. Subdesignation: Samuel James Witwicky. Superdesignation: UNKNOWN. Secondary Designation: Õµñævæ_Û
it changedunchanged, and the line was deleted, never having existed at all
Locked.
Firewalls 1-90: holding. Firewall 91: damaged. Firewall 92-101: holding. Running Shell Diagnosis. Running ... Completed.
Gear 243: Damaged. Right arm disabled.
bottle lightning blue
Situation Normal. Systems idling.
a pause, a darkness, and nothing-nothing-nothing and -- bottle lightning blue
Initializing ACTIVATION EXE
It was dark. Infinitely dark. The space was not as infinite as the darkness, nor was it threatening. It wrapped around him and cushioned him comfortingly. The quiet hum of motors kept him relaxed. It was familiar, in a way, listening to the quiet humming while the soft velveteen darkness pressed in comfortingly. He was a slippery sliding thing, curling round and round and round. Guided, just a little, but mostly free. And Safe. He felt very Safe, somehow for the first time in a very long time, but he couldn't remember what happened before that. He didn't know what made him feel Unsafe so that feeling Safe was so nice and new.
After a while, he became curious of the world beyond his immediate surroundings. He reached out (he did reach, right? He couldn't see, it was too dark, but it felt like he reached), trying to feel something in the darkness, but then fell back and centered his consciousness again. Gathering himself, he reached back out into the darkness, searching for the edges of this small dark world he could sense. He stretched further this time, reached longer, but had to fall back just like last time, centering his consciousness and curling twinning circling for a moment.
This time, he didn't reach tentatively, or wonderingly. This time he thrust with confidence and determination into the darkness.
There! He found a wall, grasping it and fluttering-pulsating in victory -- and then the wall grabbed him back. A cold hot pike of terror went straight through him, and he writhed, trying to escape it. It had a hold of him, though, and it began to suck him in and no matter how hard he struggled, he was being pulled along --!
There was only a split moment of awareness of being pulled in several different directions (and though it was not painful, and even seemed strangely natural, it was terrifying), and then he was in a different sort of darkness, completely different. He was no longer a slippery thing that curled and twinned, he was a ... he was ...
He was paralyzed.
Paralyzed, muted, blind -- not deaf. Auditory input was working at acceptable levels, informing him that there was a terrible lot of noise somewhere nearby. Sensory input was adequate. Wireless Networking suffering interference. Radio Comm disabled. All pumps operational. Coolant maintaining low body temperature ... low enough to discourage him from moving. Not stop him. There was also an annoying rushing noise, and he was ... moving slightly.
For a long moment, he just soaked that in, tentatively accepting all of this information. He was still in darkness, but it was a much different sort of darkness. He now had a sense of more than just the darkness, or the vague guiding that he had experienced just before. (There was a before, and after, now. Not just the present.) He ... felt vaguely horizontal. Marveling at that, he searched himself for more information. A sense of shifting, of sharpening, and he realized that there was a very light pressure all over him, and the pressure of his own weight pressing him into the softness below him. At that level, though, it quickly consumed too much of his attention and started to grate on him, so he relaxed back until the sense of pressure dissipated.
After a moment, it occurred to him to wonder about more than himself, and wonder about the outside-himself. That was when he realized that he didn't know: there was no part of him that could tell him where he was.
So. There he was ... in some undisclosed location ... unable to move, speak or see what was going on. After mulling over that for a moment, he became concerned about this, so he reassessed what he did know about where he was. Information relayed from some part of his head, informing him that there was a lot of 'rushing', some grinding noise, and that there was some unknown substance moving around him and tugging him slightly. Only his lighter parts, he noted. Fingers, feet ...
He had fingers and feet.
Marveling at that, he wondered if he could move them. After a few increments of time, he discovered he couldn't, much to his disappointment. It did, however, bring the increments of time to his attention. To his bemusement, he seemed to be aware of existing in parts of a second. He thought it was a second. It might have been a second. He knew that everything was moving at a horrifically slow rate compared to the spinning numbers that seemed to indicate time passing, and he knew that there was no way that a single of that increment was a second.
It would almost be fascinating if it wasn't freaking him the fuck out. He knew that time didn't move like that and it was wrong, wrong, wrong, so he shut it off. Once it was gone, he relaxed again, and turned his attention elsewhere. This paralyzed-mute-blind thing was really starting to get on his nerves. Feeling rather confident having defeated the wrong-time device, he turned his focus on that. How to change that?
Well, shutting off the wrong-time-device had been fairly easy ... pretty instinctive. He had wanted it gone and it went. (Was he God?) He had wanted it away, and it was gone.
He just had to find the right command to get him the result he wanted. First, however, he should probably make sure that he could want things back into existence before he disappeared something that he needed. Warily, he turned his attention to that part of the dark place that held the wrong-time-device. After a moment of arguing with himself whether or not he really wanted the wrong-time-device to exist again, he decided that it was best to try out this wanting power. So he bent his attention and demanded the wrong-time-device back.
It obediently snapped into existence again, and to his chagrin, it had been measuring time while it didn't exist, informing him that 14,056 parts of time had passed since he had last looked at it.
Sheepishly, he wanted it out of existence again. Well, that wasn't quite correct, was it? It was clearly still in existence, still working, even while he wasn't reading it. So he wasn't wanting it out of existence, he was merely ... ignoring it?
All of his thoughts, tangent off, eventually came back to him with 'results inconclusive'. That was the first time that he noticed that as each thought occurred to him, it ... went off, gaining its own independence until it came to a conclusion and rejoined the ... it ... his ... center ... him. It rejoined him. Which was strange. He was more accustomed to only being able to follow one line of thought at a time. He had reached the end of several since becoming aware of himself. This alarmed him on a strangely deep level, so he wanted that away, too.
If he could tangent his own thoughts, then perhaps he could tangent out a search for -- ah. Okay, that was nice. Useless, but nice, since apparently there was no 'you are here' maps. Or a user's manual. (Why would he need a user's manual?) Back to wanting things into working, then.
A moment later, as he was struggling to locate something to want at, he felt something else activate. Inspecting the thing, a feeling-memory from his time as a slippery changing thing came back. He vaguely remembered something before becoming aware of the darkness, and this felt similar to what he could-couldn't remember. But he was aware of this, and he knew what this strange thing was doing. It was -- it was highlighting things for him to want at, lighting them up in neon. Things he wasn't aware off previously were brought to his attention, and he cringed-didn'tcringe (what could he cringe? His body was paralyzed) at all of the new things he suddenly knew existed when previously, he had nothing but his thoughts and the wrong-time-device. Which, that strange program informed him, was a chronometer. Which was a bad joke; he knew what a chronometer was. That was a watch. Who could use a watch that didn't even tell the right time?
More importantly, this strange body filled with unfamiliar things was starting to seem a lot more normal. His leg felt the grinding beneath and the rushing over and above, as did the rest of him, instead of him being distantly aware that he had a limb that was being acted upon.
That was ... different. Warily, he thought back to the strange process, and the memory came to him as sharp and clear as if it were happening again. Marveling at the sharpness and detail, he replayed it a few more times, then reached back into the rest of him, touching things that he was now aware of. Miraculously, it worked. It seemed that the 'thought' that became a command that set off the ... search and locating programs worked for all sorts of things. His perceptions of his immediate outside-his-body surroundings altered drastically.
Optics: online. Motor Function: online. Weapons: offline. Scanners: online. Firewalls: inspected and reinstated. Sensors: optimal. Wireless Networking: disengaged as per self-defense. Radio Comm: partially enabled. Core Temperature: rising to optimal functionality.
He fumbled hard when the optical input began to pour in, and had to shut them down again for a moment. After replaying the memory a few times, he tried again, directing the feed into a different section of his brain and analyzing it ... sideways, for lack of a better way of thinking about it. Then he began to isolate the data, separating layers of visual feed.
After doing that for a while, he shut it ... he shut ... closed ... he wanted off his vision, and quivered-notquivered (didn't dare stir his body) for a moment. Something was adding up wrong in his head. Something was wrong. Optics? Visual fields -- weapons, scanners firewalls online offlinemotorfunctioninspectedreinstatedchronometerwatchtimenothiswrongwrongwrong --
After some time (963,856 of those not-real-units, which was almost one larger not-real-unit), his sense of quivering ceased, and he reached tentatively for the memory of the visual feed again. He saw in a lot more than just in-color now. Of all the ... the strange filters and odd things, he only had words for what he thought might be ultraviolet, infrared, and was might have been magnetic fields. (He only had words for --?!) Those were so ali -- so weird that he had to filter them out until his optical input matched what seemed most familiar. It didn't match exactly, but it was as close as he thought it was going to come, and it was good enough.
Having succeeded at that, he decided to ignore the nonsensical input. It looked familiar, but he couldn't make a lot of sense of what he was seeing. If he had weapons, and ... firewalls, then he must have other perceptions of the world. He felt along blindly and finally came across another way of perceiving the world. Dual input informed him that his hands were in some sort of mineral, and that he was residing within some sort of iodine rich environment, which was also heavily doused in oil and grease and wet wood and rotting flesh and waste. He tasted from his hands and smelled from his entire body.
This amused him terribly, but he wasn't sure why.
Turning both of those fairly useless things off, he reached for more ways to perceive the world. After a while, he came to the conclusion that he had something rather like echolocation. This was rather useless, since he couldn't make heads or tails of the data that gave him.
... well, he certainly wasn't going anywhere, was he?
His chronometer informed him that twenty-two of those larger not-real-units of time had passed since he started trying to learn how to work his other-perceptions. On the upside, he had figured out how to ... sorta use them. He knew that he was fifty feet off the beach, ten feet below water, and that his echolocation scared the fuck out of fish.
There was no more putting it off. He had to move: there was a building sense of urgency that warned him that he if he spent much more time in what must be the ocean, his joints would be really messed up. Which sort of made him feel bad for some ... people? that had been put in the really deep water. But not too bad, because even if he wasn't quite sure who they were, he knew that they had really pissed him off.
Okay, first thing first. He had to move. It would help if he could.
In the end, he had to resort to something he thought he remembered. Yellow and red. Long sharps shining? Yellow. Lots of yellow, and 'wiggle your big toe'. Only, for him, it was a lot less 'wiggling your big toe' and much more like 'twitch your boom-box sized fist'. While a program erected to look after succeeding at that, another part of him started hunting for more information on himself.
It seemed to be something of a lost cause. He circled his thoughts ceaselessly, and couldn't bring himself to address one corner of the dark place. He didn't have a users manual (why would he have one?!) and he was struggling to work a body that was strangely foreign in a world strangely familiar (though he was sure he wasn't supposed to be underwater). His anxiety built while he circled endlessly, avoiding searching too deep least he found something he didn't like (what could he not like?!).
Every process in his CPC came to a standstill when a power pulse rocketed down a wire and his hand twitched.
Programs whirled to life, replaying the sensation and everything that had been occurring at the time. The data was cut into measurements that could be fed into algorithms, analyzed and stored. After a few miniseconds, he decided he might know enough to figure out how to reproduce it, and tried again. That time, his fist clenched.
Thrilled with his success so far, electrical impulses rocketed back and forth through his insides until he regained some semblance of decorum, and set to work reproducing the power surge through his entire body. Finally, he was able to move. He had to struggle up out of the sand, being a creature that weighed a ton or so, and his head broke through the surface of the water. Feeling giddy (he could feel giddy?) he looked around to see where he was.
Apparently, his optics could telescope.
After he got that under control, he pushed himself to his feet. He was doing pretty good over all. Up until he saw his own hand, at least.
That spot in the dark space sprang to life, pumping him with information. Suddenly he knew who he was and now he knew what he was and he knew what he should be but wasn't. Staring at the mechanical claw and sharp edges and pieces of armor and wires and gears that build the thing attached to him, Sam Witwicky shrieked, a horrible mechanical noise that sounded like squealing tires and engines trying to achieve the impossible. What had he become!
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The thing no one probably saw coming when they considered an organic creature becoming a mechanical monster was suffocation.
Well, very obviously, being inorganic meant that there was no need to breathe. No breathing apparatus. That's how it worked with mechanical organisms, after all: no need to for the function, nothing to fulfill that function. What didn't change was that the mind was still human, and the human mind occasionally thought to wonder how that breathing thing was going. When the body is mechanical, and no breathing is required and there was nothing to breathe with ... the lack of a need to breathe didn't hold a candle to the very basic instinct to breathe.
Over the last five minutes, Sam had been alternately starting up, and shutting down, and had done this approximately thirty times: it was the bad side about being able to think in those minuscule measurements of time. Panicking with a processor for a brain and firewalls and safety measure in place apparently meant that he'd automatically fall into 'hibernate' mode. This was supposedly to save him ... from ... something. Rather like the human reaction of passing out, though he suspected that it was actually an electrical overload, not ... why ever humans passed out.
Luckily, over those brief periods of consciousness, he had slowly managed to master his mind, by ... basically focusing solely on something else. Completely. It had worked, to an extent. By which Sam meant that he was now face-down in the sand, still underwater, and scanning the beach. He hadn't been alone as he thought, though he hadn't realized that until after he ... freaked out.
Now aware of them, he realized that even underwater and while having the robot equivalent of panic attacks, he had heard and recorded the human's alarmed and curious yelling. For a moment, he panicked until he realized that they hadn't been there to witness him rising up, and had actually been responding to the ... the noise he'd made when he first saw himself. Now he was trapped underwater, claws dug into the sand to prevent the tides from taking him anywhere now that he was no longer wedged into the bottom.
The humans were showing no inclination to leave the beach now that they'd arrived, and after sitting around for nearly three of those larger-not-units of time, he decided that he had to get out of the water. He quickly measured up the differences, and figured that as long as he dragged himself along by his claws, he'd remain safely unnoticed. He crawled under water this way for a fairly good distance before he came across a freshwater stream which was emptying into the ocean. That seemed to be a great idea, as it would help wash out some of the salt and sand that had gathered in difficult places.
It was also fairly abandoned, so he could stand up.
Sam did so, wobbled dangerously as water poured out of his hollow body, and then struggled up through the silty water, fighting with the muddy-sandy general unpleasantness around him. He was struggling very hard to succeed at all of this without looking at himself. Scanning his surroundings with a sort of paranoia that would make Miles proud, he moved slowly up stream, trying to get as much of the sand and mud and silt washed away as he could before he finally was forced to struggle up on to the bank. He crawled until he found firm land and settled himself on it tentatively.
After a moment of steeling himself, he looked at his hand.
It was hideous, gunmetal gray and riddled with molten streaks of burnished silver and flashing gleaming chrome metal. It moved when he closed his hand, four vicious inhuman claws clinking slightly as they met the segmented palm and the shorter hook that made his thumb twitching idly next to them. He shuddered hard enough to make his ... segments clatter together. It didn't sound exactly like metal striking metal, but it was -- it was like -- he couldn't breathe -- he couldn't breathe he wasn't human he was a monster --
Four thousand, three hundred and four of those small not-units of time later, Sam came back online (it was surprisingly soothing to translate the numeric information into alphabetic equivalents). He delicately sat up and firmly didn't look at his limb for a long moment, scanning his surroundings to make sure he would still go unobserved. Still no human life signatures. Cautiously, he returned his gaze to his arm.
Different segments came in different colors, he realized after a moment. He was mostly built out of the gray stuff, gunmetal dark, but there were strips of burnished copper that helped construct him, and small bands of gold. It was ... it was alien, but not ... he revised his opinion. It wasn't ... hideous. It was ... sharp and cruel, all cutting edges and not very reminiscent of humans, and --
His fans clicked on with a grind of unlubricated metal, and the sensation of air moving through him calmed him a little, the vibrations of grinding metal rippling through his armor and making him feel a measure of life. They whirled softly, only heard because they were a part of him that was moving, rather like hearing the blood rushing through his ear drums (that no longer existed). He still couldn't breathe, but the fans cycled air through him and cooled down his circuits and reminded him that it wasn't necessary for survival anymore.
It would have been nice to be able to breathe deeply or swallow to gather his courage, but he could do neither. He didn't have a throat, and he didn't have lungs. Instead, he looked at the sky for a moment before returning his gaze to his body. He was ... all metal. All metal, and sharp edges. Crystallized. Sharp edges, threatening, dangerous and angry and cruel --
The fans whined with strain as they tried to keep him calm and cool, but he was having yet another panic attack, because he was terrified that his optics might be red. He certainly was favoring a Decepticon, design wise! All sharp cutting edges and he had freaking spikes!
If his body resembled a Decepticon, then his face --!
The claws flying toward his face nearly brought his panic attack into another hibernation period, until he recognized them as his own. Tentatively, he moved them toward his face again, running the sharp tips lightly across his features.
He didn't even have anything even vaguely resembling a face!
A few false starts later, Sam came back online for longer than fifteen miniseconds (he didn't know what else to call them), staring at the sky overhead, which was turning a delicate purple from the setting sun. After ascertaining that he was still alone, he offlined his optics and tentatively reached for his face again. It wasn't as bad as he had thought. He didn't have much in the way of a human face, but neither did he have any ... weird ... mock-teeth or anything. There wasn't much in the way of a mouth-structure ... he had a few overlapping sections, but nothing to them.
He had movable pieces on his face, like Bumblebee had before that silver mask that gave him a moveable human face. Sharp, though. Cutting edges. Not round and friendly like he wished they would be. They shifted and moved, like expressions. Sliding his claws over his jaw, he investigated the vicious metal growths and smoothed his digits over his head. A helmet of sorts, not as angular as the heads of Decepticons. More rounded like the Autobots, so there was hope for him yet. He jerked, snatching his hands away from the pair of growths on his helmet, then tentatively reached for them again. His head wasn't really -- head-shaped, but there were these -- growths that splayed out, an array from temple back, long flat fin-like things. Even as he touched them, wincing slightly, they shifted, aligning into one long spike that still managed to flinch away from his claws.
Sensitive. Very sensitive. Finally, he stopped doing the equivalent of feeling up a bruise and lowered his hands, onlining his optics so that he could check the rest of him out. Armored, yes, but only sparingly. He was extremely vulnerable at the moment, conspicuous. He wondered if he was the Cybertronian equivalent of naked, and that made him laugh silently. His structure was ... strange, and alien. Those wires and tubes were ... a part of him. He tentatively reached out and with all due care, slipped his claws between a gap in his armor.
He could feel his own claw, feel the wires at the tip of those dangerous looking digits. Copper colored framework like an inside out skeleton. Not a completely inaccurate description, he noticed, running his claws over the bands of metal that looked a lot like a rib cage. He shuddered again, hearing that not-quite-metallic clatter, and scanned his surroundings. It was dark enough that he felt fairly safe in moving around, but first ...
Carefully, he rolled back onto his ... er, front, as he didn't have a stomach, right? Well, he rolled over and carefully began to inch his way back toward the water. It was just dark enough that his optics should be giving off some measure of light, and with another shudder, he leaned forward toward the blackened water. Fans twitched in relief when he could make out what was clearly a blue glimmer in the running-rippling water, and he carefully shuffled, easing himself up onto his hands and knees and then carefully sitting back on his heels.
His whole frame was vibrating, a low thump in his chest -- his pump, he supposed. It was like when his heart pounded ... it sounded loud to him for being within him, but there was no actual sound to betray it. His fans strained for a while, but he didn't shut down and felt a sliver of triumph as his fans slowed. He could do this ... he just had to find out where he was, and why the hell the Autobots left him in a freakin' ocean. What the hell! That was just insulting!
Which did bring up the question of what had happened to him. There were only vague hints of what happened ... as a matter of fact, despite the fact that he was discovering that many of his memories were startlingly clear about a month after Mission City, apparently he hadn't been taking good records after that power surge that woke up Jazz. Or, was it possible that the same way he had conked out due to the transfer, it had scrambled his ability to remember things?
Ugh. Science, biology, mechanics -- whichever one it was that applied to him? Still, not his strongest subject. His strongest subject was ... er, he didn't actually seem to have one. Hmm.
Sam carefully shifted, taking in his surroundings once more before he leaned over and carefully braced himself against the ground and began to stand. Which should have been easy, but really, all he got was a head-first trip back into the river. He flailed in panic for a while before he remembered he didn't need to breathe, then had to fight off another panic attack, and finally flopped around in the shallows in a slightly more coordinated manner before he managed to straighten himself up and take a few tentative steps. All the equilibrium calibrators in the world couldn't help a human work a giant electronic body, so he was more than a little unsteady on his new feet.
Luckily, it seemed that his experiences in walking as a human wouldn't go completely to waste. It took him a moment to coordinate his body, since it was different, but subprograms took over after that and he moved freely. He wasn't graceful like the other bots, he noted that immediately. He wasn't mechanical and halting, just ... awkward. As if he wasn't working his body. Which he wasn't, so that was that.
At a sort of lope -- he could probably run, but wasn't secure in his ability to keep on his feet -- he left the beach behind him, trying to ignore the slight squeal of his dry gears and the numbed sensors warning him about them. Salt and sand had gathered in his moving parts, grinding to a powder, and he was hardly properly lubricated to move comfortably.
Right now, even being a car would be reassuring ... and that was where he was headed right now, even though he didn't have the first clue how to scan a car and imitate it.
Moving seemed to help him adjust, though. The more the body responded to him, just as if is were his own, the more secure he felt in it. It wasn't until he stopped paying attention to where he was setting his feet ... claw ... things that he realized that he was hearing an awful lot of whirl-clicking in his legs and came to an abrupt stop that nearly made him fall on his face. Sparing one more 'glance' about with his scanners, he looked down at himself.
Aw, crap. He was the chasebot!
He flexed his hands in distress a few times. Now that he was a little more accustomed to what he was going to see, it seemed a little less horrific. But he was definitely lacking the impressive hood-chest of most Cybertronians he was used to looking at, and his legs were rather long -- powerful. While he wasn't sure of his body yet, a check of his list of system-things implied there was a lot more machinery in them than he expected. He nervously raised a claw and tapped it restlessly against a plate that was situated where his pelvis would have been and cast a beseeching look toward the sky. (He was now too freaked to speak, anxious that whatever voice that came out would ... er, giggle.)
Alright, first thing first -- he was feeling jittery and would really like to find some car to pretend to be. According to Bumblebee, it mattered very little what the outside or inside looked like; under the hood was the same thing for every Cybertronian -- the most efficient engine possible. Bumblebee's engine was just like Ironhide's engine was just like Optimus' engine, minus the size -- identical but congruent. Of course, because Bumblebee was more aerodynamic, he had less drag, and could therefore move quite a lot faster sooner ... or, well, that's how he made it sound, anyway.
That bit of information, coupled with his own panic and desperation, meant that Sam wasn't exactly feeling very picky. At this point, anything that was familiar looking would do.
If only he knew how to scan something and trigger the transformation.
After a while, Sam started to realize that even if he wasn't terribly picky about his alt mode, he might have a bit of trouble. After all, size seemed to mean something about what kind of cars could be used, from what he'd seen as their alt modes preserved the size scale. That meant ... he searched through his internal information files. If Ratchet could find schematics, so could he.
Ah. Oh. Um. Apparently, Sam was ... smaller than he had originally thought. He was apparently looking for something about the size of a Miata, since he appeared to be exactly fifteen feet and two-point-three inches exactly. (How in the hell did he know that Bumblebee was sixteen feet and two-point-four inches exactly, anyway? He certainly didn't remember taking a measuring tape to Bee, and he definately knew that he had no reason to know that Arcee was fourteen feet and two-point-four iches ... ) Where was he going to find something like that?
At first, he thought the road he stumbled across might help, but it was apparently not one traveled often.
Not straying far from the it, Sam regularly flickered through the different sets of visual fields he had, trying to make sure he wasn't going to stumble onto anything unexpected in the dark. To his relief, he could spot raccoons, so there was little chance of him happening unknowingly on a human. He was starting to get the hang of this walking thing, and flickering his scanners and the different layers of optical input. A person would think that it would give him a headache, but was actually fairly easy. The only thing he was having problems with was the fact that his gears were aching horribly because he had nothing to ease the movement and he still had junk in them from being in the ocean.
As it turned out, he wasn't terribly far from major civilization ... but he hadn't thought he was, anyway. It was hard to ignore the vibrations of industrial work, especially in the water. Now, he just had to find a car. Cars were popular in big cities. He also had to hide. That ... was not going to be as easy. And, of course, being on the beach off America would have been too much to ask. He was off the beach of England. Fun times. Weren't cars smaller in England? ... weren't they also backwards? Or was that Japan?
He sincerely wished he was connected to the Internet.
Movies really sucked, by the way. They made that secret agent slipping-by-people thing look easy. Well, maybe it was easy if you were a six-foot movie star in a black suit, but sneaking around as a fifteen foot robot that wasn't the lightest thing on his feet? Well, then! Sam fretfully ducked behind a building as another car ambled by, then leaned out to watch after it.
Something in his head shifted, some sort of program activating, and the world shifted -- or rather, his perception shifted, closing down into nothing but the vehicle, and then it went to pieces. Panels came off, the entire thing just began to peel apart and bare gears and the metal skeleton, plastic and metal and rubber all being dissected -- and he suddenly understood how it all went together. Sam reeled, clutching his head as his vision snapped back to normal. He staggered a little, strongly reminded of his nightmares about being stuck inside on of the Autobots or Decepticons who transformed and squashed him -- only, well, it was less disturbing, because there was no ... er, gore involved.
Was that how they ... er, chose a vehicle to transform into? Apparently, as the program chugged away and then reported that the shape was 'incompatible'.
Lowering his hands from his head, he attempted to frown. His facial components moved, but whether or not he succeeded in frowning ... it was strange that he had been so disoriented by the sudden influx of information, wasn't it? Well, it had seemed that most of his attention had gone to dismantling the vehicle in his head, but disorientation? Maybe this was one of the things that Bumblebee had never thought to share, or perhaps it was a matter of them waiting until it was information that he actually needed ...?
Either way, it was good to know now, before he fell on his face while trying to find a suitable form ... the queer thought occurred to him that an Autobot tripping probably sounded rather like a car crash. The quiet whirl of gears warned him that his face ... facial ... part things were moving, and he snapped out of the daze and checked the streets. Sam wasn't too familiar with the way that cities worked, but he had so far managed to stay out of heavily populated areas.
Now, where to find a lot of different cars, quickly? If he was in America, he'd find a highway, but that was like ... in the open, and he might be spotted (and one of the really weird things that he'd developed over the last months of knowing Bumblebee and the rest of them was that they wanted to remain hidden. Of course, he completely agreed at the moment, and again had to wonder if he was the equivalent to naked). Then where to find --?
A parking lot would work well, wouldn't it? Where do British people go at night? That was the million dollar question. Not that Sam could do much with a million dollars right now, except pay someone to find him a car he could pretend to be. Maybe he should -- follow the lights?
-+-
'Follow the lights' turned our to be fairly good advice. Well, okay, maybe that was a matter of opinion, but he was getting a head of himself.
Sam had been becoming more and more depressed, the more cars he saw. It seemed that not many people wanted vehicles as small as a Miata, because no matter how many he took in through his scanners, the program always came back with 'incompatible'. He had even begun to think about what was smaller than a car and had started to convince himself that he'd gotten the worst of both worlds -- he was a chasebot who was going to be a motorcycle. The only appealing thing about chasebots was that they could be cars! That and actual weapons, but he had long since discovered that having them did not mean he could access them. He was so far past wanting to go home that he was just desperately waiting to wake up.
That was when he almost literally stumbled across the fact that this strange world of Britain had dealerships. How had he not even thought of looking for an alt mode at a dealership?
Sam had learned through trial and error that if he gripped cement too tightly, it had a tendency to break off. He forgot this time, however, waiting anxiously as his programs sliced apart the vehicle and worked the information over however it was that it did to figure out whether or not he could use it.
The program reported that the shape was 'applicable'.
Sam didn't believe it. If he wasn't being such a chicken at the moment, he might have started laughing in disbelief -- but he went through the motions anyway, gears whirling and clicking as his shoulders moved and he adjusted his stance, shaking his head. Then he actually took a real look at the vehicle in question, and completely believed that it was 'applicable'.
It was a goddamned Mini Cooper. Life just fucking loved Sam, didn't it?
To be utterly honest, being caught completely alone while trying to learn to work his new body was a bit of a mixed blessing (he thought while his fans strained, inadvertently reminded that he was so much hollow metal and strange wires and he couldn't breathe). On one hand, it was all so very confusing. There was a lot of trial and error involved in trying to get the set of mathematical craziness that the Mini Cooper translated into 'Cybertronian' as to be something that he could actually use. Having another Cybertronian about (preferably Bumblebee, but a Ratchet would have been fine, too) to explain how to get all of those sets of numbers to apply to everything on the outside would have been great.
On the other hand, he kept having panic attacks, and he rather liked looking like a fool where no one could see. No one liked to have their inadequacies aired for others to see.
So, yes, a Mini Cooper was far from Sam's first choice (although, what he would have chosen if he could have chosen anything ... he wasn't sure). The fact remained that it was probably the only car he was going to find that would accommodate his size, and it was a car, four wheels, not a motorcycle. The particular one he'd scanned was blue, and happened to have white racing stripes (and a white roof, what was up with that?) which was better than ... say, pink, which it could have easily been (or not. He didn't see any pink Minis out there on that lot, but he wasn't entirely sure there wasn't one somewhere).
The fact remained that Sam was running across some very curious issues -- namely: the difference between 'possible' and 'Sam being able to do it'. These two concepts were not the best of friends, he found out. Why could he not use this apparently perfectly acceptable data and transform? He'd really ... really like to be something a little more familiar than a bipedal robot, and he was pretty sure that the ... that his programing really wanted to transform as well. He still felt vulnerable ... and personally, he was hoping that some color might change his appearance a little -- take away the sharp edges. Maybe.
Having determined that he wasn't going to be transforming any time soon, Sam had left the dealership behind and found what he hoped was an abandoned area to sulk in, sitting awkwardly. Robots could sit, it seemed, but he wasn't looking forward to trying to sit on anything other than concrete -- he imagined that his weight would make dirt get in his gears. He ran unsteady finger-claws over the broader bits of armor as he tried to puzzle out how to get all those numbers to translate into something he could use to transform.
It seemed to work like magic, a few hours later. He'd done a few different things (wanting at stuff, since that had worked before), when his search function seemed to finally locate the thing he needed to want at. Then little programs had flickered to life and cut the mathematical craziness into little data bytes and Sam spent a few minutes feeding it into some problem-function -- an algorithm, in a way that it didn't report that the resulting solution was 'nonfunctional'. Then Sam actually tried to transform.
Yeah. Wow. He didn't know it was possible to fudge it up that badly, because within the first few moves -- within the first few major shifts of his ... body parts, he just ... failed. Big time. So Sam spent the next while gutting out the mathematical craziness until he had something that ... well, basically, he'd be a car, but the thing wouldn't even have a radio of any sort. He resolved to change that, just as soon as he got a hang of this transforming thing, because Bumblebee had a radio and little review-mirror dangles.
Then he fed that information into the algorithm (a little quicker this time), and tried to transform. The good news was that he made it into the transformation a lot further. If by further, a person meant that a third of the way through he was ready to start screaming in a blind panic and got shunted into hibernation mode. Even though transforming seemed to be a lot like doing fractions with a Ti-81 scientific calculator, Sam was not going to be transforming any time soon. Not when he was having flashbacks to that nightmare that taught him about transforming in the first place. The snap-crackle of his body being mauled inside the cab and the pop of his organs and head was not something that could be easily bypassed.
So, yes, perhaps he could be excused for freaking the fuck out so badly that he not only ended up in a tangled mess, he ended up in an unconscious tangled mess. Thankfully, reversing back to his bipedal form wasn't nearly as bad.
It took a while to gather his courage to try again, if only because the he had suffered something similar with his inability to breathe in the ocean and because the need to become something that could blend in was strong. Still, by the time he finished his fifth attempt at transforming, he simply couldn't take it anymore -- he was clattering almost constantly, having become a shivering wreck of metal. Sam decided that he deserved a gold fucking star for even keeping with it so long, and crawled off to go hide until tomorrow.
It was about then that he realized he didn't know where to hide. Whatever city he was in, it sat off the ocean, not far from where he woke up, but he didn't think it would work to go back into the water -- he remembered the warnings that drove him to leave it to begin with, that his joints (painful as they were, far too hot from friction) would become further damaged, or might corrode ... he knew that salt water rotted metal quicker than anything.
Sam finally shoved himself to his feet and checked out his location. He had chosen to attempt transforming in a shipyard, of sorts, but he didn't think that he could wait out the daylight there. Or maybe he could, if he found something to hide inside?
Once that he felt assured that no one would find him in the corner of the warehouse that he had decided to occupy, Sam had little other to do all day than to try poking his insides from the inside. By which he meant to say that he was trying to discover what other neat things he had -- software and programs, right? Surely he had some sort of radio. He might be in England, but -- hell, if customer service could be in India, he should still be able to, say, call his mom, right? The only problem was ... well, he couldn't find it. Why did life have to hate him so much?
Then what about those weapons he was so insistent on? Good God, don't tell him that something was wrong with his weapons.
It wasn't until he held out his arm to see if he could activate it or however it worked that he took a good look at the glossy metal and realized that there were some structures that he didn't remember being on the schematics Ratchet had drawn up for him. After staring at his mechanical limb (and feeling slightly awed and fascinated in spite of himself), he remembered that he was a shorter than he thought he was supposed to be. Now, Sam wasn't an encyclopedia of cars, but he thought he remembered some notation on the chasebot schematics that mentioned that he'd just have to find something just slightly smaller than Bumblebee's Camaro to turn into. (Granted, at the time he dismissed that, because he knew there were a fair amount of cars that weren't as big as the pony car.) But in reality, he barely found even one vehicle he could transform into, and that was a freaking Mini Cooper, and Sam was not so forgetful that he didn't remember that there had been some heist film that practically celebrated the Mini's sheer lack of size by running three of them around halls and in a subway.
His current shape was apparently nothing like the chasebot that he should be. What kind of weapons did he have?!
Sam's frantic thoughts seemed to do some good, though, since they set off some more things inside his head -- helmet -- CPU? Anyway, they set off another search through his software, activating programs as they went. It let him know that he still had that strange 'signature structure' that had occupied both the minibot and the out-of-date schematics of the chasebot. But now that he was living it, he got a better idea of what it was -- cables that lead from his arms through his chest to some sort of ... box structure in his ... hip-pelvis-area-joint-thing. For that matter ...
He tried as best as he could to take in the entirety of his body. After a second, he decided that he was built ... much different than what he had expected. He seemed a lot bulkier across the shoulders than he recalled -- or, he described it as 'bulky', but it was honestly just extraneous metal ... random structures that apparently served no purpose. Well, no other purpose but to balance out the obvious extra work that had gone into fitting so many gears into his legs. Sam, being human sized among a dozen giant robots, felt that he had a pretty informed opinion on their leg structures, and his were ... just different. There were obvious additional gears, pistons -- whatever they were called, and he had this stuff attached to his upper body that seemed to help ... well, not make them look so obvious, the way they were with Arcee.
And importantly, he seemed to have cannons on his arms. Which was good -- awesome, because he really felt like he needed them. Seriously. The only problem? He wasn't sure he could actually use them, and guns did squat for good if he couldn't even shoot the damned thing.
Somewhat aware of the noise of humanity waking up in the distance, Sam settled down against the floor and wall, aware that he had to wait for darkness ... and wondering what it would be like to live a life that didn't require sleep.
-+-
Sam abruptly came back to himself exactly thirteen hours later. He knew that even before his visuals came online and before he even made the connection to all of this sudden information and the lack of it and reasoned that for a being that didn't require sleep, he sure had just woken up.
And experienced Cybertronian dreams for the first time. His ... what had Bee called it? In ... Involuntary Video Remember ... no, Recall? His IVR had actually been ... well, boring and meaningless. It had been a few hours of him skateboarding around the Autobot base. He had spent several hours doing that during the time that Arcee had first shown up and she and Bee were being all ... buddy-buddy. Sam resolved to forget about it, for several uncomfortably obvious reasons.
After taking a look around the warehouse and determining it safe, Sam stirred from his cardboard sanctuary and shakily made it to his feet. It took him a moment to familiarize himself with his own controls. Please, please-please-please don't let this mean I'm gonna have to do this every time I want to stand, he begged silently -- electricity shooting across circuits that he could somehow feel. He hesitated in an awkward crouch as he tried to remember if he had felt that before, and with the new technology that recorded nearly ever minute of his day, he knew that he hadn't.
Did that have something to do with his IVR? What had Bumblebee said -- it was like Defrag? Sam was no computer wiz, but ... he was fairly certain that even a defrag shouldn't have made him more sensitive ... work faster? Yes. Wake up new programs? No way in hell.
He nervously completed the trip (it was a trip, of sorts. For some reason, he never truly noticed how much further from the ground he was, now) to a standing position, and then started for the door -- this caused some trouble, as he tried to take a nose dive into the floor, and barely stopped himself. After all, there was no way that a cement floor would be as forgiving as a stream bed, and even through he'd seen all of the Autobots flung around, he didn't trust his ... body to be that resilient. Sure, some cars could crash and continue working, but he had a feeling that he was made of several thousand (perhaps even millions) more small moveable parts than a car was.
Sam's next few steps were slow and tentative. He moved carefully, feeling like an idiot and thankful no one was around to see him wobble with his arms thrust out for balance. By the time he made it to the door, he was feeling slightly more secure, and moving faster. He dipped a few claws into the groove made for human hands and lifted the door, stepping outside. It was probably a loading dock for a semi, or something similar, but it was convienently sized for all fifteen feet of Sam.
Haha -- Sambot. Oh wow.
His fans flickered on miniseconds before another panic attack, and Sam waited it out unmoving, gears straining and clattering faintly. The only good thing about being metal was that he recovered more seamlessly from a panic attack than he had when he was -- was himself, or human -- whatever. A sense of disorientation accompanied the unexpected memory of the five or so he'd had as a child the one time he had been in a school play. (It was strange, he thought -- the things he had made himself forget out of embarrassment, only to remember now that he missed being ... flesh, skin and bone.)
Sam crept into the dock yard, feeling slightly hyper alert -- he certainly felt more aware than he had yesterday ... last night. Once he determined that he was as alone as he could possibly be in a city, he settled into a still position, aware that he should try transforming again (wanting to try ... or rather: wanting to succeed). The memory of last night stuck with him, however, and the remnants of his nightmare. His brain must of been metal when he'd had it -- he remembered it too clear (or was he simply letting his imagination run away with him again? It was hard to tell, sometimes).
He stood motionless for maybe thirty minutes before he actually convinced himself to try again. It went no better than last time, and he had another panic attack, fans hot within him as they pulled air in through gaps in armor and hardware and blew the hot out through vents formed especially for such a purpose. He hysterically thought that he sounded just like one of Miles' old computers, only weeks before they'd burn out.
Miles.
Sam hunkered in the best imitation of a curl that he could (a human thing, apparently, since his body was too obviously not meant to rest that way: he could feel joints straining as several hundred pounds of metal rested awkwardly against them, though programs assured him the joints could take the strain), claws curled over the irregular shape of his head. He had told Miles that he was dying, or something like it, and Mikaela -- who knew what she knew? And he was alone in England, an entire ocean away from everyone and everything he knew. Here he was, flailing about in this metal wreck, frightened by his own body and not even considering everything he should, being stupid and useless and -- and he wasn't a problem solver, he never was, goddamn it, how many times had his mother fondly reflected on the fact that he had hammered the square peg through the round hole? He wasn't a problem solver, but hell, he might not even be himself, and he had to get through this, and get back to everyone (Mikaela, and Miles, and Bee) --
and the hell with it. Fuck it. He was getting back and he was telling Miles, because Miles loved his retarded sci-fi and he'd probably kill for a chance to meet aliens, and hell, he might insist for a while that Bumblebee had a little man driving him like that one alien in MIB2, but who cared? He'd come around eventually, right?
So Sam just needed to get through this. He needed to transform, even if it was into some retarded little Mini Cooper, and get back to America, and that meant problem solving.
Alright. Okay then. Transforming scared the fuck out of him, and avoiding it wasn't possible. Then what?
He lowered his hands and lifted his head, taking in the moon-and-street-light stricken scene of the empty concrete yard. It wasn't until he tuned into the scene and actually began paying attention that he realized that there was something wrong with his fans. They were -- ... they were mimicking breathing, as creepy as it sounded. Before, they had kept him from suffering the Giant Robot Alien version of the Blue Screen of Death, but ... oh, wow, what the fuck? First, they spun one way, then went into reverse -- and, well, that might work well for a large creature, but Sam was starting to get all sorts of warnings. They were generating more heat, and weren't actually fulfilling their purpose, so he was starting to overheat. He actually felt hot. (But hadn't Mikaela said that they only felt extremes of temperature, and then as pain, or was Sam's brain translating the warnings into something he was familiar with?)
That completely derailed him for some time, trying to undo whatever had started them to cycle that way, but Sam was not that computer savvy and he had to just keep wanting them off and sitting there until the heat dissipated. By the time that happened, he was more frustrated than frightened, and tried to transform again -- failed, again, and lurched to his feet, pacing and feeling more thwarted just because he had nothing to strike out at. If transforming freaked him out so badly that he messed it up so bad, then what? Was he going to just ... haunt some shipyard for the rest of his years -- centuries? Alone, in freaking England? This was worse than some of the video games he had played that he never got past the first level because the clues on how to get through it were so obscure that he couldn't figure it out without looking up some sort of guide online!
Alright, alright, so -- what did he do when he had to do something that terrified him? He -- either ran from it, or did it fast, right? Well, what good that does! He couldn't do either of those, so what was he -- ... wait, run from it, or did it fast ... or, perhaps, he did it very slowly? Like the few times he had been up late on some stupid scary web site, then realized it was three in the morning and he had to leave the safety of the computer behind and either get ready for bed, or go to the bathroom. He did it all very slowly, watching the shadows, pausing often.
Could he transform slowly?
Familiar with the process by now, Sam easily triggered the search function in his processor, and bent all of his attention to that. If he could find the thing that made him transform, he could possibly ... change it, make it work somehow. After he rifled through a few unfamiliar things, one of which he thought might have been what hijacked his head and disoriented him while it sliced cars apart, Sam discovered that the important part of what allowed a Cybertronian to transform was a mathematical equation. On hindsight, this made a lot of sense, considering his scanning program thing turned the Mini into a bunch of numbers, but ...
At least Sam was able to isolate and discard the data he had entered himself -- everything that had to do with the Mini. That wasn't what he was interested in, after all -- it was if there was a time function, and if he could write one in (though, having never been very strong in math or science ... ). It took a long moment, because Sam was looking for seconds of sort, remembering how fast Bumblebee could transform, when he really should have been looking for the units that originated from the wrong-time-device, that was probably a chronometer in Cybertronian time. (This made sense, also in hindsight. Why Sam had originally assumed that even super advanced alien robots worked with flawed human measurements of time ... well, Sam's brain worked in mysterious ways, it seemed.)
The original entry was six thousand and twenty four of those miniseconds. In a vague attempt to be somewhat accurate or at least mathematical about the entire subject, Sam estimated that he made it a third of the way into the transformation before freaking out too badly, and therefore three was a good number to multiply that time by -- then decided a little longer couldn't hurt, and rounded the number off to twenty-four thousand and one hundred miniseconds. His ego might not take kindly to this change, when he eyeballed it, but he figured that he could try to trim it down over time, and that no one could get off the couch and run five miles straight off, anyway.
The one good thing about all those failures was that Sam already knew what pose was ideal for starting the transformation from a bipedal form toward the car. He got ready, mentally crossed his fingers (he wasn't sure his claws would bend that way), and triggered it.
All across his body, things loosened -- like a hood latch releasing, and a thousand whirling gears kicked into gear, spinning away as all sorts of small bits shifted even as the larger parts began to move. His control slipped away, as always, and his body began to move on it's own, locks releasing to allow joints to reverse and entire parts of him to relocate. Warnings flashed to life, blaring over the chatter of his busy processor, warning of the sudden plunge his energy levels were taking, and Sam's spare attention focused completely on the active measurements of his power, anxiety rising at the cold hard facts of the dangerously low levels he was headed for.
He was just getting ready to panic enough to interrupt the entire process and end up a pile of quivering scrap when he landed hard against the cement and bounced. Sam frantically demanded attention from his exceptionally busy circuits, and realized that he'd just landed on his wheels.
Holy crap, he had wheels!
The blaring warning of his power levels was ignored in favor of gaping in awe as glass (it wasn't glass, he didn't know what the hell it was, but it wasn't glass) formed across the gaps of his doors and windshield, and he would have flinched if he could as the final touches snapped a metal cover over his gas tank (his intake valve, apparently), and the arms of newly made windshield wipers snapped down at the newly finished windshield. The glass connected to the roof just as it clacked into place and the formed-less-than-miniseconds-before new rubber popped against the clear material.
Sam might have continued to hang still and gape in awe for a while if the frantic warnings stopped being the equivalent of 'plug in now or lose your data' and became enforced hibernation. For the second time in less than twenty four hours, Sam went dormant as normal Cybertronian energy abandoned his wires and Spark energy spilled out through them instead.
-+-
There was no obvious sign of anything happening, but just because nothing appeared strange to human eyes did not mean that there was nothing happening. As a matter of fact, for the first time in the last lunar cycle, higher processors received viable energy as the power-saving state was triggered off. For a long moment, the car was still as information rocketed from one corner of an alien consciousness to another, analyzed, turned over, filed and considered.
For the last several lunar cycles, it had been cognizant of a vague impulse to leave fairly familiar haunts and travel a certain direction. Such things were not unheard of, though the science behind the phenomena was weak as best and it labeled as superstition at worse. With a determination that was congruent to the strength of such, it had allowed itself to drift that way -- far from working toward the destination that must be held in mind, but not resisting it as some would.
Tonight, the vague impulse sharpened into a certainty. It must arrive at the destination -- it was now something to be worked toward with the exception of nothing. Considering that it had little to discourage it from following it out to the end, the engine hidden within deceptively smooth metal rumbled to life ...
... and a second, next to it, did so as if synchronized. (There was little 'as if'. Synchronization was easier to handle than it was to be forcibly separate.) With a lazy crunch of miscellany trapped between the hard floor and the black material it had mimicked, the sleek vehicle pulled out of the yellow painted square, followed by the second. The impulse was strong, now, but the urgency was not betrayed by their speed.
Woe befall any of these strange little soft things that stood between them and that destination. It may be quicker to avoid trouble than to run over it, but it was by far quickest to run over trouble than to reason with it. It did not care what any others said -- language was not a sign of intelligence ... or if it was, it did not bar madness ...
.... and madness was rife, on this horrid little round organic dirt ball.
- I'm not going to be doing intermissions -- half because I can't go on LJ right now, and half because I decided that fail-writing was fail.
- RE: ENGLAND - Since I was reminded of how extremely vague I was on details, and I've pretty much decided that the Decepticons will never get a PoV piece, this is the 411: Megatron died, and so Starscream's buddy, Skywarp, who had divorced Starscream as a friend when he went off with Megs, came back around. Starscream convinced his buddy to kidnap Sam, since a teleporter could do that and escape without retaliation from the Autobots. Only Sam did to Skywarp what he did to Prime, crashing them into the ocean. Without a Jazz for the energy to go into, it jumpstarted the conversion, and eventually Skywarp recovered and showed up again, but everyone assumes Sam is dead.
- OMG Y A MINI? I chose a Mini for a few reasons -- it's a small car, it's dorky, and I love 'em. However, it won't be Sam's final form, because ... because. BOY HAS DREAM! IS DELICATE DREAM. As to why he couldn't get anything else to scan for him ... well, to be painfully honest, I was handwaving. This is my handwave: Sam is a very unconfigurated mech, very unprepared for transforming. While a Bumblebee can pretend to be a very old car, he's got experience. Sam needed something much more similar to himself for his first transformation, and his software knows it. That's why it's a brand-new Mini.
