Author notes: Again, this particular chapters' been floating in my head a while. It came out a bit.. Long, and it jumps around a bit, but, uh.. ... Happy new year. :D
RESPOND TIME. YAY.
I-Can't-Exist: I hope the start of this chapter answers your question. :D If not.. I need to work on my story-telling skills. *cough*
Tugera: Sometimes, people do things they don't mean to do when very, very pissed off. :D
JJStar: I hope this chapter makes you cringe less. XD
Blackmoondragon: Actually, that had nothing to do with it. I hope the first scene in this chapter helps shed some light, tho.
Thing With No Talent: You, sir/ma'm, are why I continue to write this thing. I hope you know I look forward to your reviews.
Oh, it's getting so hard
Livin' with the things you do to me, uh-huh
Oh, my dreams are getting so strange
I'd like to tell you everything I see
Oh, yeah, it was like lightning!
Everybody was frightening!
And the man at the back said
'Everyone attack!', and it turned in to a ballroom blitz
And the girl in the corner said
'Boy, I wanna warn ya, it'll turn in to a ballroom blitz'
-- 'Ballroom Blitz', Sweet
Souvenir: Chapter Fourteen
"It's real, isn't it?"
"The email? Yeah.. Yeah, it's starting to look that way."
"Didja see the 'cons' faces?" A delighted laugh, made wild from the excitement of battle. "They really weren't expectin' us t'be here, that's fer sure!"
"That's why it's called a 'surprise attack', Ironhide." The joviality wasn't shared; he had seen, had spotted a single-optic faceplate amongst the small group of invaders, and wondered if the furious mech had fragged some poor spark before they had gotten there. "Well.. It's confirmed, at least."
"So.. What do we do now?" The only femme in their small group frowned. "This essentially changes everything we know about what Decepticons do with prisoners."
Somehow, they had thought even Decepticons couldn't stoop so low.
"We need to tell the Magnus, at least. After that.. I don't really know. A rescue, maybe."
"Is yer hard drive glitchin'?" The previously laughing mech stared in disbelief. "No bots' ever gone in to th' flagship and come out again!"
"Well.." The Prime took in a deep intake. "Maybe we'll be the first. After all, we can't just leave them there."
A long moment of silence passed.
"..Primus, I hope someone comes up with a plan."
Consciousness returned far too slowly for Blurrs' liking. The quick-moving speedster was so used to waking up with a start that the slow trickle of awareness quickly became an annoyance; his frame, it seemed, did not want to cooperate with the rest of him.
By the time his meta finally got in touch with the rest of him, his head was pounding with a steady and agitating rhythm. His own servo gently cradled the aching point in the back of his helm; his optics flickered online and slowly focused as he brought the strangely tingling limb in front of him.
Why his servo felt so strange quickly became apparent; the entire limb dripped with pink fluid. His own, it seemed, leaking from the back of his helm. A quick check on his systems revealed that his self-repair was already working on the problem; not enough fluid had been lost to bring about difficulty.
Yet, the drops falling down his hand met a pool on the floor. Blurr stared at the pink lake and realized it had a trail; his optics followed it to eventually look to the rest of the room.
A scream died in the back of his vocalizer at what he saw; pink coated everything. The floor was all but littered in the still wet liquid and even the walls bore some marks; the fallen shelf and scattered datapads appeared to have been painted with the brightly hued fuel. The berth, as well, was all but drowned.
Blurr slowly staggered to shaking, ever-chained pedes; the pounding within his mind only intensified as the fear escalated. A shuddering, drying hand covered his mouth as he took several steps away from the wall.
A chance look towards the energon-caked shelf -- and what lay on the floor besides it -- caused the Autobot to stop in slow moving tracks. It took a moment for a shock hazed mind to digest what he was seeing as truly real and not some horrible hallucination.
The Autobot collapsed to his knees as his vocalizer finally released a deep, petrified keen; both servos covered his mouth as he tried very hard not to vomit the previous days' ration.
The last thing Blurr recalled before waking up had been Shockwaves' return; he wondered what malice he had missed for Cliffjumpers' disembodied arms to end up on the floor.
The first thing Cliffjumper realized upon waking up was that he was still very much alive. Ordinarily, this would have been a quintessential 'good thing' -- if not for the fact that the minibot remembered everything.
Bright blue optics onlined with a start. Or, rather, they attempted to; one optic was covered with a thick shroud of cloth that refused to allow proper vision. The former secretaries' HUD claimed the optic itself simply wasn't there; the patch of cloth, it seemed, served to protect the delicate internal circuitry from the air and any wayward specs of dust. He wasn't quite certain why anyone would go to the trouble of applying it.
The remaining working optic slowly roved around the room in worried silence; Cliffjumper quickly realized that he was not in Shockwaves' room or any other place remotely familiar. The walls and ceiling bore a bright whitewash and the stench of antiseptic met his olfactory sensors; he was either in an asylum or a medical ward. He wasn't certain which he would have preferred.
An attempt to move revealed that his frame was strapped down with several thick metal bands. A deep, troubled frown crossed a gray and red faceplate only to fade in confusion at the realization that he wasn't feeling any pain.
In fact, a strange, numb calm slithered across every sense that he had; even the sight of his mangled arms -- wrapped where they ended with transparent, protective plastic -- couldn't evoke more than a slightly disgruntled sense of discontent.
Perhaps, the Autobot mused, he had been drugged.
"Hey." A soft voice called from nearby, barely above a whisper. "You okay over there?"
At the angle he was restrained, it took a rather uncomfortable backwards tilt of his helm to spot who was calling him. Another medical berth lay nearby; the figure atop it was restrained to the metal in a fashion similar to the way he was held. With the awkward angle, it took a moment to realize the other frame was a minibot; the first he had seen since before his capture. That is, other than Blurr and the corpse in the closet.
Perhaps the sedatives in his system kept him calm, but Cliffjumper couldn't quite bring himself to worry too deeply about the situation. "Hi."
The pale green minibot gave him a dubious stare; she -- and she was the first blue-eyed femme he had seen, as well, since Cybertron -- even bore the same protoform mold as himself. Perhaps it was the correlation, but she seemed strangely familiar. "Wow. The doc must've pumped you up good. You in any pain?"
"Uh.." It took longer than it should have to understand the question. "..Not really. Feels.. Weird, actually." He gave the green femme a scrutinizing stare; why she seemed so familiar suddenly became clear.. "Hey, you're.. Carerra, aren't you?"
The femmes' optics widened. "How -- Oh." The surprise faded to understanding. "You're Shockwaves' new pet, huh?"
Despite the drugs in his system, Cliffjumper bristled. "I'm not --" The fury fell apart with a drug-induced abruptness; he looked away from the other minibot and fell in to silence.
"You found the ID tags, didn't you?" Carerra, however, seemed intent on continuing the conversation. "So.. You his only one, right now?"
Cliffjumper didn't quite understand the question. "What?"
"His only prisoner, pet, slave.. Whatever you wanna call it. You his only one?"
A deep frown crossed his faceplate again; it took a depressed moment to answer. "..No. The slagger kidnapped someone else with me."
"Oh, good. Ol' one-eye isn't gonna try to rush the medic, then. You've got time to heal." The femme let out an audible intake.
If the petite minibot intended to calm him with those words, she failed miserably; Cliffjumper only frowned deeper, troubled by the idea of Blurr suffering alone. He tilted his helm back in the attempt to look to the pale green paint again. "What does it matter? The same thing's going to happen if I'm healed up or not."
Carerra let out a derisive snort. "Trust me, you'll be glad you had a couple of solar cycles to rest up after Scalpel fixes those arms and optic of yours. They sedate us, sure, but they don't really bother to use painkillers. Waste of resources."
"..Fantastic." Cliffjumper groaned, shuddering his working optic shut. After several seconds, he glanced back to get as proper view as he could at the femme. "You know, when we found the ID tags, we assumed you were all offline.."
"The others are, actually." A deep, saddened sigh came from the green femme. "Well, okay, I don't really know what happened to Hubcap, but the others.." She took in a deep, shaky intake. "..I saw the others offline with my own optics."
"I'm.. I'm sorry." Before his capture, Cliffjumper had been rude and abrasive on a regular basis; the empathy he felt now wasn't something he had often felt before. Before Blurr, he had never really felt sympathy at all; he found himself sputtering with emotions he wasn't used to processing. "What.. What happened to them?"
A long moment of silence passed. Despite the strange angle of his vision, the red minibot could clearly see the depression crossing the femmes' entire frame as she stared at the ceiling.
"Volks and I were captured together. We were security guards just escorting some rich Towers kid. We didn't even know Decepticons still existed, so we really didn't stand a chance when they attacked us. Volks, she.. She might've gone through training to do the job, but she was still.. Innocent, you know?"
Carerra paused a moment; her optics shut down with the misery the memories evoked. "Shockwave was pretty high ranking even back then, so he got us both easy. Hubcap was already in his room when he brought us there. He'd been there a while, actually.." A shuddering intake was taken and released. "Primus, we were so glad we had him there to warn us about everything that was gonna happen. He even tried to protect us a lot. Like some kind of.. Big brother.."
Cliffjumper shifted in the restraints and laid back in to as comfortable a position as he could; he found himself empathizing with the femmes' described relationship with the long-dead mech. His relationship with Blurr wasn't much different.
"..Anyway, not too long after Shockwave got us, he got hold of Windcharger. I think it was something like a month later that he got Fallback. I think it took Fallback joining us before we figured out that ol' one-eye had a.. A thing for minibots. I mean.." The femme let out a short, bitter laugh. "It's one thing to have a spark-slave, another to have a whole fraggin' harem. I don't think there was ever a night Shockwave didn't 'face with one of us. Does he still have the cages in his room?"
The unexpected question took Cliffjumper by surprise; he sputtered a moment before he was able to answer. "What? He, Uh.. He locks us in a closet.."
"Huh." Carerra seemed to muse. "Guess with only two of you, there's no point. He'll get others, though, sooner or later, and then he'll get cages. There'll be others.." The green femme shook her head to clear it; her voice became quiet and subdued when she began to speak again. "It was half a decade before he got Tap-Out. He was a trained cyber-ninja, you know. How the 'cons even got him, I don't know, but Tap-Out.. I guess Shockwave considered him exotic or something, 'cause once the ninja-bot joined us, Shockwave fragged him every night for at least a month."
The femme let out a snort. "I still remember.. The first night Tap-Out was brought in.. The look on his face when we had to tell him why he was there.. And then Shockwave coming back and.. He looked right at poor Tap-Out, right in the optics, and I was just too slagging scared to try and help him and I guess the others were, too.. But he asked poor Tap-Out if cyber-ninjas were really as 'limber' as he had heard." A deep, un-femme-like snarl came from the petite green frame; it quickly died down back in to depression. "..I guess Tap-Out's ninja training made him stronger than the rest of us for him to do what he did.."
A soft hum rent the air. The tone, although deep in voice, was even and almost melodic in nature; occasionally, the gentle voice would stop to take in a breath, but otherwise continued on unimpeded. The figure releasing the droning sound sat, unmoving, in a cross-legged position on the floor; fingers cupped together perched on still knees.
Tap-Out hadn't moved from his meditation for over an hour; he wouldn't move until bare cycles before Shockwave returned. He never did.
Nearby, five other figures sat amongst chairs that dwarfed them. Carerra and Volks sat huddled in the chaise, the slightly taller green femme fruitlessly attempting to comfort the shivering orange frame. Hubcap lay back in the chair in subdued silence, looking on as Windcharger laid back on the table with Fallbacks' help.
The gray and red mech hissed as he laid back and allowed Fallback to open his spark chamber. Burns were a common problem; luckily, the brown minibot had basic first aid training. He was the closest thing to a medic that they would get.
"Easy.. Easy, there, mate." Fallback frowned at his wincing friend; the burn gel he had found in what they had dubbed the 'Pit closet' was held in one hand. "Try not to move much, mate. We've only got 'bout twenty cycles 'fore Shockwave gets back, so we haveta do this fast."
"Thanks, mech.." Windcharger hissed, optics shutting down at the first touch on his spark chamber. "I'm fine, though. The damage is three solar cycles old, already.. My self repair's should've fixed most of it by now.."
"Stop complaining and let Fallback help you." Hubcap smirked; still, sadness marked his expression.
"Fine, fine.." The hissing mech dared to laugh. "I swear, you guys are like a bunch of mother micro-hens.."
The brief chuckles that came from the joke died down in to an uneasy silence; the only sound that passed came from Tap-Outs' even humming and Windchargers' pain. Thankfully, the gel was applied with several minutes to spare and the gray chest plate was closed again without fear or hurry. Then, the five simply waited, occasionally glancing at the berthside clock or their own internal chronometers.
It was, sadly, simply another ordinary day.
The humming stopped at two cycles to; only then did Tap-Out stood and onlined his optics. After so long in captivity, the group had grown used to these actions and the near exact schedule that they kept.
Unusually, Tap-Out did not join them by the lounge. Instead, the olive cyber-ninja glared fiercely at the door.
"..Tap-Out?" Hubcap frowned, taking a single step towards his fellow captive. "..Tap-Out, mech, what are you doing?"
There was no verbal response; the cyber-ninja glanced sideways at the bright yellow mech with an unchanging expression before looking back to the door.
The door slid open with a soft hiss.
As soon as it did, Tap-Out moved; with grace and speed only a bot with his training would have had, the minibot crouched and leapt, foot outstretched. The figure he aimed at didn't have time to move; with a resounding clatter, Shockwave let out a shocked yell and fell back.
Tap-Out didn't stop moving; he turned and ran down the hall.
"Tap-Out!" Hubcap gasped before trying to follow suit; the rest of his companions roused and rushed behind him.
Unfortunately, Shockwave was not rendered unconscious by the blow; he stood hurriedly, catching the sudden rush of Autobots in his claws. Thick, sharp talons pushed at the yelling and struggling minibots; they were shoved back inside their prison, but not before they had seen the trail of pink.
In the few short seconds they had been in the hall, Tap-Out had managed to knock down and slaughter several Decepticons that had been in his way. As the door slid shut, the five could do nothing more than stare at the sealed off entryway; yells and screams could be heard from the other side.
"..Holy.. Holy slag.." Carerra sputtered in shock. "Do.. Do you think he'll really.. He'll really escape?"
"Wonder why he didn't tell us he was going to do that.." Volks mused aloud in a stunned whisper.
The cacophony from the hall went on for several long cycles more. After nearly five minutes of what was doubtless chaos from the other side, the volume rose with a sudden clamor before dying down with a swift halt. The prisoners exchanged worried glances.
The door slid open again. Shockwave stood there, shaking and fuming; behind him, a Decepticon walked by, dragging a small gray frame behind him. A trail of pink was left in its' wake.
Volks let out a shrill wail of despair and buried herself in the arms of a horrified Hubcap.
"No, no.. Tap-Out.. No, no, no.." Windcharger moaned.
"..Three solar cycles later, on the way to our daily ration, Windcharger grabbed the gun from a passing Decepticon and shot himself in the head. He was offline before he hit the floor."
Cliffjumper stared at the ceiling with a wide, horrified optic; the tale had thus far rendered him unable to speak and sent his frame shuddering. He knew that the femmes' past could very well be his future.
"I think Windchargers' suicide broke Fallback. The next morning, he started laughing and just.. Didn't stop." Carerra had long since fallen in to a whisper. "I don't know where the 'cons took him, but they dragged him away while he was still laughing. Never saw him again." She let out a deep, mournful breath. "It was maybe a stellar cycle later when all the femme slaves were rounded up. The last of the Allspark energy was gone.. Or, at least, that's what the 'cons said. So they took us all away to what the slaggers' called the 'breeding sector'. Couldn't even tell you how many brats they forced out of me since then."
Cliffjumper opened and closed his mouth several times at this revelation; still, he was unable to form a proper response through the horror locking up his frame.
"That's where Volks offlined. She was smaller than I was.. Smaller than most minibots, even. After the fifth one, she just couldn't take it. Offlined underneath some slagging 'con.." Carerra took in a deep intake; not once had the femme's voice risen or choked up with an emotion greater than base bitterness. "Never found out what happened to Hubcap. Couldn't even tell you if he's still online or not."
"He.. He's.." Cliffjumper sputtered; a shock-hazed mind was entirely too compounded with horror to rethink his words. "..He's not. When.. Hubcap's been in the closet. His body was there when we got there."
There was a moment of silence. Then, the femme let out a deep, sorrowful keen.
"Oh.. Hubcap.."
Only then did Carerra begin to cry.
I'm reaching out for something
Touching nothing's all I ever do
Oh, I softly call you over
When you appear, there's nothing left of you, uh-huh
Now, the man in the back is ready to crack
As he raises his hands to the sky
And the girl in the corner is everyone's mourner
She could kill you with the wink of her eye
Oh, yeah, it was electric
So frightfully hectic
And the band starting leaving
'Cause they all stopped breathing
-- 'Ballroom Blitz', Sweet
..I seriously watched 'how to do an Australian accent' on youtube for Fallbacks' few lines. XD