Man, this was like the good 'ol days, writing the chapter the day of! Lemme just say:
Oof.
This was rough, and I'm sorry, but also, I'm not. XP Hope you enjoy!
"C'mon, Kay, I could run faster than this with no legs!" Ironhide chided. Kay gave an annoyed growl but continued to push herself, pumping her arms in legs. Every footstep resulted in loud slaps against the tarmac, sharp tones that shot upwards and buried themselves deep within Kay's ears. Her legs were burning, her lungs screaming for oxygen, every muscle in her torso sore from the heavy load on her back. And yet, with every step she was able to take, she was gaining on the cadet in first, his eyes widening with every backwards glance.
"Go, go, go!" Ironhide screamed in her ear. Kay let out a frustrated yell with her final push, launching herself over the finish line of the run the old mech had set up for soldiers new to NEST. It took about fifty feet for Kay to come to a complete stop, the woman waiting for Ironhide to unwrap his holoform whose weight he had increased halfway through the run from his position on her back, and then she dropped to the ground, heaving in oxygen with every gasp of her lungs. The soldier who she had passed a mere ten feet before the finish line also sat beside her, flashing a bright smile and an incredibly breathy laugh.
"You're a college kid?" he managed, his voice wavering with each inhale and exhale. Kay could only nod, lightly hitting at Ironhide's ankle. The mech casually moved his holoform one step to the left, casting his large shadow over Kay's face and cooling the air significantly. "That was some impressive time," he added. Kay finally was able to crack her eyes opening, giving a thankful smile to the soldier.
"Thanks. One of the few pros to being stuck with Ironhide for a while." The holoform, watching more soldiers cross the line and collapse to the ground, absently kicked at Kay's shoulder with enough force to hurt but not enough to leave a bruise. Kay let out a small whine then sighed. "Yeah, I deserved that."
It took two minutes, but soon Kay was standing on her feet again, watching the rest of the soldiers crossing the finish line or recovering on the ground. Ironhide looked towards Kay, giving her a small, genuine smile when she caught his gaze.
"You really did good," he said quietly, just enough for Kay to hear. A blush hit Kay's cheeks and a bright smile split her features, true happiness glowing in her heart. Ironhide rarely gave compliments, so this was a rare occurrence. Usually she would gush loudly, calling out to anyone nearby that Ironhide had complimented her and promptly receive a scowl and a punch in response, but Kay was not sadistic. Ironhide had a reputation to create for the new soldiers, however, so she kept quiet.
Five minutes after the last person crossed the line, Ironhide barked out an order to move, heading off towards the gun range. Kay leapt to her feet and kept close to him, hoping to avoid another conversation with the soldier who finished second. He was kind, it was nothing against him, Kay was just uncomfortable speaking to new people.
"Grab a rifle, a partner, and pick a lane!" Ironhide ordered before he even finished walking. Kay moved towards a rifle, but the holoform stopped her, looking pointedly towards the silver bracelet around her wrist. "Make one with that." Kay glanced towards it with slightly crinkled brows.
"Can it do that? Is there enough material?" Ironhide shrugged.
"Try it." Kay gave a single laugh to the nonchalant response but otherwise obeyed, imagining the rifle the rifle in great detail and sending the silent command to the bracelet. The metal expanded and, slowly but steadily, began to grow into an unshapely mass. Many of the soldiers stopped in their movements to stare with wide eyes, especially as the mass of metal suddenly began to form itself until Kay had an M4 held within her hands, missing only an ammo magazine.
"What the hell?" many of the soldiers questioned in an assortment of variations. Kay flashed Ironhide a wide smile, excitement-fuelled adrenaline racing through her system.
"Well?" the mech prompted, motioning towards one of the open lanes. Kay walked up, put on the protective gear, clicked a magazine into place, took aim, and fired. The kick-back was the same, the firing rate the same, everything perfect. It worked.
"That's amazing," Kay heard a familiar voice comment. She glanced back to see the same soldier from before, carefully holding his own magazine-less rifle at its neutral position.
"Isn't it?" Kay agreed, looking over the weapon in awe once more.
"Mind if I'm your partner?" he added, motioning towards the remaining safety gear. Kay motioned towards the gear, lowering her rifle and clicking the safety on. As the soldier equipped the gear, he flashed Kay another smile, holding a hand out.
"I'm Jake," he introduced.
"Kay," she responded with her own smile that she hoped wasn't reflecting as much awkwardness as she felt. Jake glanced towards the target at the end of the lane.
"So, would you like to finish your shots?" Kay let out a small laugh.
"Yeah, that'd be smart, don't you think?" Jake laughed with her, stepping back with his arms held towards the lane in a 'have at it' gesture. Kay stepped forward again, rose the weapon, set her breathing, and fired. Her mind naturally chose controlled burst of firing rather than the rapid full onslaught many of the other soldiers preferred, resetting the body quickly and efficiently. When the click of the empty magazine sounded Kay froze, slowly releasing her breath. She smiled, clicked the safety out of habit as she lowered her weapon, and hit the call button for the marker, her smile growing as the target neared.
"How the heck?" Jake demanded quietly beside her. Kay shrugged, forcing herself to be humble as pride bubbled deep within her chest. The shots were all concentrated in a small radius either directly above the heart or head, not a single shot off mark.
"I don't know, really. Just lots of focus and a refusal to blink." Jake laughed at that one, pulling the hole-riddled target off the clip and putting a new one up.
"Well, I'm about to embarrass myself, so if you'd just stare at the wall, that'd be greatly appreciated." Kay fully laughed at that one, but refused to turn around. Instead she watched Jake fire off his own shots, producing an equally impressive target.
"That wasn't bad at all!" Kay chided, lightly punching the soldier on the arm. He laughed.
"Yeah, not as bad as I thought I'd do."
The duo switched a few more times before training everyone, Ironhide excusing the group. Kay bid farewell to him and Jake, happily heading to her room. She spent many hours in there with KiKi, visited by Alpha for a while. The wolf had pawed at the door twice, startling both Kay and KiKi out of a light doze and sending them tumbling to the ground.
Kay gave an exaggerated groan as she pushed off the ground, opening the door and poking her head out up close to the Cybertronian wolf's muzzle.
"What do you want?" she whined, dragging out her last word for emphasis on her half-hearted annoyance. Alpha didn't respond, but rather picked up Kay by the back of her shirt and transformed around her. Kay froze for a moment, surprised by the sudden changes in her position, then hit the seat warmer and cuddled into the soft leather. KiKi hopped in through the open passenger window and then Alpha took off, expertly maneuvering through the halls. She exited the hangar and gunned it, Kay not even bothering to open her eyes in her exhaustion from earlier that morning. The femme came to a careful halt on the edge of the island, resting lower on her wheels.
"Girls' Night Out?" Kay mumbled, halfway back to her earlier nap.
"It's only two in the afternoon, but sure. You could say that." Kay smiled while curling into herself further. KiKi carefully padded over to her and took a spot in the main curl, became a black ball of adorable floof in Kay's lap.
Alpha woke the two up three hours later with a careful but firm shake and call of Kay's voice. The young woman snapped upwards, her glasses halfway off her face. She pushed them up with one hand and used the other to pull the hair that had escaped from her ponytail out of her face, mumbling a tired, "what?" All of that happened with two seconds of being woken up.
"There's an Autobot landing tonight," Alpha explained as she turned and took off back towards the hangar. "Optimus said you could go along."
"Really?!" Kay squealed in excitement, KiKi leaping upwards with her own yowl of shock. Alpha laughed while Kay squished KiKi close, barely able to contain her excitement.
"Yes, really. He said to get dressed in the NEST fatigues Colonel Lennox left for you in your room and meet Bee at the main hangar." Alpha weaved through the crowd forming near the main hangar, instead taking off for the dormitories in a deceptively relaxed fashion. She wasn't even able to fully stop when Kay leapt out, KiKi still in her arms, and bolted straight into her room, letting KiKi down and shutting down before rapidly changing into the NEST uniform. When she burst out of the room two minutes later, hair now controlled and body clad in completely different clothes, she almost ran into Alpha's leg. The wolf gave a deep laugh.
"You're a little too excited for a three-hour flight," Alpha stated. Kay leapt upwards onto her usual perch on Alpha's back without responding, a massive smile splitting her features. Alpha padded away from Kay's room for the third time that day, amused at the woman squirming.
When they entered the hangar, Kay leapt off the back of her mount and half-ran-half-walked over to Bee, watching his holoform appear and smile wide.
"You look excited." Kay nodded rapidly, watching everyone else prepare for takeoff.
"So where are we going?" she asked. "And who is coming to Earth?"
"Middle of Nowhere, America and a mech name Mirage," Bee answered, carefully wrapping an arm around Kay's waist and holding her close. "Did you have fun at training today?" Kay laughed.
"Yeah, I guess fun's a word you could use. Good shots at the range, finished first at the race with Ironhide on my back." Bee laughed then.
"Ironhide was on your back?"
"Oh, yeah. Piggyback ride."
"Kay." The two calmed in their laughter, Kay beaming towards Optimus' holoform as he walked up.
"Thank you so much for letting me come along, Optimus," she said. The mech gave her a warm smile back.
"It'll be good experience," he responded with a wink before walking off. Kay slowly turned back towards Bee.
"What was that supposed to mean?"
"Load up!" The command came before Bee could answer, something the mech leapt on and used to shove Kay into his alt and ignore the question. The young woman noticed it, frowned to herself as she watched Bee's holoform disappear, then sighed and let it go as she settled back in the seat.
"Three hours?" she questioned again.
"Yep." It was a long three hours, longer than Kay expected. She wasn't able to sleep, her mind racing from the nap she had taken earlier huddled in Alpha's alt form. She talked with Bee, a lot, really, but even then they had thirty minutes left in the flight and another hour of driving.
And they had to do all this on the way back.
Kay took in another deep breath, staring unblinkingly at the roof of Bee's alt above her head. Bee's holoform sat beside her, dim as she requested, with a small frown on his features.
"You sure this is safe?" he asked for the third time. Kay shrugged.
"No. But it's the only way I learned how to use my powers growing up, and with the Matrix energy racing through my veins I'd like to know what else I'm dealing with." She blinked once then resumed her small trance, waiting until every muscle in her body felt calm and relaxed. Then she slowly released her power.
It was always a strange sensation, this slow 'release' and she called it. It started in the base of her skull, blooming outwards to fill the cavity then lazily tracing down her veins towards her heart with feathery-electric caresses to the cells of her body. Sparks were left behind, glowing and bright and energetic, ready to do whatever requested of them. When the trickle of energy reached her heart, it exploded outwards with every beat, grasping forward and flooding her body with energy and power. In her relaxed state, the process was the slowest, leaving time for Kay to feel out every new sensation, to poke and prod at the sparks and see how they'd respond.
Right now, she was being slammed with the sensations of the Bots around her, specifically Bee. It made sense, of course, she was surrounded by the mech, but it was still overwhelming. Kay gulped for air, worrying Bee further, and forced herself to focus, to look around now.
"Kay?" Bee was next to her, his holoform still dim but now slapping her across the face. "Are you okay?"
"Fine," she wheezed, sitting up. Bee didn't believe her at all, but she stopped answering him, instead looking around with wide eyes. Everything was bright blue, radiating from the sparks of the Autobots within the belly of the plane. Besides that, however, the humans were pulsing. Not as bright, but there was something still there.
Kay pushed her way out of Bee's alt, spinning around as she took everything in. She went straight for the two brightest pulsing humans, having to get close to see their faces. Lennox and Epps.
"Kay, what's going on?" Lennox asked, carefully standing.
"Power rush," she responded, carefully stepping back and whirling around to look at more of her surroundings. Even the engines were pulsing something, but it wasn't blue like everyone else. It was a smoky gray, almost blending in with the dulled colors of the normal world, but it was thick enough to be visible.
"Kay." A hand touched her shoulder at that moment, a careful and innocent gesture, but it wasn't normal at all. Kay gasped and lurched away from the contact, her nerves exploding as the Matrix power jumped to connect with it. Her own two feet wrapped around each other and she fell to the ground, the shock racing through her body.
"Oh no." Three seconds later Kay was falling through some night air somewhere on Earth. She knew it was still Earth from the rapidly approaching buildings below her. "Crap crap crap crap teleport!" The remaining energy hovering in her cells exploded in a flash of yellow and then Kay was face-planting the floor of the C17, the crash echoing throughout the entire shape of the plane. There was a mixture of surprised shouts and questions, with a cluster of holoforms and two soldiers around Kay.
"Kay, what happened?" Bee demanded as she pushed up off the floor.
"Yeah, um, power test gone wrong," she managed, coughing from her dry throat. "So, updates, I can sense energon readings, all these soldiers," she motioned in a large circle, "except for the new ones have residual energon in their bloodstreams, I can see energy coming from the engines of the plane, and holoforms touching me when I'm in a super energized state like that will cause me to teleport."
"What is going on?" a familiar voice questioned, walking up. "'Power test'? 'Teleport'? Kay, you were glowing yellow back there, what was that?" Jake demanded. Kay nodded, running a hand through her hair as Ratchet did a quick physical check.
"Right, yeah, new group. I'm not classified anymore, am I?" Kay asked, glancing towards Lennox. The new Colonel sighed, glancing around.
"Not to these people, they all technically have clearance."
"Cool." Kay turned towards Jake and the rest of the new soldiers sitting behind where he was standing. "I have powers. I can teleport, manipulate things, slow time pretty good, but the easiest one is switching between dimensions." There was a long, loud silence. "Right, good, what do we still have, an hour and twenty minutes? You guys got a while to digest, I got a while to recover," she gave Ratchet a pointed look as he did his fifth scan then stood, walking back to where Bee's driver's side door was still open. "Did I do that?" Bee gave a single nod. "Right, sorry. I'm going to sit and just think and let this energy rush calm down naturally."
The next hour and twenty-three minutes was definitely tense. Kay was bombarded with questions and answered every one, even those that came over the comm and were echoing through Bee's alt. The soldiers only seemed satisfied bout ten minutes before arriving at the landing sight, barely enough time for Kay to recover from the sore throat she had been developing.
The medium-sized convoy of military vehicles and flashy cars stopped at the edge of a large field, long time abandoned based off of the various tall weeds and grasses. Kay stepped out of Bee's alt, moving out of the way for him to transform. Ratchet and Optimus followed suit, keeping aware of the humans milling about their pedes.
"Mirage is on course to land in the middle of that field, about five hundred yards away," Optimus explained, pointing towards the landing zone. "The three of us will go to meet him first and ensure he is acclimated before meeting the rest of you."
"Sounds good, Optimus," Lennox agreed, appearing on Kay's right. Epps took her left, flashing his friendly smile and clapping her on the shoulder.
"You look natural in that uniform," he stated, a glint in his eyes. Kay rolled her own eyes and gave him a light smack but still thanked him for the compliment, years of manners grilled into her by her grandmother. The group of soldiers consisted of the six newbies, six veterans, Epps, Lennox, and Kay. The group wasn't large but it was powerful enough, with no expectation of a visit by Decepticons.
"How long are we going to have to wait?" Jake asked, curious rather than annoyed. The follow-up echoes from the soldiers around him were annoyed, though. A loud boom cut everyone off, a shockwave almost bowling over half of the soldiers. Kay audibly chuckled, watching the incoming meteor with interest. It was still far away, a small dot in the black of the night sky.
"With the speed he's going, he'll be here in five minutes," Ratchet stated. Everyone watched him approach in quiet. Not silence, people were too excited for that, but it was definitely quiet. Optimus, Bee, and Ratchet began out towards the landing point as the meteor grew larger and larger. It was on a straight shot.
For the wrong area.
"Run!" Lennox commanded, yanking on people to get them moving. It was too late, though. They wouldn't make it far enough. Kay made a decision, a snap judgement based off of how she was feeling and the current situation. The rapidly nearing sparks of the Bots slammed into her, much stronger than earlier, and then it slowed. Kay hadn't done this before, but she was expecting the drain to be magnificent. She created two large tendrils, wrapped them firmly around the still burning meteor, and heaved. Much like she expected, the meteor did not want to move. Kay let out a small groan, testing for the nearest dimensions she could send him to with the power she had remaining. All of them had beings in the way, the nearest empty dimension just out of reach with the power she had left.
Kay snapped back into her home dimension, the meteor a little closer and Lennox's hand almost wrapped around her arm. Kay gave him a light push with a tendril, wrapping the others back around the meteor and pouring everything she had into moving it. Inch by painful, strenuous, terrible inch it moved, closer and closer to the ground. When it touched the ground, Kay took a deep breath in, wrapped the entire meteor in her remaining power, and let go of time. The remaining momentum slammed into Kay's very bones, her skeleton rattling. Dirt exploded into the air, there was a massive rush of burning heat, and the force finally stopped. All of that happened within three seconds, the sudden drain hitting Kay hard as soon as the Bots reached them. She wavered heavily, stumbled, then fell to the ground on her butt, taking deep breaths as the world spun.
Bee was beside her, scooping her up with a worried series of whirs and beeps. Kay waved it off but still laid down, breathing slow and steady as the world finally began to calm down. A thorough scan buzzed through her body, but the lack of hasty reactions let her know she was fine.
"Just exhaustion," the medic stated, returning to Cybertronian as Mirage looked around and asked confused questions. It was a blur for Kay, a blur as Mirage chose an alt, began speaking English with a heavy Italian accent, everyone loaded up, and they all ended up back in the C17. When she finally came to, the fog clearing from her mind, the group was well in the air. In fact, many of the soldiers were gathered around a new holoform. Tall, slightly lanky, pitch black hair, and a light racing outfit of black and bright red. Black jeans, black boots, red shirt, and a black leather jacket with red stripes. A lot of black, really.
"Who's that?" Kay mumbled, rubbing at her eyes. Her brain was trying to yell at her, probably some obvious answer, but it wasn't working.
"That's Mirage." Kay glanced towards Bee's holoform, scrunching her eyebrows slightly.
"Have you been there the whole time?" Bee rose an eyebrow.
"Yeah. Are you okay?" Kay shrugged, laying down again and curling up in the seat.
"I bet it's the exhaustion. Can you ask Ratchet?" There was a pause before the answer.
"You're right. He said the only thing that'll help is sleep." Kay smiled.
"I like that cure." She curled further, smiling happily as actual tiredness began to pull her down into darkness. "Wake me when we get back, okay?"
"Yes, ma'am." Kay smiled, blindly grabbed for Bee's hand, gave it a quick peck, then tossed it back as she finally went to sleep.