Notes/ just another 'mini-chapter' again after a few longer ones. I was going to keep on going, but this just looked right as a short little chapter. So fair enough. Something to post as an update while I keep on writing.
A reviewer very recently made a very interesting point about Bulkhead. Maybe too much of a punch first and question later kind of bot, that he really was not meant to be on TFP. Bulk' is a bit tricky to write. I'll work on toning him and the thinking with his fists thing, down a bit in future chapters.
Drenched from a sudden start of the rainy season, and still dressed in her school clothes, Miko pushed open the door to her family's apartment building. She let a large heavy bag of sticky rice, that she had carried on one shoulder, drop to the floor. And she then processed to dig through her book bag, swinging from her other shoulder, looking for her keys, while she juggled two grocery bags. Somewhere in the bag, her cellphone rang loudly, and she cringed at the high volume she had meant to lower on the train, but had not, and choose now to simply ignore it for lack of any free hands to work with.
"Miko!" someone said from somewhere beyond the building's locked security doors. And a second later, her schoolmate Shinju, who lived a floor below her, yanked open the door to let her inside. Emily, another friend and schoolmate from somewhere three floors above, hurried past Shinju, to grab one of the grocery bags, just as it was about to be dropped.
"Thank you," Miko mumbled politely. She finally managed to find the needed keys, swung the book bag over both of her shoulders and lifted up the bag of rice again.
"We lost you once we all got off the train," Emily said, with a silly and sad pouting look obvious meant with humor. "You didn't wanna walk home with us?"
Emily, an exchange student from somewhere in America, had been speaking to her in fast and excitable English. She still tended to do that both out of habit and because it was obviously much simpler, and required far less effort, whenever she was around English speakers. But Shinju could barely understand a word of it, and Miko, laughing slightly, reminded her friend to try Japanese instead.
"I needed to go to the grocery store," Miko finally said in reply to the original question, and speaking in her own language. She shrugged slightly and gestured with her eyes toward her grocery bags.
"We are on our way to Hayami's house, to go over some ideas for the science competition," Shinju said. "You coming?"
Again Miko gestured with her eyes toward the grocery bags.
"So, we'll drop the groceries off in your apartment and we can go," Emily said. She spoke slowly as she always did when she tried to speak in Japanese, but still she certainly was speaking better than she often said she thought she could.
"Hayami's mother will have leftovers," Shinju put in. "Four people in their house, and she always cooks for seven. She won't mind if you grab some food while we work. Then you get a hot meal too."
"Maybe some other time," Miko answered. She could cook for herself well enough. She'd been doing it since she got home from America to find her mother busier than ever with work and endless socializing into the night. And of course her father working away in Thailand was never anything new. Miko felt a headache coming on, and she longed for a quick hot showing before a fast bowl of rice and vegetables, and a couple hours to do homework in peace before she went to bed.
"You sure, Miko?" Emily asked in her hesitant and cautions Japanese.
"You can always come and meet us at Hayami's if you get lonely and change your mind," Shinju added, after Miko had nodded her certainly about declining the invitation.
"Thanks," Miko answered, as she grabbed the grocery grab that Emily still held for her, and moved to step toward the elevator. As soon as she had grabbed for it though, her phone, still buried in the book bag on her shoulders rang again. Another text message notification. She passed the bag quickly back to her schoolmate, and this time she hurriedly retrieved the phone.
Staring at the message showing on her tiny screen, Miko blinked a couple of times in baffled confusion, looking at a screen filled with Cybertronain code, showing in its usual green again a black background. Her confusion fast gave way to fear and concern, and she stared again before scrolling to the earlier missed messages and finding more had been sent to her in Cybertronian.
"You okay, Miko?" Emily asked. She had fallen back into speaking English again, in her obvious concern for the look she must have seen hon her friend's face.
"I… I'm good, Miko mumbled back a reply, and grabbed the bag again. "I gotta go. Two both have fun."
She was hurrying for the elevator before either of her friends and schoolmates could further react.
Running off the elevator as soon as she had gotten tot he ninth floor, Miko hurried to her family's empty apartment, discarded the bags of food onto the tiled floor of the tiny kitchen, and raced immediately for the little living room beyond that, where she knew she had last left her lap top. After turning it on, and while she let it boot up, she grabbed her cellphone again and typed in a hurried text message.
Get online NOW. Message me. Emergency.
A reply took a little while, but she expected it would. And as she waiting, staring expectantly at her laptop screen, the phone rang again. She grabbed it and stared for a second with a sinking heart, at another message in code she could not read. Eventually her computer chimed, indicating an incoming call through her messenger service and she hurried activated her webcam, she she clicked to accept the call.
"Miko," Raf said somewhere on the other end of the line. The view on Miko's screen showed that he was in his room, in front of a bookshelf overstuffed with textbooks, the unstable shaking meant he was surely trying to balance his own laptop, somewhere, while he moved to put it down somewhere stable. "It's four in the morning over here. What the scrap..."
"I know, I know," Miko mumbled in apology. "But I need your help. You're the only person I know of on Earth, who can read Cybertronian!"
"What?" Raf only sounded baffled, and his looked at her, confused, over his webcam. Slowly through he confusion gave way to obvious concern of his own, as he mumbled, "Miko, the bots always message us in English..."
"Why do you think I was so baffled I urgently called you, when I found texts from someone today in Cybertronain," Miko answered quickly. She held her phone up to her cam, to let him have a look at the text on its screen. "Raf, please tell me you can read this, and work out who it's actually from."
"Hmm..." Raf appeared to considered for a moment. "Okay. Can you send me still images of your phone screen? I think I need to copy that out onto paper so I can figure it out."
"Gimme a few minutes," he said after Miko had sent the requested images, taken by holding her phone close to the webcam.
"Maybe these are from Bumblebee," Miko reasoned while Raf worked at his desk, writing on paper beside the corner he'd used to set down his computer. "Maybe he was trying to message you in his language because he knew you'd read it and laugh, and he sent it all to the wrong number by accident."
The simple explanation was the only think she could think of, and it sounded reasonable to hope it was only a simple mistake they would all later laugh about. She wanted to think that perhaps her growing panic over it was silly, that she had bothered him before the crack of dawn over nothing. But something about the whole thing just felt wrong, and now, alone in her family apartment she glanced around, nervous and not sure why.
"Any luck?" she asked, looking at her webcam. She kept her voice even and smiled a little to hide the strange growing feeling of anxiety.
"Miko," Raf said, suddenly looking up from his work with an expression of unmistakable fear on his face. He made eye contact with her over their computers. "Grab what you need, fast. I think you've gotta run."
"What? Run? Run where? Raf, who was that? What do these messages say?"
"I'm going to call 'Bee. He can talk to the rest of the bots. Someone will know what to do. They've always said they're only a space bridge away. That's got to mean someone can come and help you… Miko run. Get away from your building."
"I'm not going anywhere until you tell me what the frag is going on!"
"It appears those text messages were sent somehow, by Starscream," Raf hurriedly explained. "I would guess he was taunting you with those messages. He wouldn't know any of us could translate them…. Or maybe he would. I...I don't know. He claims to have your address and an operational space bridge. Miko, I don't know what he could possibly want with you of any of us, but let's not find out..."
"Scrap," Miko said loudly. And it was then that she finally moved to run.
Racing quickly down the hall, she dashed into her bedroom, dumped the contents of her book bag into a careless heap on the floor, and stuffed in the first warm sweater she could grab from a hanger inside the closest. Running back through the place, she grabbed a family picture – taken three years before, from it's place in a frame on a bookshelf, a decent handful of snack food from the kitchen, her school ID, and her laptop and phone.
The hallway was empty when she stepped out of the apartment with her full bag. And she made a quick dash for the elevator several doors away. Riding back to the ground floor, she left the elevator again as soon as its doors reopened, and made a dead run for the main security doors, and out into the street. She managed to run half a block, through the crowd on the sidewalk that never seemed to really thin out all that much, and she might have just kept on running, if not for one loud bang somewhere behind her, which made her turn at once and look.
A space bridge had opened, in the middle of the air, somewhere close to the roof of her apartment building. And clearly its operators had no regard whatsoever, for who might just have noticed such a big and bright out of place and obvious thing right over central Tokyo. Miko took a few more running steps, in a direction leading away form her building, and the bridge. But then she turned again to look back. And when she did, she saw many lighted windows, of apartments belonging to hundreds of her neighbors she did not even know. Looking again, her eyes fell on a window she knew belonged to Shinju's family. Her friend was not home – it was safe to assume she was still away with Emily- but someone certainly was, and that family had always been nothing but kind and helpful to anyone that needed a thing from them. Right next to Shinju's place, a window slid open, and an elderly lady, who Miko had seen more then once in passing in the halls, and now oblivious to the threat above, leaned slightly out over her sill to water a hanging basket of flowers.
With a shake of her head, Miko paused on the sidewalk, and grabbed the cellphone from her bag. Then she turned and ran back toward home, while typing in a text message, and finally sending it.
Heading for the Rooftop, Raf. Building is full of people, and no one deserves to be trashed by 'cons. Give the bots my coordinates.
She was well aware that Raf would surely text her right back, begging her in quickly typed words not to go back, to stay away from the bridge. She knew that when that failed he would contact Jack and within a few minutes more he would text, begging for the same. And if she'd only had more time she might have answered back, telling them both that wreckers did not just run away. But there was no time. Instead, Miko turned her phone off and ran back anyway.
Riding back up in the elevator, and running fast through the building besides, Miko reached the rooftop in record time. And when she stepped out though the trap door above the twenty-second floor, she sighed with relief at finding the rooftop empty of neighbors. Turning around at once, she faced the blueish space bridge portal, spinning in the air meters above and away from the rooftop's edge. Glancing around fast, she grabbed a meter long iron bar, likely discarded from some nearby construction project, and wielding it threateningly, she turned again to face the portal. The wait was not a long one. And within minutes she heard the roar of jet engines from somewhere within the swirling of the bridge.
"I know it's you, Starscream," Miko called into the spinning vortex, and waved the bar around a bit to make her point. "I'm ready for you!"
She had forgotten just how impossibly fast the 'con commander was in in the air. And she had forgotten that he handled a flying form far better than most bots she knew handled any ground based ones. But still, when Starscream raced out of the bridge, made two rapid loops over and away from the roof to lose some speed, and then flipped midair to drop to the roof on his feet in his bot form, she was ready with the heavy bar in both her hands.
"It is Lord Starscream now," the bot screamed at her, she she stood in front of him and stared up at his knees. He was repainted, she noted oddly enough. A fair of bit white and blue, and a bit of red along with his familiar dull silver gray now. But still he was very familiar and inwardly she cringed and shuddered, while she gripped the bar with determination.
"Only to your loyal subjects," Miko said, taunting him dangerously. "Of course most of those are already defecting..."
"Shut up, you… human!"
"That the best you got?"
"I said, shut up."
Miko, feeling bolder than she probably should have, and determined to hide amount of fear she did feel behind even greater boldness, stomped toward the bot that towered over her, and whacked him as hard as she could across the fronts of his legs with the bar in her hands. It might have done nothing more than produce a loud metallic clang, but still it made her feel powerful and she did enjoy making noise. She looked up to see the bot look down, and for a moment he only looked at her open mouthed with shocked surprise. And then he reached down fast, and before she could react he lifted her from the ground, and held her high above the rooftop, with one of his long pointed metal fingers hooked securely, under her thankfully equally secured book bag.
"Put me down, you flying nitwit!" Miko yelled. And though she knew full well that it would get her nowhere, she waved the bar around trying to hit him with it again. Finally she settled on a good hard thud across the top of his left wrist, trying to force him to drop her. When that failed, as she knew it almost certainly would, she tried it again anyway, hitting him several times in rapid succession. He only appeared to look almost bored with the whole thing, she was doing little more than leaving dents barely bad enough to be noticeable, and he was certainly not letting go of her.
"What?" she taunted, still held high up in the air above the roof, and glancing toward the space bridge portal. "No backup?"
"I hardly think I need any 'back up' to secure one obnoxious little human," Starscream snapped at once. He gave the human he held such a terrible and furious look, that she was stunned into silence at once. And when he lifted her slightly higher, shaking her just slightly, the bar fell from her hands and clattered to the roof top far below.
"What are you gonna do? Drop me off the roof?" Miko asked, finding her voice to taught the bot again with far more boldness than she felt, when he began to walk slowly toward the edge. But for all her bold taunting, and the pointed laugh that went along with it, she feared more with each slow step that that was exactly what he was going to do.
"Fly willing back to this terrible planet of yours just to kill you? Waste of my time!" Starscream laughed loudly for a long moment, in a clearly unstable and crazy way that Miko had never heard from a bot before. "Say, Miko… you aren't afraid of flying are you. I wouldn't want to deal with any mid air panic attacks on the way back to Cybertron."
"Cybertron? Ah no! I haven't packed nearly enough stuff to leave the planet on a minute's notice. You pulled this, grab the kids and haul us to your planet trick before, and what happened? The Autobots saved us, and you lost!"
Starscream, seemingly oblivious to the tiny human's yelling, took a couple more huge steps toward the roof's edge. And from there he simply jumped overt and a way from the edge, transforming as he did and trapping her inside his jet form. Miko, now inside, unharmed, but with no hope of safely escaping in mid air, kicked angrily at the sides of the small cramped cockpit, while he only laughed again somewhat maniacally. Pausing to look a second through the tiny window she was trying hopelessly to kick at, she could see the space bridge portal swirling all around her as they left Japan and Earth behind.
"Stand by to close the bridge on my order, "Starscream said out loud to someone, who was obviously waiting somewhere unseen.
"What the frag do you want with me, you… you crazy flying junk pile?" Miko demanded once she had grown tired of her helpless kicking.
"Bait," Starscream answered at once. He laughed again, and though his face-plate was hidden in his jet mode, she could easily imagine he was probably somewhere between snarling and smirking at her. "Defector bait."