Author's note: All characters are copyright their respective creators. I do not own Transformers and I am not
affiliated with Hasbro or Takara, Mainframe or Alliance, nor should any affiliation be inferred, implied or assumed. Enjoy the fic.
Historian's note: "Indeterminate Timeframe" events occur shortly after "Feral Scream", but before "Crossing the Rubicon" or "Master Blaster".
**Earth, Indeterminate Timeframe
"A bomb?" the femme asked, still unbelieving.
"Damn straight," Copperhead replied, fiddling with the stasis pod. "My 'plan B'
was to rig a bomb that would vaporize every single Maximal on this planet, including that
bitch Pantera."
"But it'll leave every Pred safe, right?"
"Every pureborn Pred, yeah... spider-lady and crablegs'll be out of our circuits for
good."
"It's not that I don't WANT Blackarachnia and Rampage eliminated, but isn't this
a bit dishonorable?"
Copperhead turned to his companion with an incredulous grimace. "When were
you ever the honorable fighter, Garrotte?"
The femme shook her head. "Not the point, worm," she spat. "Even if I played
dirty, it was always face to face."
"Whatever," Copperhead buzzed, still working with his stasis pod. "Give a guy a
hand here, ya dizzy bitch?"
"Geez, worm, that misogyny's gonna get you in trouble one of these days." A
halfhearted chuckle later, Constrictor was kneeling beside Copperhead at the floating pod.
"You have this octagon loop modulator in upside down, dumbass," she mocked, pulling a
polygonal piece of copper wire out and reorienting it back into its seating. "And the
squamous power coupler's out of alignment. What the slot do they teach you at the PSP
training grounds-- underwater basket-weaving?" Constrictor chuckled again, her
denegrating tone grating on Copperhead with every word.
"I'd get a helluva lot more work done if certain slut goddesses would keep their
oral transmitters shut and their freakin' hands on their work," he droned, a very familiar
way of addressing the female snake.
"Oh, so you wanna get into a bitch-off, huh?" she quipped, rattailing a greaserag
and snapping it at her companion. Copperhead smirked and nodded frenetically.
"Fine then," she started, "you're a worthless pile of Sharkticon droppings unfit for
a Quintesson slagpile's slagpile!"
Copper smirked... "Good one, Gar. My turn."
"Bring it on, fag," she snorted, pulling a circuitboard from her pod.
"Your sodpiece is dirtier than Rattrap's mind!"
"Ouch!" she laughed. "Lemme think, lemme think... your fore-bot has a vocoder
on the ventral of her cranial strut and the glitch masticates like this!" Constrictor leaned
her head back, causing it to bob as she made odd groaning noises.
Copperhead gawked. "The fuck are you talking about?"
Constrictor looked back at her companion. "Something I picked up on earth a few
hundred sol ago... you wouldn't get it."
"Might I remind you I showed up on Terra a good 40 sol before you did?" Copper
chided, wagging a finger at her in mock criticism. "YOU are he one Terran humor's lost
on."
"Yeah, well yer momma was a Seeker."
"Thanks. I take that as the deepest compliment," Copperhead chuckled, phasing
an image of his past personality, Parseltongue, into his friend's mind.
"Quit it, that freaks me out," she complained as she bent down to retrieve a fallen
wrench. "Megatron'll have our shells if we aren't back soon."
"Meggs is the least of our concerns. With Tarantulas off on his own plotting
Primus-knows-what and Blackarachnia a micron away from defecting back to the
Maximals, you and I are gonna be dead center in their sights when they wanna strike out,
y'know?"
The femme nodded in a very uncharacteristically somber fashion. "I'll bet my
cleavage this is some sort of a trick... you said Shockwave sent you here?"
"Yep," Copperhead responded. "I was supposed to temporally track Elder
Pantera."
"But she arrived after the Darkside crashed."
"I wondered about that, too, for a few megacycles after I got here-- then I
remembered that the Tripredacus Council had tracked her shuttle falling through time...
certain types of temporal anomolies, like the Transwarp explosion wavefront, travel
through all points in time-- forward and backward-- simultaneously."
"You mean temporal anomolies are permanent," Constrictor guessed.
"Not exactly," the snake replied, absentmindedly looking over a fried circuitboard.
"They can be dissolved in the concrete present and its concrete future, but they'll still
appear in the liquid future, regardless of actions taken during the present or past. It's like
stopping one ripple in a pond: the rest continue outward, and the only way to stop the
ripples from forming would be to not have dropped the stone in... but since this timeline's
past is concrete, you can't stop the ripples without creating more."
"You lost me with not exactly," she grumbled.
"Simply put, they knew she'd be here, 'cuz history shows a 2 million year old
Maximal starhopper that matches her registration, and two 2 million year old, unidentified
crashed warships, derelict in the northern part of the planet."
"The Axalon and the Darkside," Constrictor muttered, surprised. "I guess we're
stuck here, then, huh?"
"Shockwave said the information was classified, probably because the two ships
hadn't been launched yet. So they slung my spark into a protoform, shoved it into the
Darkside's cargo hold, and shot me into space... funny how things work out, huh?" he
chuckled.
"No, not funny at all," she growled, rubbing her temple. "Fuck, I hate temporal
mechanics."
"That makes two of us," Copperhead said as he slammed a hatch on the pod shut,
watching a green light blink on and off. "Well poke my spark and call me Starscream,
looks like we're done!"
Constrictor spun with a scowl. "Don't joke about that," she cursed, then she saw
the green blinker too. "I see," she smirked. "What now?"
"Now... we set it off."
Copperhead grabbed the datapad he'd left behind and blinked at it for a few
moments. "We'll need two more sparks for the equilibrium drive."
"Where are we gonna get two more sparks?" Constrictor queried, still less than
enthused about the entire project.
Copper turned to the computer and brought up the scanner array. "Right in our
own backyard," he smirked, seeing two Maximal sig's heading their direction. "You take
the cat, I'll handle the lizard," Copperhead barked, grabbing his null staff and running out
of the cave. "Secure the area, too!"
Before Constrictor could register her displeasure, Copperhead was out of sight.
Of course, in Copperhead's case, out of sight was definitely not out of mind. ==Be
careful, this time. Last time, you inverted the polarity on the forcefield! I was sore for
days!==
==Outta my brain, Worm, or I'll start thinking about breasts and lesbians.==
The snake didn't need to be told twice.
"There, on the ridge," Steeljaw whispered, forepaw pointed somewhere at the underbrush
where Copperhead was hiding. "Can you see him?"
Tyrannix squinted a moment and sighed in frustration. "Not in beast mode; I don't
have forward facing optics."
"Well, don't risk transforming... best to stay in beast mode until he sees us."
The gigantic T. rex nodded and strode forward, massive gait outpacing even
Steeljaw's rapid walking pace. "So?" Tyrannix growled.
"So, we engage."
"But the scanners said two Preds in the area; we've only spotted one."
Steeljaw's aurals pricked up, feeling the presence of another Predacon nearby.
"Spotted maybe... but..." He sniffed. "...there is another nearby, I can sense her."
"Old Autobot intuition, little cat?" Tyrannix asked, narrowing his optics at the
ridge, still trying to spot the Pred on the ridge.
"You could say that... or the fact an obviously Cybertronian snake just slithered
across my foot..."
A muffled "damn!" could be heard from the underbrush at Steeljaw's right.
"Terrorize!" followed, then Steeljaw was tackled by an extremely tall, well-built
femmebot.
"Get off of him!" Tyrannix roared, his beast mode mixing into his voice.
"Maximize!" The rex leapt into the air-- something VERY unusual to see a Tyrannosaur
do-- and broke open, forming the massively built Tyrannix. With an immense fist, he
cuffed Constrictor's collar and ripped the angry femme from the steel blue feline. Then, to
appease his code of honor, he threw her into a tree. "I cannot strike a female... but I can
incapacitate one," he chuckled with a sardonic smirk.
"Real smart," another voice hissed, leaping on Tyrannix's back.
The Maximal's expression was priceless: optics wide, mouth agape, it was as if a
bug had crawled down his collar and was walking on his back. This bug, however, was
venomous.
"Wanna die, lizard lips?" Copperhead snarled in his aural receptor, plunging his
two, energon laced wrist daggers into the Convoy's shoulders. "Nah, can't have that
happen, you're much more valuable to all of us alive..."
"Tell your... master Megatron..." Tyrannix grunted, grabbing at Copper to no
avail, "...that if he strikes... argh!... the Maximals down... more will... come to battle him!"
"Oh, how heroic." Copper squealed in delight as he upped the amount of energon
poison being injected. Within moments, Tyrannix was on the forest floor. "Get the kitty,
dammit!"
"What's it look like I'm doing?!" Constrictor groaned, reaching her feet and
aiming a throwing dagger at Steeljaw.
"No!" Copperhead shouted, jumping off Tyrannix's back and rushing to
Constrictor's side. "Alive. Without active sparks, the machine isn't gonna do squat, got
it?"
"Whatever," she said, and threw the knife.
"DAMMIT!" Copperhead gasped, jumping after it, but the knife was already
sailing toward the forehead of the dazed Steeljaw.
And it hit. The pommel glanced off the Maximal's forehead, and the knife went
clattering to the rocks below. The cat fell to the ground with a mechanical WHUMP.
"You could have TOLD me you were gonna do that," Copperhead complained,
going over to Steeljaw to make sure he was out. A mental flick of a switch inside
Steeljaw's core processor ensured he wouldn't be coming online at an inopportune time.
A similar trick inside Tyrannix's processor-- though this was a bit harder considering some
of the odd resistance this one put up-- and the two stasis-locked Maximals were in tow
back to Copperhead's little cave.
"I can't find them!" Cheetor whined, thumping the scanner against his leg. "It's
like their sparks totally blipped off!"
*/Keep searching, Cheetor... three megacycles is far too long not to report in./*
"Okay, Bigbot, but..." A bright flash from a few klicks away gave Cheetor a start.
"What in the spotted heck?!" To get a better look, the golden feline shifted to beast
mode, his hunchbacked form blasting into the forest.
*/Cheetor, report! Cheetor?/* There was no response, only static.
"This has gotta be some Predacon trap," Cheetor audibly thought to himself.
"Neutral ground, maybe, but that's never stopped them from setting up jamming tower..."
"Ya know," came a curt female voice from behind, "for a cat, you sure are loud."
Cheetor whirled to see a jet black femme, flanked on each side by two girls: one
was black and white, a wolf, the other, brown and copper, a coyote.
"Elder Pantera!" Cheetor smiled, waving. "Hi Wulfie..." He nearly blushed.
"Hi Spots," she smiled, digging her toe into the dirt.
Inuarai made a gagging noise.
"Cheetor, what are you doing here?"
The hunchbacked Maximal pointed to the cliffs. "Saw a flash of light coming from
that direction," he said. "Came to investigate."
"So did we," Blancwulf piped. "Maybe we could check it out together?"
Nari was now rolling her eyes. "Good idea; we'll split up to cover more ground,"
Pantera ordered. "Inuarai, you're with me... Cheetor, take Blancwulf."
With a twisted salute, Cheetor and Blancwulf stalked into the trees.
Pantera and Inuarai had taken not fifty steps into the deeper woods when another
light-- this one more gentle and hazy than bright and piercing-- glazed over them. "The
slot?" Pantera muttered, rubbing her optics and stumbling.
"Mamacat, you're glowing!" Nari oohed, pointing at her mentor.
"I..." She held her hand out and shook her head. "How in the pit?" Pantera
swung around, hearing a twig snap behind her. She was met with a very angry Cobra
face, which immediately shouted, with a southern twang:
"TERRORIZE!"
Pantera instinctively kicked out, catching Quickstrike in the gut and sending him
sprawling. Inuarai wasn't nearly as quick, and a blast from a figure hidden in the brush
rang out. It caught Inuarai in the small of the back, and at first glance, it didn't seem all
too severe... but the blast pushed forward, bringing Nari into the air, finally ripping out of
her stomach in a wide beam of destructive energy that rushed into the sky.
"Cruelty!" screamed Rampage. "It is my life's blood..." The orange and silver
crab burst from the underbrush, cannon barrels still smoking, as Inuarai lay, near death.
The reddish glow had waned some, but Pantera seemed to have absorbed a good
part of it... she glowed as she screamed, her body tearing apart. Pantera's limbs twisted.
Her voice played chords of agony as the wave overtook her.
"Ma...macat..." Inuarai grunted, the light in her optics dimming. Rampage merely
cackled that manic laugh for which he was known, gleefully clicking his crab claws
together.
"There'll be no 'Mamacat' to pull your fat out of the fryer this time, little vixen..."
Rampage chuckled, thrusting one of his stilleto-pointed feet through her skidplate,
cleaving a leg off, with all the glee of a schoolyard bully yanking the wings off a butterfly.
He did the same with her shoulder, shredding the metal and fur, bleeding her of bio-matter
and mech fluid, and sending the arm skittering across the rock. "Just... let the pain grow...
let your anger fester, while there's time. Watch your life ebb away-->GLUK!<" A
laserbolt cut through Rampage's mandibles, melting the metal and cooking the flesh.
Cheetor, growling bestially, leapt from a treelimb onto the crab's back, shredding his
armor with his diamond-edged claws. "Don't... hurt... my friends!" he roared, biting
Rampage's antennae off.
Blancwulf was ripping Quickstrike limb from limb in her jaws, ferociously tearing
at his arachnid parts while the reptilian parts did their best to fight back. The snake's
fangs had shattered when it tried to bite the barrel of her railgun as they grappled in robot
mode. But with Quickstrike's assault, the railgun had been damaged beyond usefulness,
causing Blancwulf to shift to beast mode. Neither form bade well for Quickstrike: four of
his eight scorpion legs had been rent from its body by Blancwulf's powerful jaws, and his
pinsers were of no use as Blancwulf had pinned him on his stomach. "Yer... gonna git it!"
Quickstrike moaned as Wulfie shredded his chitinous armor. "The bossbot's gonna..."
"Shut... UP!" she snapped, biting off his left pinser. Her snowy muzzle now
stained brownish-red, she leapt off of Quickstrike to assist Cheetor.
Bearing down for a jump, she was distracted by a shot ringing out, both on the
battlefield and in her-- and everyone else's-- mind.
==Everyone stay still,== a droning voice called in their heads. Without the
thought of arguing, Blancwulf froze, as did Cheetor and Rampage. Even Quickstrike and
Inuarai quit twitching. The only one not effected was...
"Mamacat?!" Blancwulf gasped, looking at the crimson-and-silver clad behemoth
rising from where she'd collapsed mere moments ago.
"Where is he?" she snarled.
"Who?" Wulfie responded, still frozen in place.
"He's here somewhere," she muttered, eyes wide, scanning the area, and spinning
around. "Come out, you bastard!" she shouted.
A golden blur streaked past her at high speed, but there was no air displacement...
as if it had been merely light. "Parseltongue!" she screamed, voice echoing into the forest.
"Come, show yourself, you COWARD!"
==No need to shout, Artemis...==
"Get... out of my mind..." she growled, teeth clenched and face screwed, as if
pained. "...or... it won't be pleasant, I promise you..."
==Come now, Artemis Prime, you'd be hard pressed to lay a finger on me.==
"You'll be hard pressed to have a finger left, you bastard," she snarled, dropping
to her hands and knees. "What're yo..."
==Oh Primus, what did that madman do?!== came the voice in her head, then the
pain stopped, and as Pantera looked up, she could see a green and red form kneeling at
Inuarai's side.
"GET AWAY FROM HER!" she screamed, leaping forward to pull what was
obviously Copperhead away from Nari. "Your kind... they killed one of my children,
they're not getting to another." Tears of lubricant streaming down her cheeks, a small
crystalline node on her chest glowing, Pantera rushed to Inuarai's side. "If you hurt her
any more, Primus help me, I'll have your spark..."
"Let the man work, little lady," came a low, rumbling tone from behind her.
Before she knew it, an immense golden hand had clasped her waist and was hauling her
into the air. The golden stream still poured from the trinket on her collar, snaking its way
to Inuarai's broken form. "He knows what he's doing..."
A hand shot up from the working Copperhead. "Silence, Mayhem," he muttered,
and the form that had snatched Pantera ceased talking. "And put her down..."
Mayhem, as Copper called him, complied, releasing Pantera. "Don't interfere and
your girl will be fine. Now let me work."
The golden light still wound from Pantera to Inuarai, but Copperhead disregarded
it, quickly sticthing her cleft arm back to her body with copper cording, psionically
shunting the mech fluid bleedoff by switching certain fluid pumps off and others on. "Heal
her..." he muttered to the copper wiring as he sewed. "Mayhem, please, bring her leg."
Pantera finally got a good look at the giant who'd grabbed her: there was no way
she could be seeing this. He was... he was a Dragon! How in the world did...
"Mutant beast mode?" she asked aloud, a question that was halfway out of
curiosity, halfway reaching a conclusion.
"Yes," Mayhem responded emptily. "When the device activated, my spark was
twisted along with my body..." He dropped Inuarai's leg at Copper's position and sat on
his knees, looking down at Pantera. "I do not know if it left my mind intact."
"I think I know how that feels," Pantera replied, halfway joking. "Right now, I'm
not sure if I'm altogether here, either."
"It's common to all the TM-2's," Cheetor muttered, hopping off Rampage's
nearly-static locked form. "We get a wave of angry, 'I hate being me' monsteritis... you'll
get over it. Whadda we do with Crablegs there?"
"Leave him and move on," Copperhead ordered. "Dinobot will feel the pain he's
feeling right now, soon enough, and come to find him. By then, we'll have left."
"You're helping a Maximal, Snakes," Cheetor noted. "That ain't gonna win you a
lot of brownie points with the Preds."
"But your Optimus Primal will welcome me with open arms for saving the life of
one of the children..." he grumbled sarcastically.
"Megatron's favor isn't really relavent anymore," Mayhem noted. "I could crush
him with a thought."
"Pantera... what is that glow emanating from you?"
Tera shrugged, but Cheetor answered. "Dinobot and I both do that when we're
hurt... our sparks start working and heal our bodies. We got it from Rampage's spark."
"But... why does Pantera have it if she's not a child of Rampage?" Copper asked.
"Would I?"
"Good question," Cheetor snorted. "How's Nari?"
"Yeah, is she going to live?" Blancwulf asked hurriedly.
"Artemis's... glow," he chuckled, "and my psionics will let her see another sunrise,
but she should get to CR soon."
Cheetor nodded. "Can we move her?"
"She can move herself." He waved a hand over her optics-- more for show than
for function. "Wake."
Inuarai's eyes sparkled back to life, and she slowly sat up. "What in the stripey
heck happened?"
"Rampage pretty much eviscerated you, sis," Blancwulf chuckled, placing her hand
gingerly on Inuarai's undamaged shoulder.
Pantera looked at Rampage. "As much as I want to rend X limb from limb... we
need to get you to safety first. Copperhead..."
He stood, dusting himself off. "Yes, I am coming with you. The Predacons kill...
for pleasure. For... no reason. It's sickening."
"Is that you talking, or the Transmetal insanity?" Cheetor chuckled.
"You'll never know," Copper snapped, almost playfully. Almost.
"What about you?" Wulfie asked, propping Inuarai against her shoulder.
"What about me?" he growled, stalking to the edge of the clearing, Mayhem
behind him.
"Coming back to base with us?"
"I have my mind to clear, as does Mayhem here. My comrade has gone missing, as
well; finding her takes precendence over a Maximal hug-fest... one of your Maximal
brethren was also with us, in the explosion... you should find him."
With that, Copper and Mayhem faded from their minds and into the forest.
Rampage and Quickstrike stirred a bit, groaning.
"I think now'd be a good time to haul," Cheetor suggested, looking at Rampage's
flickering optics.
"Ya think?" Blancwulf chuckled. "Gimme a hand with this sack of slag," she said
with a flip smile. Cheetor slid his arm under Inuarai's armpit, clutching Blancwulf's hand.
Smiling, the two dragged her away.
As the three of them ground into the forest, making as much racket as they
possibly could, Pantera gazed into the woods.
"You saved her... someone I consider my own daughter... after all your atrocities,
you do have some compassion. We'll meet again, Copperhead." Turning, she paced back
into the woods to laugh with the kids again.