More of it!
Alex the Mary Sue is displayed in all her pneumatic glory at . It's only a black-and-white pic, but damn, does she ever have improbable breasts. Megs frowning at her is in the process of being coloured.
Disclaimer: Transformers is the property of Hasbro, yadda yadda yadda, yesssss.
"Well? It's been almost two weeks. How's your plan going?"
"Pretty well," said Wheeljack, adjusting a few knobs on the housing of a cylindrical laser housing. It took up most of the space in his lab and was very, very shiny.
Ratchet, hands on hips, circled the machine. "I have to admit we haven't seen much Decepticon activity since you turned this thing on."
"Heh," Wheeljack muttered. "Last time I caught sight of a Decepticreep, he was peering in the window of a Godiva shop in New York, looking confused. I can't think why nobody did this before."
"Tell me again," said the Autobot medic, "exactly how it works."
Wheeljack stared at him. Ratchet grinned a little. "This is called "exposition," he said. "Saves the narration the bother of showing rather than telling."
"Oh, well, in that case," said Wheeljack, glancing around in case there was a fourth wall anywhere in the vicinity, "this little baby is something I like to call 'The Sappivator.'"
"Any relation to the Negavator?" inquired Ratchet.
"No, I just like putting "vator" on the ends of words, it makes them sound all futuristic and science-y. The Sappivator works by zeroing in on the nexi of imagination."
"Come again?"
"Common thoughts. Like, okay, say you're a mildly illiterate fangirl."
Ratchet tried to picture this. "Okaaaay."
"So you write unreadable dreck about how your original female character, a poorly disguised self-insertion with magical powers and omnicompetence and the physical characteristics of a Barbie, enters the story-world and Saves the Day."
"I think I'm getting a migraine," said Ratchet. "What does all this have to do with the Decepticons?"
Wheeljack's voice held a grin. "Don't you see? One of the major targets of these self-insertions—they're called Mary Sues—has always been the charismatic villain. And we've got a bunch of them to choose from."
"Wait," said Ratchet. "You're saying this cannon thing is able to track these...these figments of some teenybopper's imagination?"
"And turn them into real beings," said Wheeljack triumphantly. "My Sappivator is capable of producing as many Mary Sues as there are people inventing them. And they're inventing them all the time."
"But what's to stop them attacking us?" Ratchet wanted to know.
"Oh, we're much too clever to be vulnerable to them," Wheeljack assured him. "No, they're only a threat to the Decepticons."
Ratchet was staring at the engineer, a look of surprised consideration in his optics.
"What?" Wheeljack demanded.
"This has to be the first invention of yours that actually worked straight off the bat," said Ratchet. "Well done, man."
Wheeljack scowled. "Well, there was a weird instance recently where it blinked into and out of reality, but I'm sure it was nothing. Eddies in the space-time continuum."
"He is?"
"That wasn't funny the last ten times you said it."
"Sorry."
Alex jerked awake out of a complicated dream featuring stylized symbols resembling red faces and giant cannons which flared pink and then black. "Oh, fuck," she said. Her watch had stopped sometime since she last looked at it; she had no idea how long it had been since she'd fed the cells in their growth media, and she was damn sure no one had decided to run her gels for her out of the goodness of their hearts. There's a week's worth of prep thrown away, she thought. If I ever get back I'm going to be lucky if I keep my job.
If I ever get back.
She rolled over and pulled the tablecloth tighter around her shoulders. It was so bloody cold in here that her toes had gone numb; she assumed it was because the robots, like supercomputers, generated a lot of heat, and needed their environment to be airconditioned. After a few moments, her brain kicked in, and she thought deliberately What would be really useful at this juncture is a massive four-poster bed with a feather mattress and a fur coverlet, as well as something warm to put over this stupid catsuit thing.
Almost immediately she felt her hipbone and shoulder sink into the delicious softness of a featherbed, and she was surrounded in a cocoon of softness and warmth. I could get used to this, she thought, and then deliberately I want a million dollars.
Nothing happened. She sighed. Maybe it had to be something she actually needed. She'd have to work on that.
Meanwhile, she drifted back to sleep. The lights in the lab had been dimmed, which she assumed meant that the giant alien robots were on the downside of their daily cycle. Hopefully she'd be able to get used to this, or escape, before her circadian rhythms were completely deranged.
Wheeljack looked over at the Sappivator. The red telltales glittering along its barrel had shifted to yellow; as he watched, they shifted again, to green. "Heh," he said to himself. "I wonder what's coming through this time?"
There was a feeling of barely controlled electricity flickering through the air, a sensation of pressure, and then the Sappivator flared briefly pink and faded back to its normal steel colour. Wheeljack hurried over to his consoles and tried to find out what it had brought through this time.
"Oh, sweet lovin' Primus," he breathed. "This is going to be priceless." He hurried out of the lab and up to the control room, passing several astonished Autobots, and skidded to a halt behind Prime's command chair facing Teletran One. "Prime," he said, his ears flashing pink with the force of his enthusiasm. "Can you get a direct video feed from Decepticon headquarters?"
Prime stared at him, giving the impression of having raised an eyebrow, despite his lack of any such facial adornment. "What's going on, Wheeljack?" he wanted to know.
"Trust me," said the engineer, "you are going to want to see this."
The Autobot leader turned back to the console and called up all the active spy satellites in the vicinity. Out in space, one of them turned suddenly, attitudinal jets firing, and refocused itself on a specific area of the ocean. A blurred reading came up on Teletran One's screens, which zoomed in and began to take on some detail. They could make out the main control room of the Decepticon base. "Wheeljack," said Prime, staring at the screen, "what are you on about? I t looks perfectly normal to me."
"Watch," said Wheeljack, pointing past Prime's shoulder. Ratchet, Tracks, Ironhide and Prowl had joined them, wondering what all the drama was about. On the screen, something approached the main control console of the Decepticon base. There was a stunned pause, and then Ratchet started to laugh.
"What is that thing?" he managed, through the laughter. Wheeljack turned to him, hands on hips.
"That," he said, "is the downfall of our Decepticon friends. Once their optics get a load of her, we won't have any more trouble with them."
"It looks like a femmebot," said Ironhide, thoughtfully. "One hell of a femmebot."
"I wonder what she turns into," said Tracks, not looking away from the screen. "Got to be something fast."
"Hey, hey, hey, don't get too interested," said Wheeljack. Prime was regarding the screen, arms folded, with an attitude of concern mingled with interest. "What d'you think, Prime?"
"It's certainly powerful," said Optimus Prime. "I take it this is the result of your experiments with transducing nexuses of the imagination into physical format?"
"Yep. They're vulnerable to the humanoid females produced by most minds, but this...well, this is something quite new. I doubt even Megatron will be able to withstand the power of this particular construct."
"What about that strange fluctuation we registered a day or so ago? You complained that your experimental machinery flickered in and out of reality."
"Ah, that was just a power surge," said Wheeljack, shrugging. "Nothing to worry about."
"It brought something through, right?" said Ratchet, behind them. Wheeljack shot him an annoyed look.
"I expect it was just another nexus," he said. "The energy signatures I've been getting are consistent with another imaginatory individual."
Prime frowned, fingering his chin. "Is there any way your machine could have popped an extant physical being into the Decepticon headquarters?"
Ratchet turned to Wheeljack expectantly. The engineer shrugged.
"Maybe. I never considered that particular use for the Sappivator, but theoretically it could occur."
"So, in effect, we could use it as a way to introduce a spy—or a saboteur—into their base?" asked Prowl.
Wheeljack nodded. "I think it could be done."
Prime got up. "I want you to keep a very close eye on what goes through your Sappivator," he said. "A very close eye indeed. I have a bad feeling about this."
"Yes, Prime," said Wheeljack, sighing.
**
Alex rolled over and yawned, rubbing at her eyes. The feather bed and its massive canopy seemed to have stayed perfectly real and solid during the time she wasn't concentrating on them, which was a pleasant thought.
She slid out of bed and stretched. Something furry was draped over the Plaza Hotel dining-room table; she picked it up, apprehensively, and found that it seemed to be a full-length blue fox coat, suitable for keeping humanoids warm in the forty-degree environment of the Decepticon base. Excellent, she thought. Whatever's providing me with what I need has excellent tastes in obnoxiously expensive things. I hope it's me.
Shrugging into the fur, she looked around. The lights were back to normal, so she assumed it was what passed for day in this place. No one was around. She checked the computers, and found that something noticeable had happened to the energy flows in the area. Something else must've come through the warp hole, or whatever the hell it was. She sighed, imagining another Lady Darktalon, or Princess Moonstrike, or whatever. Presumably either the Decepticons didn't know about it yet or they were dealing with it without her help. She wondered vaguely what she was supposed to be doing.
Lighting a cigarette, she did an ungainly jig on the keyboard to bring up whatever information she could find about the Decepticon base itself. She almost fell off the keyboard when the screen started scrolling information past her, and had to back off a little and apply herself to the Krug bottle before it started to make sense.
She was under the sea. About fifty fathoms down, to be precise. In the remains of an interstellar ship which had crashed here and been converted into a base of operations. She hopped around a bit and managed to find a schematic of the base, vaguely amused that the computer programs seemed to've been last updated around 1985. Wonder what they'd make of a Palm, she thought, or one of those little tablet laptops that cost about as much as a new Buick.
Another few dancing keystrokes brought up something even more interesting than her current location. She kicked the Page Down button, and then had to back up to the edge of the table to get adequate perspective on the giant screen.
She was looking at a giant red diesel truck, the sort with the engine directly under the driver's compartment. A split windscreen rose above a massive chrome grille; the trailer it pulled was immense and shaded from charcoal to steel grey. The face she'd seen in her dreams was painted both on the trailer and on the sides of the great red cab. What the hell do they have pictures of Peterbilt's finest for? she wondered. Actually, looking at it, it's probably a Mack or a Reo. She nudged the page-down key again, and realization dawned.
This time the screen showed her a massive giant robot, roughly the size of Megatron, whose torso was bright red and featured not only a giant chrome grill but—and she had to laugh a bit at this—two windowpanes, complete with wiper blades, where his pectoral muscles would have been if he'd been organic. A blue helmet with spikes framed a silver-grey face half-covered with a faceted mask, lending the face as a whole an air of inexpressive power. The blue eye-things alone seemed to hold all the expression he'd ever need.
His legs were white and blue, and she figured out after a while that they'd fold up to form the trailer hitch, but there was no sign of the vast steel box of the trailer itself. Presumably he could make it vanish at will. Good deal, she thought. Wish I had that kind of storage at will.
So, she wondered, sitting down with the champagne bottle in her lap and staring up at the giant robot on the screen, who was he? She hadn't met him yet, and the red face marking him was quite different from the purple face she'd noticed on Megatron, Starscream, Thundercracker, and the other Decepticons she'd met. Presumably it was a mark of allegiance. Based on the colour imagery, she'd assume that Megatron et al were the bad guys, and this angular primary-coloured individual was a Good Guy.
Alex had never liked Good Guys. They never had any fun, and they certainly never had any good lines; mostly what they did was show up in the nick of time and say heroically predictable things like "You'll never get away with this," and then ruin the evil guys' plan with a few well-placed shots. While they inevitably won, they were dead boring.
She got up, pacing, tabulating conclusions in her head. One: she was more or less Megatron's captive, despite the fact that she certainly wasn't languishing in durance vile; two, something big had come through the warp hole thingy that had brought her and the rest of the Mary Sues here; three, she hadn't seen or heard any of the Decepticons recently, and four: clearly the Decepticons had some large and capable-looking enemies.
Alex finished the champagne, dropped her cigarette end into the empty bottle, and began to clamber down the table leg. Luckily, her boots seemed to have effectively gripping soles, and she found it remarkably easy to climb down the polished steel column. Must be that magical power thing again, she thought, the same one that made the bed and the coat appear. Jolly good.
She didn't know exactly where she was going, but she had a feeling something might guide her. Turning left out of the lab, as she vaguely recalled Megatron doing when he'd been carrying her, she trotted along vast echoing hallways until she came to a large, heavy, firmly shut steel door.
"Bugger," said Alex, and gave the door a kick. There was a hollow booming noise, but no movement. "Well, there goes that idea."
She lit another cigarette and sat down crosslegged to have a think.
TBC
Fanfiction.net says I have eight reviews for this story, but I can only see two: the one I put up saying I can't see the reviews, and one other. If you feel like reviewing, please either send email to alexandraspar@hotmail.com or AltarisCentral@groups.msn.com. Thanks so much!!