And a little more.
I don't know why the bloody URL for my site never shows up as anything other than a period. Perhaps if I type it with all extra spaces, it might ignore the hyperlink and actually register the characters: http ://groups. msn. com/ AltarisCentral.
I hate Microsoft Word 2000. Dear God, I hate it. I have to spend half my time undoing all the wretched AutoCorrects that it thinks it needs to insert, despite the fact that I've tried to turn off all autocorrect options; they reset themselves every time I open the program. Bloody thing. Word 98 didn't do half this rubbish, and I loved it.
Disclaimer: TF is Hasbro's. Not mine. Kay?
Absently rubbing her toes, which had not appreciated her attempt to kick open a steel door roughly six feet thick, Alex huddled in her blue-fox coat and sulked. Even if I could get through the bloody door, she thought, there's no guarantee I could ever find my way to the control room. Not that I'd have much to do when I got there, but it's got to be more interesting than sitting around in a giant robot's lab and waiting for something to happen. And I want to know what came through the warp hole this time.
She sat back against the door and closed her eyes. Things could be worse: she could be a smoking grease-stain on the floor, for instance, if Starscream had had his way to begin with. However, smoking grease-stains on the floor don't generally have to make up ways to excuse their sudden absence from work during the last days of a grant, or attempt to contact the outside world from inside a giant alien spaceship, or deal with animated Barbies with advanced degrees in astrophysics. Maybe Starscream hadn't done her that much of a favour by letting her live.
She was so deep in her self-pitying reverie that she didn't notice the approach of three smallish purple-and-yellow robots until one of them bent over and said, "'Ullo."
"Yeek!" she said, jerking upright and hitting her head on the steel door with an amusing booming noise. The robots snickered. Rubbing her head, Alex regarded them thoughtfully. "Who're you?"
"I'm Kickback," said the one who'd addressed her originally. All three of them were black, purple and yellow, with rather elegant silvery metal bits sticking off them at odd angles. The one who'd spoken had cheerful yellow antennae, which were waving themselves absently in the air. "This is Shrapnel, and that's Bombshell."
Shrapnel was the one with the things that looked like streetcar-cable contacts on his shoulders, and the lower half of Bombshell's face was covered with a visor reminiscent of Italian High Gothic armour. They were looking at her curiously.
"Can we eat it?" Bombshell asked.
"It's a human, human," said Shrapnel, fingering his chin. "They give you indigestion, remember?"
"Nobody is eating me," said Alex firmly. "How come you're not thirty feet tall?"
"We're the Insecticons," Kickback informed her. "We're supposed to be this size. Not like some of those overgrown scrapheaps who call themselves Decepticons."
Alex snorted. "Overgrown scrapheaps, huh? I'm Alex. I'm not supposed to be here."
"What a coincidence, dence," said Shrapnel. The speech impediment was really rather cute, coming from a mechanical being. "Neither are we." He grinned. Kickback's antennae pointed themselves at her.
"What're you doing in Decepticon headquarters, then?" he asked.
"Trying to get this sodding door open. Look, do you know what's going on? Where is everybody?"
Bombshell shrugged. "The place is deserted. Say, you're not one of those Mary Sues, are you? They don't taste very good at all."
She blinked. "You eat them?"
"We eat whatever we can get," Kickback told her, "although I gotta say that the taste's definitely not worth all the squealing and thrashing about."
"Speak for yourself, self," said Shrapnel. "That one with the purple hair was kind of good, good."
Alex was fascinated, despite herself. "Hold it, you're robots, yeah? How come you eat stuff?"
"We're special."
"Ah," she said, clearly not going to get an explanation. "Well, do you know how to open this door?"
"Not a problem," said Bombshell, and leapt into the air. Alex watched in amazement as the robot defied gravity, soaring up to the red panel on the wall by the doorframe, and gave it a healthy kick. There was a hiss of compressed air, and the door slid open.
"Damn," she said. "How about I just hang out with you guys from now on? With the flying, and the eating obnoxious things, and the hey hey."
"Fine by me," said Shrapnel, "as long as you don't try and get us to fall in love with you, you."
"Don't take this wrong, but you're not my type," she told him. His colleagues tried not to laugh.
After some argument, the Insecticons agreed to let her ride on them, or at least hang on for dear life while they zoomed through the hallways, because her pathetic human legs didn't walk very fast. She clung to Shrapnel's back as he shot through the doorway to the command room, did an elegant barrel roll, and landed on the console facing the giant screen. She staggered a few steps away from him and sat down heavily until the world stopped spinning quite so fast.
The Insecticons were busy doing awful things to the console; she caught a glimpse of what looked like a Photoshopped version of Starscream wearing a pink tutu before her higher brain centers kicked in and made her look away. She tapped out a few basic commands on the console next to them and managed, by sheer luck, to call up a schematic of the base. "Hey, guys," she called. "Any idea how to locate your large friends?"
Kickback stopped whatever he was doing and came over to join her. "Who cares?"
"Me, for one," she told him, lighting a Camel. "I want to see if there's any way they can send me back to where I'm supposed to be, which is about four thousand miles and several vertical fathoms away." Smoke trickled from her nostrils. "And I also sort of want to know what came through the warp gate this time. I got signatures implying something noticeable has arrived."
"Is it edible?"
"I don't know," she retorted, "what do you lot normally eat?"
"Whatever's available, vailable," Shrapnel grinned. "Except Nova power cores and Mary Sues with green hair."
"And brussels sprouts," added Bombshell, logging on to AOL.
"Well, that narrows it down," she sighed, sitting down on the edge of the console with her chin resting on her knees. "I wish I knew what was causing all this."
Behind her, Kickback was typing, rapidly. "Hey, human-thing," he said. "Check this out. Looks like all the big bots are in the storage room."
Alex turned, glancing over her shoulder. "It's Alex, insect-thing," she said mildly. "Wait a sec, isn't that the storage room where all the Mary Sues come out?"
Shrapnel and Bombshell were ignoring her. "Who cares? While the big bots are busy, we can have some fun. Hey, guys, let's go replace Megatron's DVD collection with the first volume of Hot Anime Heroines in the Shower."
Kickback joined his comrades. "Didn't we do that last week?"
"No, that was the collector's edition of Emeril Live. And the week before was Carpentry for Novices volumes six through eighteen. Remember? That was the time he chased us all around the base with his fusion cannon, yelling that he was going to tie us into knots and feed us to the anglerfish that keeps trying to get in through the main cargo bay." Bombshell folded his arms. "Maybe we oughtta branch out, you know? Start messing with his collection of Dungeons and Dragons figurines, or something."
"Ooh, we could repaint them to look like H.R. Pufnstuf characters."
"You guys don't have enough to do," said Alex, blowing smoke rings. "Okay. If I help you do something even more annoying than messing with Megatron's toys, will you help me find out what the smeg is going on in that storage room?"
The Insecticons exchanged considering looks. "Does it involve chocolate syrup, high-octane gasoline, and giant inflatable models of the Titanic?"
"It might."
"We're in, in," said Shrapnel. "Climb aboard."
**
Half an hour earlier...
Superia Prime straightened up. Her internal time monitors told her that she'd been offline for four hundred fifty-three point seven astro-seconds, and she registered strange ion signatures all around her which corresponded to the twisted energies of a warp-gate. The last clear thing in her digital memory was the battle of Epsilon Trismegistus; she'd been just about to destroy her mortal enemy DoomStar with a mighty blow from her Fire Glaive when she had been summoned to a different plane. Again, justice is thwarted by the winds of chance, she thought.
She looked around herself. She stood in a room designed for beings roughly her size, utterly devoid of decoration save for an intercom panel by the door. Her body seemed to be intact—her internal damage reports didn't register anything beyond a brief energy surge as she had come through the warp gate—and her Fire Glaive was still burning brightly in her hand. She sheathed it with a decisive motion, and walked over to the door.
Superia Prime could see her reflection in the steel. Being an admirer of Beauty in whatever form she found it, although utterly without vanity, she had a good long look at herself. Her body was all sharp angles and tight curves, her red-and-gold armour glinting brilliantly even in the dim light. More organic than several of her comrades, Superia Prime's body resembled nothing so much as a vast, perfect metal sculpture. Her pale-gold face was framed by a delicate red helmet decorated with gold curves designed to look like wings; two of these swept down to accentuate her high cheekbones. A breastplate that would have put human Valkyries to shame bore the insignia of her people, the SuperCons, etched in brilliant gold. Her golden fingers were tipped with sharp steel claws which could retract into sheaths at will; the claws themselves were dark rust-red, like the sculptured curves of her lower legs, which ended in high-heeled, pointed feet; her thighs and hips were burnished gold, and a belt of interlinked dark-red plaques draped around her waist. Her golden optics were narrowed.
Without being aware of it, Superia Prime was broadcasting a signal on a number of frequencies which cut directly through the shielding of the base like a knife through water. One by one, the Decepticon warriors dropped what they were doing, turning blindly to follow the signal, and approached the storage room. What they found there did not disappoint them.
"Oh, good grief," said Alex, clinging to Shrapnel's shoulders as he landed in the doorway of the storage room. Kickback and Bombshell joined them after a moment, exchanging looks of horrified amusement. "They're all...zombies, or something."
The storage room was packed with Decepticons. She recognized the dark-blue tape player guy who'd brought her the food, standing beside Megatron (who was swaying a bit, she noticed). Starscream, Thundercracker, and another jet-thingy who looked just like them but was a tasteful combination of purple and black were jostling for position with each other; a big grey robot she didn't know was trying to elbow his way past someone whose design unfortunately featured a large nosecone on top of his head. She stared.
"What the slag is wrong with them, with them?" Shrapnel muttered. Beside him, Kickback leaped into the air and hovered unobtrusively over Megatron's shoulder. He didn't stay long before coming back down to join them.
"It's a femmebot," he said, shakily. Alex got off Shrapnel's back, cursing, and threaded her way through the forest of enormous metal legs. She had to bang on several of them to get them to move, but eventually she arrived at the centre of the circle of Decepticons, and had to pause to catch her breath. Kickback was right. It was one hell of a femmebot.
The glamorie lasted for about a minute before the intrinsic Alex kicked back in. What the hell does a robot want with breasts? she wondered sourly. And it's wearing heels. Why is it wearing heels? And what the hell is with the lipstick?
She noticed the large sword strapped to its back, and sighed. Oh boy. This one isn't going to go down with a lucky hit by a folding chair. I don't know what its vulnerable points are, and it can step on me anytime it wants.
The Decepticons around her were beginning to shove one another aside in order to get closer to the newcomer, and Alex found herself having to move quickly so as not to get stomped. Above her head, the femmebot spoke.
"Please," it said, in a clear, sweet, bell-like voice that didn't have anything to do with machinery. "Do not fight on my account, friends. I would not disturb your fellowship."
Fellowship? Alex wondered. Christ. Now it's going to say "don't you all get in a tizzy over li'l old me."
"Out of the way, Starscream," snarled Megatron, elbowing him. "Don't be discourteous to our guest."
"Aah, you always have to have everything your own way," Starscream retorted, giving his leader a shove. "Do you have to make a fool of yourself in front of Superia Prime?"
Oh, hell, and I thought Lady Darktalon was a bad name. Alex ducked as large Decepticon feet stomped down all around her. By now all of them were arguing amongst themselves, and the femmebot was...for lack of a better word...simpering. "Please, you must stop," it said. "You will hurt each other."
This was apparently not something the Decepticons had a problem with. The shoving had escalated into a full-scale fistfight, metal clanging off metal, yells of anger and pain echoing horribly in the enclosed space. Alex cursed loudly and inventively and leapt free of the melee, landing on the femmebot's ankle and clambering up its leg to relative safety.
Superia Prime bent down, bringing its lovely face rather closer to Alex than she would have liked, and plucked her off its knee. "What manner of thing are you?" it wanted to know, holding her between thumb and forefinger like a mildly interesting worm.
"I'm Alex," said Alex, trying not to squirm under the force of those great golden eyes. "Look, um, your presence here isn't doing them any good."
Superia Prime's eyes narrowed. "But they need my help. Clearly their technology is inefficient and obsolete, and they are emotionally unstable. They need me."
"No," said Alex despairingly, "they don't. Look. Before you got here they were more or less functional, and now they're ripping bits off one another." She pointed as Megatron pulled off one of Starscream's wings and then had to duck for cover as the enraged jet leapt for him.
"Emotionally unstable," repeated the femmebot. "I can help them."
"Yeah, by going away."
A change came over the femmebot's perfect face; a smile curved its lips, its golden eyes warmed and became condescending rather than belligerent. "Ah," it said. "I understand you now, little organic thing. You are female, are you not?"
"That's got nothing to do with this," said Alex.
"Of course it does. You suffer from jealousy, a common affliction of the lesser mind." It raised her level with its eyes. "I pity you. However, your presence here is distracting and will interfere with my intentions to help these poor males."
"Interesting," said Alex, thoughtfully, clinging to its fingers.
"What is?"
"You. I never thought that mechanical beings could be complete twats, but you seem to have proved otherwise. I salute you."
"What?" it asked, but Alex had already wriggled out of her foxfur coat and leapt free of its hand, having seen Kickback out of the corner of her eye. For an awful moment she thought the Insecticon hadn't seen her, but as she reached the apex of her arc and began to fall, a metal hand seized hers, and she landed against his chest with enough force to drive the breath from her body. The femmebot made a grab for them, but missed as he zigged nimbly out of the way, soaring over the heads of the enraged Decepticons to join his colleagues, hovering in the doorway. "Let's go!" he yelled.
"Where to?"
"Anywhere that isn't here!"
TBC
again, please email reviews, as ff.net appears to hate me. alexandraspar@hotmail.com.