Creation began on 05-25-21
Creation ended on 11-29-21
Christine
More than meets the Eye: Arrivals
It was strange, sitting in a car that was not really a car, but some kind of robotic creature that was able to turn into one, and was driving itself around with three passengers inside.
"This car's a pretty good driver," Leigh told Arnie and Dennis as she sat in the center of the Cadillac, not so much close to the former, but because she didn't want to sit in the driver seat.
"Yeah," Arnie agreed with her. "You should really sit in the seat, though."
"I'm not going to sit in there. He's driving."
"Then maybe you should sit his lap," Dennis suggested."
"What?"
"Well, he has the only other seatbelt available. You know, safety first."
Leigh sighed and moved towards Arnie and he redid the seatbelt.
"Um, better?" He asked her.
"Yeah," she answered. "Honestly, the seatbelt was a good move."
"They're here now," the radio went, and the three looked up as the car drove to a nearby hill where they could see the town below…and the stars above.
"Whoa," Dennis gasped, pointing towards what looked like a meteor shower, seeing five meteorites coming closer.
Then, one of them changed direction and went away from the town while the others fell somewhere else in different parts of the city.
Leigh reached for Arnie's left hand and held it tightly.
"What are they?" Arnie asked the car.
"Friends," its radio responded.
"Friends?" Dennis questioned.
-x-
People were in a small panic where there was talk of three meteorites impacting the streets, but when they approached the crater of one of the meteorites, there was nothing. It was like the meteorite…disappeared.
"What's going on here?" A teen boy questioned as the police and first responders came to assess the situation. "Did everyone see the impact?!"
Among the craziness, nobody thought to question a medical van driving away.
-x-
A large, mechanical being wandered in the shadows and stopped in front of a car dealership lot, seeing the selection of vehicles available, selecting one that was acceptable.
-x-
Out in the outskirts of the city, another large, mechanical being, having escaped the crater it impacted into upon arrival, looked around and saw a truck carrying several cars towards the city. Seconds later, the being was gone…and in its place was a truck identical to the one that drove by, but without the cars on it.
-x-
The car brought Arnie, Dennis and Leigh to an alleyway where they were in the path of a car carrier that came to a stop in front of them.
Arnie noticed that on the front grill of the truck was that strange symbol he noticed on his Cadillac. Was there a connection between the two?
Beep-beep! They saw an ambulance come through the alleyway, followed by a tow truck and two cars.
"An ambulance?" Leigh questioned.
"And a tow truck?" Dennis added.
Click-click-click! The truck in front of them split in half down the middle, and then started doing what the Cadillac and police car did; it started moving around, changing its shape, getting larger and looking less like a vehicle.
The tow truck, ambulance and cars followed suit, backing away from the larger truck to give it space as it started standing on two legs. They were shifting their parts around, looking less like vehicles and more like robots.
The teens couldn't believe their eyes as they had been surrounded by six vehicles…and were now surrounded by six, large robots that looked like they were made of car parts.
The largest one, the car carrier, white, blue and purple in its coloration, standing at twenty-one feet, knelt down to the trio and spoke, surprising them.
"Are you Arnold Cunningham?" It asked Arnie in a male voice.
"It knows your name," Leigh told Arnie, suspicious.
"Uh, yeah?" He answered the robot.
"My name is Ultra Magnus," the robot introduced itself, or rather, introduced himself. "We are autonomous robotic organisms from the planet Cybertron."
"But you can call us 'Autobots' for short," said the tow truck to them.
"Autobots," went Dennis. "Okay."
It was one thing to find out that his best friend's second car, instead of being evil or possessed, was a robot that could change its shape. But it was another thing to find out that his friend's car was an alien robot and was affiliated with five other alien robots disguised as vehicles.
"Oh, what's the shit of the day, little bitches?" One of the other two cars had asked them, standing about fourteen feet.
"This is my lieutenant," Ultra Magnus introduced the car. "In our language, our identification designations would be too incomprehensible for you to understand, let alone pronounce. So here, we take it upon ourselves to adopt designations as close to our actual ones as possible."
"You mean, your names?" Leigh questioned.
"Correct. His designation's Baller."
The car, quite possibly a black and red Camaro, leaned against the side of a building and crossed his arms and legs.
"This is quite possibly my third favorite place to come kick it," he told them.
"How'd he learn to talk like that?" Dennis asked.
"We learned Earth's languages through your radio towers and satellites," the tow truck, standing at thirteen feet, revealed.
"My demolition specialist, Takedown," Ultra Magnus revealed, and the tow truck brandished a spiked ball with a hook.
"Any of you feeling lucky this evening?" He asked, sounding intimidating.
"Easy, Takedown."
"I'm just kidding. Only wanted to show them my mace."
"Our medical field specialist, Nurse," he introduced the ambulance, standing at roughly fourteen feet, with a build that appeared almost female in appearance.
Sniff! Nurse smelled the three teens.
"You three are definitely in the early stages of adolescence and way past the infancy stage," it told them in a female voice. "The pheromone levels from the boy on the left suggests that he has claimed the girl as his."
Dennis and Leigh looked at Arnie, unable to believe that this…female Autobot…just stated something like that.
"Forgive Nurse," said the other car, a brown Porsche 930, standing at eight feet. "She sometimes likes to state too much of the obvious."
"Our stealth agent, Incognito."
"I can be one thing in one moment and another thing in the next moment."
"And you have already met your guardian, our reconnaissance agent, Talkback," Ultra Magnus pointed to the Cadillac they had been with since this started.
"Talkback?" Arnie responded, looking at the Autobot with the speech issue. "So, you're my guardian, huh?"
"That's right," Talkback replied through the radio.
"Wait, why can't he speak like the rest of you can?" Leigh questioned. "Why does he speak with a radio or through song lyrics?"
"It's because his vocal processors were damaged in an earlier battle a few years ago," Nurse explained, raising her left arm up…and shooting a blue laser at Talkback's exposed neck, causing him to gag a little. "I'm still working on repairing them."
"So…why are you here?"
"We're looking for an Autobot ship called The Ark," revealed Ultra Magnus, "and we need to find it before the Decepticons and Predacons do and kill our comrades inside it."
"Decepti-what?"
Ultra Magnus tapped the left side of his head and shone a bright light on the ground, causing it to fracture and split apart around the teens. All around them was what appeared to be another world, another lifetime, with metal everywhere, in various forms, both familiar and unfamiliar to them, and organisms that were unlike anything on Earth.
A hologram? Arnie realized.
"Eons ago, our planet, Cybertron, was a powerful empire," Ultra Magnus explained, "until the Great Upgrade from as we currently are to what we could've become. We derived our source of life and power from energon, an invaluable energy harnessed by destroying suns or dying stars, but we needed it at all times, resulting in the Great Upgrade."
"We reduced in size to reduce the consumption of energon," said Nurse, "becoming close to or smaller than most lesser organisms from other planets. While most of us viewed this as a necessity, there were some that felt this was the path to extinction, and they were the faction known as the Decepticons. We were set to transition from Autobot to Maximal when a battle broke out and the faction responsible revealed themselves to be the Predacons, a faction of Decepticons that went through with the Great Upgrade…just to see what would happen."
"The war escalated until our planet was consumed by death and destruction," added Incognito, "and all four sides had casualties exceeding ten-billion Cybertronians. One ship containing the greatest of the Autobots was located on this planet and was intercepted by the Decepticons and Predacons before we could get here first, but they haven't located it yet due to the distress beacon it was sending out dying over two-hundred years ago. Talkback got here before we did and alerted us to the presence of the Decepticons here."
"Thirteen," said Talkback, "followed…by…ten…midgets."
The "ten midgets" had to be the Predacons.
"Thirteen Decepticons and ten Predacons," went Leigh. "Talkback, was that small creature we saw jump out of the cop car a Predacon?"
"Yeah."
"And they're all on Earth right now," said Arnie.
The holographic memory continued on to show a robot that was, beyond reasonable doubts, a brutal savage, slaying other robots with spears and laughing maniacally.
"Who is that?" Dennis asked Ultra Magnus.
"Megaton, the Decepticon leader," he answered. "He despised the Great Upgrade more than anyone else on Cybertron. His thirst for ultimate power makes him a threat across the stars. He disappeared some time ago and nobody has seen or heard from him. Before he disappeared, however, he appointed a Predacon to lead the lesser faction that, more or less, took on his name to install fear among the weak-willed."
"Is he here on Earth, too?" Leigh wanted to know.
"Yes, waiting for the best moment to strike."
"So, to make sure that we're understanding this right," Arnie spoke, "the six of you are the good guys, the Autobots, and that there are at least ten Decepticons and thirteen Predacons, the bad guys, here on Earth, and you're both looking for a ship that is hidden on the planet that hasn't been found yet, containing more good guys, and if they find it before you do, they'll just kill everyone inside it?"
"That's right," Talkback replied.
This was bad for them. Very, very bad. If these Decepticons and Predacons were after the crew aboard The Ark, they were likely willing to go to extremes to locate it, even if it meant harming people that were unexpectedly in the way, like people going about their lives or archeologists at an excavation site. A dispute over power and how to best manage it through the two sides into a long civil war…and the side that would win would be the side that had the most to gain from it all, resulting in massive casualties on both sides, and now their war had spilled onto this planet and everyone was at risk.
To be continued…
A/N: I was supposed to be working on Hope from the Past, but this also needed to be updated. The plot has changed because the old bits from the old shows are a good source to carry on the story. The introduction of new and original characters was possible because they don't exist in the other areas of the media, so we now have four factions, with two on each side, good and bad. Let me know what you think of this chapter and what you expect from the next one in the future.