Sorry it took me so long. I hope that I had put a disclaimer in the first chapter than warns of my flightiness when it comes to writing stories. I'm not really much of an author - - with the Power of Grayskull, however, perhaps I can finish this story. Just give me a year or two. As you can tell, I never finished my Mortal Kombat story, and as an aside, I've posted two other stories on that I took down and never completed. Anyway, here goes.
That was a long time ago. Like, five million years ago. 'Course, four million of those years had been spent in temporal stasis, so they didn't really count in the here and now. Well, at least not in the 'here'.
While he and everyone else - Auto- and Decepti-geeks both - had been dreaming away, the war had completely destroyed their planet, their civilization, their home. Most of the population was in stasis, much like they had been for four million years. There was no energy on the planet.
Thundercracker always moped like this. Everyone in this little purple base knew that he told them so. It was going to happen. Cybertron was going to run out of energy.
But now they were awake, and they had to do something about it. Granted, they'd been awake for a while now, maybe for a rotation of this planet around its sun. It seemed like a real long time.
It was like a curse, really. He mulled the idea over and over in his processors until he got stir-crazy. An Earth 'year', as the aboriginals called it, was a slaggin' long time, and life was, according to calculations, approximately a billion times longer.
They had to stay on this planet until they had enough energy to end the war once and for all. Earth was particularly dirty and wet - - and those Autogeeks were always reminding him of that, 'cause he always somehow ended up drenched in the slimy dihydrogen oxide, carbon, potassium and Primus knows what else that was in what the Humans called 'water'. Or sometimes called 'agua' by them. Or, sometimes more accurately called "nian" by them, full of gunk as it was.
Odd that these creatures didn't have a universal language. If he had his way, he'd study them - they were fascinating, and a part of him even believed them to be quite amazing. Of course, he sucker-punched that part of him way into the back of his Memory and encrypted it. Try as he might, though, he had studied - and learned - that encryption only happened as a defense mechanism to block out traumatic experiences so that the mind could still function without overload.
These humans - "squishies", as Skywarp aptly named them - were a whole new type of life. He'd never, ever encountered organisms that were carbon-based. Non-transition-metal based, of course, since that was one of his first breakthroughs, but never carbon-based. The atmosphere of the planet was mostly Nitrogen, though almost all of the organisms were fueled by a combination of oxygen, carbohydrates, and, of course, water. (Dihydrogen oxide? A mouthful, even when just thinking the word.)
They were electric. They had an electromagnetic field around them, much like their planet. Their pumps - hearts - worked in a similar fashion to those of the Transformers. Electricity. They generated heat.
They got their energy from what they consumed - and they consumed almost everything. But, the energy for all but one type of organism at the bottom of the sea came from the sun. "Plants" took their energy directly from the sun. "Photosynthesis", the curious humans had named it.
He didn't learn any of this through observation. The only way he could learn it was by reading the humans' own discoveries.
According to their research, they had been living on this planet in their current societal system for approximately 12,000 Earth-years. Thundercracker found this to be unbelievable. There was no way that these tiny creatures, with their tiny processors and their tiny life span, had, in a mere 12,000 years - developed the technology, harnessed the power of metals, gained so much knowledge about themselves, the micro-verse, and the universe that they did.
Granted, the amount of knowledge they had acquired was quite limited, quite vague, and quite 'ethnocentric'. (None of their multitudinous languages had a word for species-centric, or planet-centric, because these creatures had no real concept of other beings in the universe.) Still, Thundercracker was impressed by the time in which they had discovered these things.
They didn't look like they were about to stop, either. They had a long way to go. Their weapons technology was, by Cybertronian standards, pathetic, but the weapons seemed to be effective in destroying fellow humans. Was every sentient being out there the same, wanting to self-destruct?
Of course not. Half of the sentient beings, if not most, would want peace and co-operation, but the few who didn't, the few who wanted power, were ruthless and stepped on those who were too compassionate to defend themselves in order to gain control. Control is always easily gained through ruthlessness, and those who were not disgusted by cruelty were always the ones in control. And they would always exist to end times of peace. It seemed to be a law of the universe. Or multiverse. Whatever. Astronomy wasn't really his thing.
He wanted to take a few of the humans and dissect them; he wanted to put a few in a controlled environment and test them. He wanted to learn how they worked.
He couldn't. His curiosity was a weakness. The more and more he learned about the creatures, the less and less he wanted to destroy them. He acknowledged that destroying them was not the reason why the Decepticons were staying on Earth; it was to harvest the energy the planet supplied. But the Decepticons didn't care if they killed a few thousand of the humans while doing so. They, as a whole, took pleasure in the fact that when they sucked Earth dry of its energy, the humans would go extinct, as would everything else on the planet, if the planet itself didn't implode.
If Thundercracker couldn't tell anyone the real reason for his hesitation, maybe he could plead a case for inefficiency. Killing 'em was a waste of energy. Sucking the planet dry meant that it would never replenish its energy and would never be a source of energy again; they'd lose a valuable resource.
Of course, he'd never say that. Slag, why did he have to be so questioning? Why did he want to learn so much? They were primitive. They were going to end up destroying themselves anyway, so what would it hurt to just speed it up? He slammed the side of his fist into the alloy wall and headed towards the transporter to prove to himself that he was a strong, superior being. After all, he controlled the sky.
That was random. It was going to be funny and stuff at first, but then I rambled. Hey, speaking of which, anyone maybe want to be a Beta? I don't even read over my work after I'm finished typing.