Author's notes: I would love to hear what everyone thinks, so please comment!


Location: Nevada desert

Reha

"What was that?" Reha muttered to herself from the shacks roof, her work on the solar panels forgotten. Something massive had crashed in the supposedly haunted plateau. Normally, Reha wouldn't have found that concept odd. There were large heaps of broken cars and electronics dumped there. She scavenged the place all the time and had witnessed piles toppling over. But the plume of dust that rose from the plateaus suggested something bigger than trash falling.

Reha slid off the roof and hustled towards the dumping ground to investigate. It wasn't a far walk. She arrived, dust particles still in the air from whatever disturbance had occurred. She masked her nose and mouth in her shirt so not to gag in the plume. The last thing she needed was a sore throat with no money to buy even the cheapest store brand cough drops.

She soon saw what was amiss. A large portion of hanging rockface had crumbled, a bolder having crashed to the ground. Reha circled the boulder, unsure what to make of the event. This rockface had been secure, the last she checked. She had studied the area well since she had wanted to avoid getting smashed herself by hanging rocks while picking from the piles of equipment.

She glanced up where the bolder had fallen. "What the hell?" The rock wall was scorched black and still smoldering. Something had blasted the rockface with some sort of heavy artillery.

Military activity wasn't unheard of in the desert… "But I would have heard them coming here." She turned about the dumping ground. She was alone.

The Transistor radio on her belt startled her with a jarring series of beeps. Her heart started to pound fast, the sting of dust in her eyes secondary as she focused on her Transistor.

Since she had arrived at this place, it was the clearest signal she had received so far. It was like she was right on top of the signal source, but she saw nothing.

Reha huffed with growing frustration, though allowed an improbable thought to percolate. "Nothing you can see with the eyes alone," she muttered as she glanced at her feet. The parched dirt was scored in a strange pattern. She knelt to run a hand over the large indent. Despite rubbing at the dirt to fill it back in, it retained its shape. That didn't make any sense. It was as if whatever caused the large markings was… still laying there.


Location: Shadow Zone

Laserbeak

"Master Soundwave, unresponsive." Laserbeak administered another electric shock into Soundwave's chassis to maintain a stable electro pulse. Despite his efforts, his master was slipping away. "Hemorrhaging Energon. Energon levels, critical."

There was peripheral movement.

Laserbeak followed the new movement to assess possible danger. It wasn't in the Flux Space with them. "An organic." Laserbeak watched as the dark-toned human wandered nearby.

Soundwave's vitals dipped. Laserbeak went back to shock his master in an attempt to revive him. His attempts became less effective each time.

The image of his master warped. The human had stumbled into Soundwave's chassis in the physical world. Being in a different dimension, the human could walk right through them and not know of their existence. Laserbeak was ready to disregard the event.

But then the human started to beep. The repetitive tones weren't random. It was the same signal Master Soundwave had been broadcasting in hopes of receiving rescue.

Laserbeak observed the human closer. The beeping was resonating from a device attached to the human's lower midsection. "Location of signal, found." Laserbeak noted. The signal Master Soundwave was trying to locate to get out of the Flux Space, was radiating from a human?

Human or not, this organic had decoded Master Soundwave's SOS. They had followed the instructions Soundwave sent through the Flux Space. Though still trapped between dimensions, Laserbeak was able to remotely connect to the human's device due to its close proximity. In doing so, he was able to see the larger grid the human had engineered in response to Master Soundwave's broadcast. It seemed the human had created a larger resonator, most likely to amplify Master Soundwave's signal. But Laserbeak saw it had other uses. It would be able to reflect energy waves on a massive scale, like the crossing streams of two Groundbridge portals for example. No matter what form assistance took, Laserbeak jumped at the opportunity. He sent out the coordinates of his master to the human, and the device the organic held beeped obediently.

The human was focused, their strange optics blinking. Slowly, the human repeated the message out loud. They looked down at their own location, standing before Soundwave's limp chassis. Laserbeak just needed to communicate the rest. Even with this human's technology to rely on, they needed a Groundbridge to activate. Without the Nemesis to rely upon, that only left one option on Earth.


Location: Nevada Desert

Reha

It was communicating. The source of the energy flux was communicating with her!

Reha was standing on the coordinates the Energy Flux had provided, her heart in her throat. She was going to crack the mystery. She had to shake out her hands again to keep the rest of herself from trembling. "I understand you. Now what do we do?" she asked the empty air. Her Transistor radio started beeping again. This time, the coordinates were that of her larger device. Her Communication and Energy Refractor. The smile spread wide on her lips. "Hold on!" She raced back to the shack. Adrenaline made the short trip a blur. Unlike every other time, the source of the beeping followed her.

Reha slid to a stop in front of her large refractor and connected it to the shack's power grid. It buzzed to life, though it needed an energy source to reflect. "Now what?" she asked her Transistor radio. A new series of numbers came through. She recognized it from her endless hours studying programming. Binary. The universal computerized language.

She threw open her laptop and typed the message out.

01000001 01100011 01110100 01101001 01110110 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01000001 01110101 01110100 01101111 01100010 01101111 01110100 00100000 01001111 01101101 01100101 01100111 01100001 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 01110000 01101111 01110011 01110100 00100000 01000111 01110010 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100010 01110010 01101001 01100100 01100111 01100101 00101110 00100000

Activate Autobot Omega outpost 1 Groundbridge.

Though she understood what the number sequence translated into, she couldn't even guess as to what it meant. "What's a, Groundbridge, or… Autobot?"

The number sequence continued.

01010011 01001111 01010011

SOS

Whatever communicated with her was in trouble.

Another series of fast numbers.

01001101 01100101 01100100 01101001 01100011 01100001 01101100 00100000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01110011 01110100 01100001 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01101110 01100101 01100101 01100100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 01010101 01110010 01100111 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000

Medical assistance needed. Urgent

"You're hurt?" Reha gasped. "What can I do to help?"

The code changed. This time, it was a virtual location.

Reha's fingers flew over the keyboard of her laptop. Government files was where she was led. She broke through the firewall with little thought and followed the instructions. She stumbled down a government rabbit hole. The keywords "Groundbridge" and "Autobot" brought her to a top-secret defense file. Aliens, attacks on Earth. Transforming robot technology. She didn't have time to read over the insanity before her. She found what she was looking for. She had hacked into the Groundbridge system, whatever it was.

The radio beeped again. The coordinates of her Communication and Energy refractor came through. The source talking to her wanted her to put this location into the government system, this Groundbridge. This was risky. If the government decoded her presence in their system, they could find her. If she was found, then her foster parents found her.

The SOS repeated. Desperate. She had to take the risk. She typed it into the government program and pressed 'activate'.

Reha fell backwards when an explosion of light ripped through the once calm night. She staired up from the ground; eyes wide in amazement as the vortex of light reflected off her refractor and became two. The dueling vortexes fed off each other, the space between them warping reality itself.


Location: Shadow Zone

Soundwave

The pain of an electric shock roused Soundwave into an almost conscious state. Pain meant he wasn't one with the All Spark yet. Why was he lingering when there was no need to?

Laserbeak's desperate chirps brought his optics back online with a blurry image. Laserbeak was the cause of the pain, trying to resuscitate him with electric shocks. It was doing more damage to his wiring then what was worth it. He wanted to reach out to pat Laserbeak, assure him it was alright to stop. He was too weak to communicate, even through their mental connection.

"Groundbridge has opened," Laserbeak insisted, pulling hard at Soundwave's servos with his tentacles.

Soundwave didn't understand. His minicon must have been beyond reason. There was no…

He saw the light reflected off Laserbeak's wings. With great effort, he turned his helm towards the light. Was it the All Spark calling him home?

Across the desert, he made out the familiar swirling vortex of an open Groundbridge.

An. Open. GROUNDBRIDGE.

Soundwave ceased surrendering to the encroaching darkness and instead fought it. Whoever was outside the Flux Space had decoded his location and opened a portal for him. He had a means of escape. Decepticon help was only a few steps away. Could it be Megatron himself?

A few steps for Soundwave was a current impossibility. His peds were broken, along with the rest of him. He crawled towards the light with Laserbeak yanking him forward. His optics flickered on and off, disorienting him further. With Laserbeak's prodding, he flung them through the portal.

He smashed into the dirt on the other side of the Groundbridge. The light of the dueling vortexes faded. He was faced with Earth's night sky not warped by the Flux Space. His sight faded back into darkness with a last fleeting thought. He wished the night sky he saw overhead was that of Cybertron.