After Action Review

By Nopporn Wongrassamee the Evil Author

Summary: Various people react to the events of the Transformers movie. Even the wisest ones have their foolish moments.

Disclaimer: Transformers belong to Hasbro. All things Angel belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.

Sunnydale Memorial Park

Edge of Sunnydale Crater

California

Six weeks after an Allspark and lone spark combined

The Sunnydale Memorial Park had been established by the State of California after the town of Sunnydale had mysteriously collapsed. It had become quite the tourist attraction since opening, people coming to see the ocean filled crater in wondering awe. Aside from the crater, there were of course the usual information booths and concession stands. There was the strange stone monument with names carved in it that had mysteriously appeared one day. And then there were the more secluded areas that were obscured by trees that offered ideal locations for clandestine meetings.

In one such clearing, a lone young woman sat on a park bench. Aside from being a rather pretty twenty-something who appeared to enjoying the sunshine, there was little to distinguish her from any other tourist. The same could not be said for the gaudily painted long nose truck that was pulling up the gravel road to her. Vehicles such as that rarely if ever visited the park.

But then, it wasn't really a truck.

A slight tilt of her head and the woman was looking at the truck.

"What do you want?" she asked. Her voice was blunt, would have been considered rude except the statement lacked anything that might be considered malice, compassion, or any hint of emotion at all. It was a direct query and nothing more.

The truck stopped... and transformed. Panels slid aside. Parts rearranged themselves. In mere a seconds, a humanoid robot stood towering over the miniscule being. When they see one his kind transform for the first time, humans were usually impressed, fascinated and awed by the smoothness of and quickness of transformation.

This human was unimpressed.

But as the superior sensors that the robot used in its humanoid form gazed upon the small organic being it had come here to meet, it realized that this creature was not human. Her appearance as such was as much a façade as his alternate mode of a truck was. That was encouraging.

"Greetings," he began. "I am Optimus Prime."

"Yes, yes," the woman replied impatiently. "I know who you are. What do you want?"

"My people are dying," Optimus began. "In a recent battle, the Alspark - the means by which my kind reproduces - has been destroyed. Without it to replenish our numbers, time and entropy will whittle away at our numbers until we are no more." He pulled out the remnant of the Allspark that he had extracted from Megatron's chest. "Discreet inquiries I have made on this world have led me to believe that you can help us."

"Why should I help you?" the other asked. "It is the nature of our kind that either we learn to reproduce or we die. If you have not learned to do so after all this time, then you are not worthy of such in the first place."

"Please."

"Stupid human impulses," she muttered under her breath. "Fine. Give it here. I will see what I can do."

"Thank you," Optimus said gratefully as he handed her the fragment.

"You realize that there will be a price for this action, do you not?" the organic asked as she took the fragment. "And that likely it shall be bitter and costly?"

"Saving my people will be worth any price you ask for."

"It may not be I that you pay the cost to," she murmured. "Although at some future date, I do intend to collect." She concentrated on the Allspark fragment in her hand and after a moment, both began to be suffused by some internal light. "Hello, Primus."

The reply was instantaneous, powerful, and heard only by her.

HELLO ILLYRIA.

For eons, the inhabitants of Cybertron had regarded the object they called the Allspark as the source of life. They regarded with a mixture of awe and envy, reverence and desire. It had other capabilities that none of them could duplicate. And it seemed utterly passive, sometimes doing what they asked of it, sometimes not, but never taking any action on its own.

The inhabitants of Cybertron were wrong.

In truth, the thing they called the Allspark was a remote terminal, a dumb machine that connected to a pocket universe, the private residence of a very old, very powerful being. Some residents of Earth might call that being a god, or an ascended being, or an Old One. And some would have been hard pressed to tell what the difference between the three.

Though the Allspark terminal was broken, Illyria managed to piece together enough of what was left to form a crude connection. It was her people's equivalent of cobbling together a low bandwidth phone conversation over a high speed computer network.

"Hello, Primus," she greeted.

"Hello, Illyria," Primus replied. He regarded her for a moment. "You've shrunk."

Optimus heard nothing of what passed between them. What he observed was that he strange glow surrounding slowly grew brighter concentrated mostly around the fragment of the Allspark. Within the light, space fluctuated, frothing at the quantum level as sub atomic particles popped into existence and then did not immediately disappear as they normally would. Instead they stayed, and attached themselves to the Allspark fragment.

It was not like what Optimus had seen before. He had seen the Allspark mass shift before, expanding out and contracting in on itself on request. This looked more like a reconstruction of the Allspark. On reflection, Optimus decided that this was exactly what he asked for.

The light peaked and seemed to gather in on itself. And then it shot straight up into the sky, leaving behind a newly rebuilt Allspark in Illyria's hands.

"It is complete," Illyria announced. She handed the Allpark back to Optimus.

"Thank you," he told her. "You have saved my people."

"Perhaps," she replied. Illyria looked upward to where the light had gone. "Your maker has already extracted his payment." She looked back at Optimus. "And there is still my price to be paid."

"Anything," he said. "What do you want in exchange?"

"Your maker has told me that there is life form that would serve as a shell much more adequately than my current one," Illyria told him. "It is in what the humans call the Pegasus galaxy. I require transportation there."

"That…" Optimus hesitated, accessing the human Internet. "That is very far away. The trip will take a long time, even by our standards."

"Unacceptable," Illyria replied. "I must acquire one before the humans destroy them all."

Several thousand miles away, no one observed a streak of light descend from the sky and plunge into the ocean. The light continued downward into the Laurentian Abyss, barely impeded by the mass of water and pressure in one of the deepest places on Earth. When it reached its destination, and inert metal form, it vanished.

Two red eyes began to glimmer with life.