After Action Review

By Nopporn Wongrassamee the Evil Author

Summary: Various people react to the events of the Transformers movie. Things go boom.

Disclaimer: Transformers belong to Hasbro. Firestarter belongs to… Stephan King I think.

Just off the Alaska Highway

British Columbia

Canada

Six months after a leader had fallen

Charlie McGee was a city girl at heart. As such, camping out in the back woods of Canada in minus fifty degree winter weather was so not her style. She was a healthy young woman and as such, missed the bright lights, the clubs, and just plain being around people. On the other hand, the Canadian back woods had a couple advantages.

For one thing, if Charlie accidentally set fire to her bedding while asleep again, she wouldn't wind up burning down the surrounding woods. If nothing else, she'd just have to reach over and grab some snow.

She still felt a bit guilty for that one time in California.

Another advantage to being in the middle of nowhere is that she didn't have to be constantly looking over her shoulder for government and/or corporate secret agents. Being the end result of some highly illegal experiments psychic powers tended to leave her terminally paranoid. Sometimes her life seemed like one long chase by people who wanted to exploit her abilities.

They had actually caught up with her once. The end of that little bit of drama had included burning down a sizable chunk of a small town. No, it was better out here, just Charlie in her sleeping bag, lying on the open snow under a clear night sky full of stars.

And one fireball, which flashed over her, impacting nearby in a ground shaking explosion of dirt and tree fragments.

Charlie scrambled out of her sleeping bag and put on some shoes. Despite the subfreezing temperatures, Charlie had only been wearing a thin tank top and shorts to bed. But the shoes were important thing. Even though she instinctively used her power to stay warm, for some reason, those instincts didn't include stray bits of vegetation and rock from poking the bottom of her feet.

Curiosity and concern propelled her forward. From what little she had seen, the object had probably been a meteor. But Charlie wasn't sure of that, and if that had been a plane, someone might be in need of help. Of course, helping a crash victim would probably also bring her to the attention of people she wanted to avoid.

Sometimes she cursed her heroic impulses.

But when she got to the crash site, a giant and definitely mechanical figure was standing up. As Charlie gaped at it, her mind flashed back to news reports and internet forums of the previous summer of gargantuan robots fighting in the streets of an American city. The U.S. government claimed they were top secret military hardware gone rogue. Conspiracy minded theorists claimed aliens had invaded. Some of the really out there websites had claimed they were demons and monsters from alternate dimensions.

It looked like Charlie was going to find out which.

"Uh, hello?" she called out tentatively. "Are you in need of help?"

Glowing red eyes zeroed in on her.

"Such a lovely, lovely world," the giant began slowly. It began making sounds that sounded a lot like maniacal laughter. "This world is so full of things that burn. Soooo many chemical compounds to produce light and heat, where ever shall I start?"

Definitely alien, Charlie thought.

"Don't take this the wrong way," she said to the alien, "but my people really won't like it if you start setting fires at random."

"Indeed?" the alien replied. Something was happening to its arm. It looked like it was rearranging itself. "But I am Inferno, and I…" it pointed its arm at Charlie and where a hand used to be was something that looked a lot like the muzzle of a gun, "BURN!!!"

Star hot plasma gushed like water from Inferno's arm, washing over the puny fleshling and some of the surrounding vegetation. Snow flashed into vapor and trees exploded. He cackled madly, enjoying all the lovely destruction. Pity the current environs weren't conducive to letting the fire spread on its own.

But his laughter trailed off when he shut off the stream of plasma and the tiny organic creature emerged unharmed. No, not only was it unharmed, it was radiating a substantial amount of electromagnetic radiation from the infrared up to what the human Internet would have termed yellow visible light. And there were traces of even more exotic particles in there, particles that could not exist outside the extreme conditions of the…

"Okay, buddy," the human said. In the words of the natives of this world, she sounded pissed. "You want to play with fire? Let's play with fire."

…Big Bang.

Observation satellites in orbit picked up the explosion immediately. The observed yield was calculated to be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen kilotons of TNT, just slightly more powerful than the atom bomb that leveled Hiroshima. However, there was little in way of hard radiation. The blast, whatever it was, had been entirely made up of heat and light.

All over North America, people woke up to reports of a meteor that had devastated a small chunk of Canadian wilderness and damaged a piece of highway. The meteor had vaporized on impact and there was even telemetry of it coming down. There was even a survivor, a pretty young woman who had been rescued after somehow miraculously surviving the meteor impact and the Canadian winter.

Of course, the public never got the raw take of the telemetry data. Long strings of numbers were hardly ratings grabbers even if careful inspection did show that the explosions had occurred several minutes AFTER the "meteor" had hit the ground.

Meanwhile, the people at the Stargate project simply assumed that an alien ship had landed and whether by design or accident had suffered a catastrophic breakdown. Of course, they wanted to talk to the survivor, if only to make sure she hadn't come with the ship.

An isolationistic subculture of wizards also took note of the explosion. A political crisis among them was provoked when it was leaked that the explosion had a very strong magical signature and had taken place uncomfortably close to a major magical creature reserve. Accusations flew back and forth between individual wizarding governments, but eventually died down with no one the wiser of what really had happened. In fact, all the finger pointing just muddied the issue further.

In the Office of Homeworld Security, a minor intel analyst who had formerly been with a now defunct agency took one look at the survivor's picture and knew exactly who she was. A quick meeting with General O'Neill resulted in orders being dispatched to release the girl as soon as was feasible and in the meantime, every effort should be made to keep her happy and comfortable.

The day after that, the Earth was still there.