Chapter Three: Puppets of Stone and Flesh

It was the last thing that Sideswipe had expected. He had dealt with more than a few nasty surprises before, both on Earth and on Cybertron, but there was nothing that could match up to statues that suddenly came to life. He kept his gaze on the one that had just stepped off the pedestal and was currently walking towards him, watching it carefully to predict its moves. He might not have had Prowl's battle computer, but he was one of the Autobots' best warriors – a reputation he had justifiably earned.

Underneath the soft rumbling sound emitted by the statues, he heard Jazz say: "Best ta run hide for now, li'l lady. There's no tellin' what these things'll do."

"I know exactly what they'll do," Skids muttered as, with a sharp hum that seemed just a shade too high for Sideswipe's audios to pick up long, spear-like weapons suddenly appeared in the statues' hands, made of that strange energy that ran and pulsed through the stone of the statues. "They'll turn us all into hot piles of slag."

"Not if I can help it," Sideswipe muttered, optics narrowing as he watched the statue come towards him. His fuel pump thumped once, twice…

And then the statues came charging at them, spears lifted high and aimed right for their spark chambers.

In that moment, everything seemed to fade away until it felt as if it was just him and the statue in the chamber. With a grunt, Sideswipe ducked and rolled out of the way, the statue's energy spear singing past just a few inches above his helm. In a move borne of many vorns of practice and practical experience, he got onto his feet, took aim, and shot the statue in the back.

The fragger didn't even flinch.

"Slag, slag, slag…" Sideswipe chanted the swear word like a mantra under his breath as he fired another shot as the statue turned around to face him. It merely twirled its spear, and deflected the beam with an ease and finesse that the Autobot both admired and detested. He fired again, this time going for the fingers on the statue's hand. Though the shot connected and smoked against the granite knuckles, the statue did not relax its grip for a moment.

The statue was facing him fully now, and Sideswipe found himself staring straight into pools of eerie green eldritch light. He had stared more than a few 'Cons and even a couple of 'Bots down in the optics this way, but this statue gave him a cold feeling in his tanks. Though many humans had difficulty doing so, Sideswipe could tell when there was life in a Cybertronian's optics – any Cybertronian could, when it came to their own kind.

But those eyes…optics…whatever they were that stared back at him were as dead as the stone that framed them. There was no life there, no spark, not even a "soul" as the humans liked to call whatever it was that kept them ticking. Whatever was attacking him was nothing more than a giant puppet.

A dangerous puppet, Sideswipe reminded himself as the statue launched itself at him, the spear lancing a bright, deadly path before it. Knowing then that his rifle was useless, he put it back in subspace, crouched down a little, and launched himself at the statue, sending the both of them crashing onto the floor in a landing that shook the cavern and echoed against its walls like a steady roll of thunder. Heedless of Skids and Jazz's cries of warning to watch out for Naila, Sideswipe proceeded to pummel at the statue's chest area, chunks of rock flying everywhere even as the statue kicked and struggled underneath him.

In the midst of all that flying rock, Sideswipe's optics caught a glint of something bright underneath the stone that made up the statue's chest. The more he pummeled at it, the more of it was revealed: a crystal emanating the same green light that permeated the statue's eyes.

Sideswipe immediately sensed that, whatever this was, it was the statue's driving force; similar, in a way, to the spark chambers that powered a Cybertronian. Transforming his right hand into a pile-driver, he pulled back, preparing to shatter the crystal to pieces.

But the statue emitted a shriek akin to large chunks of rock sliding against one another, and threw him off with an almighty shove. Sideswipe, however, was ready, and in the few seconds between getting pushed away and landing on his feet, he transformed the pile-driver back into his hand, pulled his rifle out of subspace, and aimed. As soon as his feet touched ground, he pulled the trigger, sending a photon beam straight at the exposed crystal.

This time, the shot took effect, shattering the crystal into a thousand shimmering fragments. The moment it did, the energy spear in the statue's hand disappeared, and it seemed to seize up in mid-step before falling down, face-first, to the ground, its limbs breaking apart when the material it was made of was unable to hold up under the force of impact.

Now that he knew how to kill them, Sideswipe quickly relayed the information via radio to Skids and Jazz, even as he turned to give the former a hand with the statue that, at the moment, had the theoretician backed into a corner. He didn't need to know if Jazz was okay; as far as he was concerned, the slippery Special Ops Commander would be out of whatever trouble he had gotten himself into in no time flat, now that Sideswipe had told him how to defeat the statues.

Skids, who was a scientist first and a warrior a rather distant second, was a different story.

Transforming both his hands into pile-drivers, Sideswipe grinned wickedly as he slammed both into the statue's back, exposing a wide swath of green crystal: and earning him an enraged roar from the thing as it turned around to face him. He backed away quickly, still grinning as he switched from pile-drivers back to hands, pulling out his rifle once more. "Wanna play with me, huh, you ugly son of a glitch?"

There was a soft, dangerous hum in the air as the statue twirled its spear in preparation for attack, but just before it could take another step, there was the sound of shattering crystal, and the light in its eyes and across its body faded gradually, until nothing was left but cold, unemotional stone. Skids emerged from behind the now-still statue, his liquid nitrogen rifle smoking a little at the end. He nodded at Sideswipe, acknowledging the Lamborghini's help in saving his aft.

There was a loud "crack!" from Sideswipe's left, and when he and Skids looked, he saw Jazz emerge from underneath a large pile of rubble that had once been the third and the last statue. The black-and-white Porsche gave himself a shake, and brushed off chips of granite and crystal from his frame. "Phew! That was one close call!" He grinned and nodded at Sideswipe. "Nice save there, 'Swipe!"

Sideswipe grinned. "What'd you do without me, huh?"

"Hey."

Sideswipe glanced at Skids. "What?"

Skids' face was perturbed. "Where's Naila?"

Jazz blinked at Skids' question. "Shouldn't she be around here somewhere?" He gestured to the cavern, trying to not to wince at the amount of damage that their scuffle had done. "There's lots o' places she could hide behind here."

That much, at least, was true, since there were quite a few boulders around that were large enough to hide a human that far enough from the fight to be considered relatively safe.

"She's not here," Skids insisted. "I was the one blocking the statue to stop it from getting to her. If she dashed off someplace I would have seen her."

"Maybe she got out after we took down that statue," Sideswipe suggested with a careless shrug. "She's a smart woman; she must've had enough sense to run when things started getting dangerous."

"But-"

The high-pitched scream that tore through the air and reverberated off the cavern walls made Jazz's audio receptors rattle in ways that he never thought possible. Wincing against the sound, he automatically adjusted his audios to compensate for the volume, only to realize that scream could only have come from one source: Naila.

The three Autobots exchanged glances, but it was only for a very brief moment, because they were already off at a tearing speed even as the second scream flooded their audios.

"Aw, frag it all!" Skids swore viciously as they raced out of the cavern and back the way they came, stopping at an intersection. Though they knew that the one headed west would take them back to the entrance they came through, there were two more paths that branched out from this particular area: one leading northwest, the other leading south. "Where do we go now?"

Jazz kept quiet, trying to carefully filter out all the ambient noise produced by the echoes. That was, after all, their main problem: all that sound bouncing around off the walls made it hard to trace it back to the source. He let his sensors do the work, and in a few moments he was able to filter out all the annoying noise and get down to the original one.

"She's that way," he said, and led his team to the northwest. Mechanoid feet thudded after him as he made his way to the source – only to stop short at another chamber.

An elaborately decorated chamber.

Behind him, he heard Sideswipe and Skids' footsteps thundering against the cavern walls, only to come to a dead halt as soon as they entered the space where Jazz was. They, too, seemed to have been caught off-guard by what they were seeing.

"Holy Primus…" Skids breathed.

Indeed, Jazz would have said the same thing, if he wasn't so busy staring all around him. Though the space itself was small and the ceiling barely high enough to clear Sideswipe's head, every single inch of the rock was covered in elaborate designs of an entirely alien nature – "alien" meaning that, as far as Jazz was concerned, he had seen nothing like them on Earth or even on Cybertron. Pillars that reached up to his knee joint – each one an individual work of art given the detail that seemed to have gone into their carving – were arranged in a semi-circle around what appeared to be a rectangular sarcophagus, made of a highly-polished black stone and covered in a pattern that made it look as if a flowering vine of some sort was wrapped and twined around the whole.

His gaze dropped lower, to the foot of the pedestal on which the sarcophagus rested, and he felt relief flood his system when he saw Naila kneeling there. However, his relief quickly turned to concern when he saw that she seemed to be rocking back and forth, her hands planted firmly over her ears as if she was trying to block out some sort of noise.

"Naila?" he queried softly, kneeling down so that he was at a lower level and hence cut a less intimidating figure to the human. "Are you okay, li'l lady?"

He thought he could hear her mumbling something, but he could not quite make it out. Adjusting his audios to improve his pickup, he focused on her again, and this time, he heard her. "Leave them alone…"

Jazz frowned. "Leave who alone?"

But it seemed that she couldn't hear him, and instead was talking to some other unseen entity, one that only she could hear – and it appeared as if she was trying to block that entity out. Nevertheless, she kept on talking: "Please, I beg you, leave them alone… They are friends, friends… Do you know- No, no, no, no!"

That was the last straw. Unable to bear what was happening to the small human woman, Jazz reached out to touch her, to bring her back to her senses somehow, though he wasn't quite sure how he was going to accomplish that. Just before he touched her, however, an unseen force slammed right into him, throwing him back against the wall – and held him there. He struggled against it, tried to free himself, but it was to no avail. The only thing that he could move was his head; everything else might as well have been welded to the rock around him.

"What the frag?!"

That was Sideswipe to his left, and when he looked to his right, he saw Skids pinned to the wall there, looking completely, utterly stunned. When Jazz turned his head to look forward, he found out why.

There was a brief time when Jazz had been thoroughly intrigued by the concept of street magicians, particularly David Blaine. Of all the tricks that he had seen Blaine perform, it was the levitation trick that interested him the most. While he knew that there had to be something holding Blaine up whenever he performed that trick, he had to admit, it looked pretty realistic on TV.

But when he saw Naila hovering two feet off the ground, with her dark hair loose and long around her head after her scarf had somehow fallen off, he knew that what he was seeing was no trick – especially not when he saw the strange glitter in her Naila's eyes, a glitter that did not seem entirely human to him.

His suspicion was confirmed when she spoke: "Foul metallic death-bringers," she hissed, speaking with a far different accent from what he had come to associate with her. "How dare you come to this planet?!"

Skids blinked in surprise at that statement. What in the world was Naila going on about?

"What the Pit are you talking about?!" Sideswipe demanded.

A light seemed to flare in Naila's eyes then as she turned to Sideswipe. "Silence! I shall have no parley with you! Whatever the reason that you have come here, I shall see to it that you do not fulfill your goals!"

Skids frowned. Something continued to nag him from the back of his processors, some old and now-fragmented information stored in the depths of his memory banks that he was now having difficulty accessing. Everything that he had seen so far – the writing on the pedestals, the patterns on the walls of this cul-de-sac, the way that Naila called them "foul metallic death-bringers" – all if it seemed to fit and connect somehow, he just could not put the pieces together…

"Naila!" That was Jazz. "Naila, stop it! Let us go!"

Naila looked at Jazz then, her gaze cold. "I am protecting the human. She knows nothing of your kind, nothing of the horrors that you visited upon my home!" Her eyes narrowed. "It may have been a very long time since you came and nearly laid waste to my planet and enslaved my people, but we remember."

Skids' narrowed his optics in concentration as he dug through old files in his memory as fast as he could. What Naila had just said led him down another path of inquiry, and led him to a set of files that he had managed to commit to memory while he was still on Cybertron: something to do with some very old memoirs he had found, written by Cybertronians who had returned from a distant mining colony that the Quintessons used to hold. Apparently, the planet was already inhabited by sentient life forms, but the Quintessons…what had they done…?

Following threads of logic as they came to him, he came upon a random file, and when he opened it, all the information contained in it came flooding back to him. He gasped in stunned surprise, realizing why the writing on the pedestals and the patterns on the wall had seemed so familiar to him: he had read about them before, long ago, in Iacon. They were not the same as the ones he had encountered in his reading, but he could see similarities, for they were created by the same race, the same culture.

And that race was not Cybertronian.

"I know what she is," he murmured, and then shook his head rapidly before switching to their shared radio frequency, knowing for sure that Naila – or rather, whoever was using Naila as a vessel – would not be able to hear their conversation. -+-Jazz, 'Swipe, I know what she is!-+-

-+-'Course you know what she is,-+- Sideswipe grunted in reply. -+-She's human, and when I get free from this wall, so help me Primus, I'll…-+-

-+-No, no, that's not what I meant! Naila's human, yes, but there's something else controlling her, using her as a vessel. And I know what that is!-+-

-+-Well, you'd better tell us quick, 'cause I don't like the way she's lookin',-+- Jazz stated.

Indeed, when Skids took a quick look at Naila, he noticed that her gaze seemed far away, as if she was not seeing them – or anything else around her, for that matter – at the moment. Taking advantage of her distraction, he quickly relayed what he knew to his comrades.