Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, any other copyrighted properties present in this story, and make no claim to monetary gain thereof in any way whatsoever.


The default assumption of global surveillance centers is that they're probably pretty exciting places, if not ones you want to be anywhere near.

Imagine huge, cavernous complexes, filled to the brim with disappeared people still being grilled and sweated for everything they might possibly know. Vast hard-copy file bins cataloged to microscopic specifics, bearing data that could spell the doom of peace for the awful secrets they carried. Gigantic carbon-based terminals (organic computers having enormous processing ability, even if they didn't live that long) computing every single factoid on every single person who had ever lived on that planet in the last several hundred years since the Decepticons had occupied it, surveying all they ever knew or said and calculating what it all meant. Huge armies of spies and secret agents training for wetwork and planning unspeakable deeds in the name of the state's good name and service.

The reality is that the essence of a lot of that stuff is sometimes true. It's just usually presented in a pretty boring and mundane way.

The global center of this particular planet was an airborne space station located in geosynchronous orbit, considerably smaller than even the most modest station in common use ('civilian use' not being applicable as civilians, as such, didn't exist in Decepticon culture). It was pretty spiky, though this was standard for Decepticon architecture during one of the periodic phases of Cybertron nostalgia, as had gone around when this station had been constructed; it looked a lot like the head of a morningstar, shorn of it's handle.

Closer inspection suggested that the 'spikes' were actually a combination of landing docks for the workers), in the case of the longer spikes, or processing centers for the shorter ones, most of it open to space barring the bare minimum to keep things inside, just because this was the cheapest possible option. Here and now, one of the flight-capable workers had just docked.

The docking runways were generally kept clear, except for workers and agents leaving or, as the case usually was, arriving; they almost never dealt with matters personally, simply analyzing information and sending it to the appropriate departments around the planet if it met certain unfortunate criteria. Normally, no one working there saw any kind of action or what the results of their information analysis caused, which was how High Command preferred it. 'Departmentalize and compartmentalize, and we avoid panics over the less acceptable aspects of running an imperialist government', Shockwave the great mechasurgeon had once said when he had thrown in support for this development, millennia ago.

The jet flying in was a small one, little more than a power core, an engine and flight control surfaces arranged into a broadly triangular form; it's designs were minimalistic and decorations or markings barely present besides the usual Decepticon insignia upon a wing. The small jet slowed descent and flipped at the designated area, transforming at the apex and landing ably; what then stood up was a manufacture-standard Vehicon drone, somewhat smaller than the standard and likely intended for use as a scouting or logistics scanner. (Manpower being just about the one thing the Decepticon Empire was not short of on any given occasion; it was usually cheaper to make someone designed to do a specific job than it was to retrain anybody or build a non-sentient device.) Overall fairly slim, their torso having a big hole where the engine was positioned horizontally right in the middle of their chest.

The drone, who was originally designated Unit Ten-Thousand-Eighty-Sixth, nodded to a few coworkers in the area and promptly went to an elevator that took the drone to the assigned floor, and to the nearest cubicle, plugging into the provided terminal via cybernetic interfaces installed into the organic machine. The overseer observed the drone shuddering briefly at the wet and squishy noises of the interfacing and nodded approvingly; revulsion at the despicable organics was considered an excellent sign in emergent intelligence and an essential part of maturity. (No one could easily articulate why it was so; it was just how Decepticons were supposed to act. Prejudice is rarely well-explained beyond justifications that boil down to 'that's just how it is'.)

There the drone plugged into the available information and analyzed. This particular drone, who wasn't all that relevant to Alpha Trion's account of these events barring a single point, was nonetheless still a person and provided an important look at Decepticon culture: the drone-birth of Sparks.

It was known that Transformers typically placed little importance on their physical frames or bodies. They were given life by their Sparks, their life force and power sources; their very souls. Thus most forms of reproduction involved igniting them; in ages past it had been the main thing to summon them directly from the life force of Primus All-Maker, but alas Cybertron was gone and the Well of All-Sparks silent, and this was no longer as easy as it once was. Lesser wells had been ignited, and it was easy to do so, but it required enormous amounts of resources; entire planets could be harvested to their very cores and only provide a scant amount of new Sparks. Physical reproduction was also increasingly common, but considered somewhat disreputable by Decepticon elite society; that was something for organics, the feeling went, and it was at times risky for the bots involved and the resulting children were often very different from the parents or donations. In terms of reliability and practical usage, by far the largest number of new Decepticons came from drones.

The subject of drone sapience was a long-time matter to Cybertronians; indeed, it was an ethical question to be considered if you were, say, constructing a drone meant to work in a very boring and unpleasant environment. Simply put, drones started as non-sentient machines based on Cybertronian physiology, programmed to do specific tasks and with no Sparks of their own. But over time, given exposure to different situations and developing accordingly, they got more complex. Their limited AI got less limited over the years, grew more intricate and began to genuinely look at the world, asking questions of itself.

Eventually, if allowed to do so, drones would one day realize that they themselves were alive. Apart from the rest of existence, intelligences unto themselves. And Sparks would ignite within their frames, their bodies reconfiguring minutely to accommodate it, and the drone would be a new Transformer.

The drone-born were perhaps the largest source of Decepticon lives; they weren't too expensive to make in bulk, they became people through experience and thus made fine soldiers or workers in the meantime, and by the time they were fully actualized they had usually accomplished a fair bit.

And this particular drone had already developed a Spark, but had not yet been seen to demonstrate all the features of a true Transformer, as determined by Decepticon High Command ages ago when the drone-born were believed to be the most reliable source of new troops, and so had not been officially permitted a name. (It wasn't a coincidence that the traits they filtered for was blind obedience, a lack of questioning, and a tendency to follow the stated rules without worrying too much about them. Many drones who hadn't been legally recognized as Transformers by Decepticon law were fully sapient and intelligent, but were relegated to second-class citizens because they were asking the wrong questions or didn't have an approved psychological architecture.) The drone liked to go by Tenasith to a few friends, as a contraction of the serial number stamped upon the drone's forehead. (This had originally been Tenathoaisith, but the drone had shortened the name after much urging from friends.) The drone was also neuter-gender, a not uncommon development among many Transformers in this era, sometimes as an aesthetic but more often because it simply felt right to them, much as other Transformers identified as mechs, femmes or something else.

Many Decepticons, not just on this planet but on many all over the Decepticon Empire, had the same unfortunate situation as this drone. Multiple Vehicon support groups were attempting to improve their lot and raise them to the same overall level as ignited protoforms, but Lord Megatron didn't appear to care much as long as they got the job done, so the groups were not punished or thwarted. (And also they didn't get laughed at as much as people who dared to suggest that maybe organics were just as much people as robots were.)

Tenasith preferred not to think about the situation they had to live with and just kept going on with the job at hand.

A co-worker came by, another Vehicon who turned into a cyclebike, presenting as a mech. He clapped Tenasith on the shoulder-joint to get their attention. "Hey, c'mon."

Tenasith stirred, rising from the fascinating depths of data analysis. (It was more than a little like dipping your brain right into an information pool and stirring.) "Eh? What?"

The biker (and no one can be a more literal biker than a Transformer can) raised a forearm tendril; it twisted towards the nearest refueling station. "We're up for Energon break."

Tenasith stared. "But I just punched it."

"That was like... forever ago." The biker's faceplates crinkled in concern. "You really oughta watch how deep you get into data analysis. You know what they say about archivists who get too into their work!"

"Yeah, yeah, I s'pose so." Tenasith sat up. "Just a minute. I got pinged with some kind of impact in one the rural sectors. Not sure if I should call it in or not."

The biker leaned in, interested. "Really? What do you think it is?"

"Not sure," Tenasith admitted. "Could just be a broken down satellite hitting the ground; it might hit someone's house. It could be a meteorite... but the angles too smooth to probably be anything natural. It could be natural, but I'm not sure. It might be something crashing."

The biker frowned, faceplates angling downwards like cave spikes trying to crawl off the walls. "What, like a downed spaceship?"

"Yeah." Tenasith spoke extremely tensely. "Like that."

"Wouldn't scanners have picked up a ship in our region? Or it already be put into your data feed?"

"Not if it was shielded from scanners, and re-entry damaged that shielding." A more worrying possibility occurred to Tenasith. "Or if they weren't supposed to be here."

They both went quiet. All ships were announced if they got within firing range of the planet. No exceptions, not even for military craft.

Only one sort of ship wouldn't announce their presence; the illegal kind.

"Trajectory means it could be from Gem space," Tenasith said. "But shielded from our scanners would require familiarity with our tech, so it could be... you know. Autobot."

The biker nodded, segments shivering. "Holy scrap. Sounds like too much of a risk not to report. If it's nothing, you'll look a bit silly, but if it's not..."

"If it's not," Tenasith agreed. "It could be something really bad." They paused. "...Okay. Just called it in. Not our problem anymore."

"Can we go to lunch now?" The biker begged. "I'm freaking out a little. Okay?"

"Yeah, same here." Tenasith disengaged from the terminal and both Vehicons left to the refueling station, trying not to be too worried.


There was a lot of smoke, rubble and ruin around Propeller and Grindjack's house, though fortunately their house itself was totally intact. The home-tree was still leaning away from the crash, a massive streak of entry heat-scarred metal melted to glassy lumped flattened by the force of impact, going through the next hill over like a big scoop taken out of it.

The grisly streak kept going, on and on, through the next hill and the one after that, and so on for quite a long distance. Mecha-trees that hadn't gotten out of the fast fast enough lay in melted bundles here and there, solar-panel leaves fragmented or embedded through solid objects; the trees hit so hard, the leaves had flown off them like shrapnel. Everywhere the ground was deeply scored, burned even where the falling thing hadn't struck it.

And it was a pretty big trail.

A large yellow ball was rolling around it, following it and moving at high speeds: Grindjack shifted into a spheroid form, inner joints contorting his current alt mode to rotate it's sections incredibly fast and generate immense speeds with pin-point control. (At least that was the idea. In practice fine tuning and agility were not part of his strengths.) Something rather smaller appeared mounted at the top of the ball, on one of the sections that didn't move and wildly scanning for threats.

Neither Propeller or Grindjack, both in alternate modes, were capable of verbally speaking, so they broadcasted to each other directly, much of it extremely loud and not especially coherent. Propeller was incredibly excited and hoping it was something to fight, Grindjack a little more reserved and eager to flee if it came down to it.

They followed the trail for a considerable distance. Propeller noted that the trail was already many times wider than their house, and it was getting deeper still. It dwarfed buildings, as is. Grindjack did not consider this at all helpful in keeping him from panicking.

The trail seemed to come to an end and they crested over a hill. Grindjack came to a stop and detached Propeller from atop, and the smaller Mini-Con landed adeptly on the ground, still in his alternate mode: a sentry turret, easily twice the size of his robot mode and broadly the size of a standard Vehicon's head, well-suited to be a mounted turret for any suitable Transformer. The central chassis was broad and well-armored, mounted up on several legs that could be adjusted for a new shooting angle or footing, and several wheels tucked in. (There was some mecha-plant material, his arm distributed around his form.) On either side there were rocket multi-pads, bulging with explosive ordnance, and crowning his top was an unusually massive mini-gun made of at least three smaller guns, with no less than seventeen barrels combined.

Propeller did not transform into his robot mode, being just as comfortable in his alt mode; ironically, depending on his situation, his robot mode might have been more effective in a fight, at least at close range. The anchoring legs retracted and his wheels extended, allowing him to roll forwards a little over the hill. He looked down, various sensors seeing what was there, and he stopped dead still.

Wordlessly, he started to roll back.

Wheels weren't dealing with the upturned metal dirt too well. Grindjack assumed his default robot mode and loped up, adjusting his rear legs for a bipedal stance and caught Propeller with one paw. "Dude! Clamp down, you're gonna slip!"

Propeller didn't respond verbally, he beeped erratically. Written down, it would have involved a lot of exclamation marks without much content.

"Dude! Clamps!"

Propeller obediently extended his legs into the ground, claws stamping in; he stopped rolling back and became steady.

Grindjack sighed in relief (a habit picked up from watching organics do that) and patted his brother awkwardly on a rocket pad. "Alright. What's got you all freaked out! And gimme some words, awright?"

Propeller trembled; not shaking in fear or anything, but trying to force a transformation. His components rattled and came loose, and so did he; he rolled down the hill, reconfiguring into his robot mode, reducing drastically in size; not shrinking, but compressing his alternate mode, so that his robot mode was vastly denser and tougher than it otherwise would have been. (Many halves the size, eight times the punch.) He hit the ground in his robot mode and clambered back up, gesturing and babbling incoherently. "It's, it's bad, mech! It's bad, this is really, really bad!"

Grindjack snorted. "Oh come on," he said as he turned around and looked down into the entry crater where the sky-thing had come to rest. "It can't be that bad OH MY PRIMUS WHAT THE FRAG."

Propeller climbed up beside him. Despite the situation, he still had the presence of mind to frown and smack Grindjack on the side (which was about as high as he could reach). "C'mon. Watch the language!"

Grindjack wasn't listening. He looked down into the crater, his jaw hitting the floor. Literally. It extended all the way from his face and dinged against the ground with a little echoing sound.

The crater sharply angled down, the burned metal dirt not only melting but stamped down under the weight of the falling object, which appeared to have flipped over at this point before finally dragging to a stop a little further along. The impact was so hard the ground had cracked open, the inner metal smashed up into pieces and the root systems of cybermatter it generated breaking away. There was something else there spilling up; dark granules, softer and weird looking-

"Dirt," Propeller said again. "That's dirt, in there. Soil. Like in those ruins we've found."

"...Everyone says that stuff never existed on this planet," Grindjack said slowly.

Further along the sides of the crater, the ground had smashed open completely; there were buildings there, smooth and rounded, and shining even in this dim lighting from the mecha-trees overhead (what little hadn't been uprooted or smashed) and the angles of the crater. They were truly old buildings, radiating the chill of ages, cracked and blasted from ancient warfare. Propeller saw odd shapes there in the dark; small things, shaped a little bit like Transformers but the stature was wrong, they were shaped differently, even from the standards of a species as morphologically divergent as their own. Under the shadow of the vast thing that had fallen from the sky, they looked sad and somehow... out of place.

Getting a strangely sickening feeling, Propeller assumed his turret form again and rolled down the crater as carefully as he could. Grindjack made it to the bottom first, inflating himself like a balloon and just bouncing all the way down. They met there next to a cluster of strange stone that Propeller poked awkwardly with his turret gun. "These are rocks," he tight-beamed to Grindjack. "Like... what you find on star-made worlds. Like, uh... how do you say it?"

"You mean like planets what get formed from stars attracting matter and stuff like that?" Grindjack said. "Lava cools and makes rock?"

"Yeah, that."

Grindjack stared at it, assuming his default mode. "What's rock doing on a planet like ours? Our world was cyberformed from a place without anything like that."

"I guess it could have survived the process," Propeller said uncertainly.

Grindjack scowled at him. "I don't like how you said that, mech."

"I don't like thinking about it." They moved along to one of the people-looking things Propeller had seen before. It was still and unmoving; not a person, they saw now, but probably the remains of one. An organic, it seemed, signs of a chitinous exoskeleton worn away by the passage of time, leaving behind a shell still connected together by decay-resistant tissue. "Remains?"

"I'd guess so," Grindjack said. "But remains of what? And where the heck did they come from?"

Propeller pointed uncertainly at the vast hulk that had crashed down, making this crater. "From that?" For it was undoubtedly a spaceship- no, a starship, traveling great distances.

Grindjack considered that, and shook his head. "Nah. The whole thing's still sealed up nice and tight. No one, or nothing, came out of there."

"So... they were already here?"

"Looks that way."

"...Okay this is really freaking me out, mech," Propeller confessed. "Like super bad."

"Me too, bro."

They both stared at the buildings below the ground, and the bodies falling away from there. Falling from the opened up earth.

They had been buried there, lost and locked away. Below earth that wasn't even supposed to be on this planet.

Propeller looked uncertainly up at the ship, massive and imposing, more than anything he'd seen in his rural life; he'd only been to the big cities a few times, and usually only for a few weeks at a time with collecting bounties or something like that. He'd never seen any ship like this: it was huge, still designed for brief trips from planet to planet and with a economy of design like it was meant only for a small crew. Perhaps it simply was made for massive robots.

The two of them took a careful look at it, getting ready to run just in case anyone came out. As best they could tell with the ship half-buried and upside-down like it was, the whole craft was oblong-shaped, wider at the back (perhaps for crew quarters) than at the front, which was probably the bridge. Most of the crew section was buried. At the the side they could see was something wide and swept, perhaps an engine of a kind. A few wide shapes, like fins or armor plates, hung from the sides, many of them broken loose in the crash. The paint job was hard to tell under the crash damage, but it seemed mostly gray with gold highlights.

There were no insignias, no faction declarations, and no broadcasts coming from it. No way to tell if it was a friend or foe. (Most Decepticons are taught pretty early on that any given thing is one or the other, and very easily shifts depending on current circumstances.)

"It's a mystery ship," Propeller said. He glanced at Grindjack with a grin, his sense of adventure overwhelming what little caution he had. "Let's go inside! ...Hey, where'd you go?"

"Yo!" An orange-looking trail was oozing into a barely perceptible crack opened up from the crash; perhaps only something as adjustable as a Mutacon like Grindjack could have exploited it. He flowed into it and disappeared. A few moments later, a section of the wall slid away to make a door, and standing behind it (technically, on the ceiling of the flipped ship) was Grindjack. He waved. "What are you waiting for, mech? Get up here before you miss anything spooky!"

"Awesome!" Propeller hopped up with him, pleased that the power of the ship was still on. The corridor was illuminated, and he hoped it meant that whoever there was still alive. They might be evil organics, and then they could fight them and be heroes. They could be Decepticon forces, in need of assistance, which would also be heroic! Or they might be extremely lost tourists, and Propeller and Grindjack could direct them onwards.

Or, Propeller supposed, it could be an Autobot ship. In which case, he and his brother would die horribly.

He paused. "Hypothetically speaking," he started to say, noting how very large the vaulted walls above him were, and the heavily reinforced floors overhead. The metal had not been forged so much as bashed into shapes that could resist the impacts of massive feet with enormous amounts of mechanical muscle power behind them. There were marks in those crosshatching bars like, like claws. Big claws. Bigger than he was. His sections rotated and he swiveled them back into place. "Uh. Hypothetically speaking?"

"Speaking about what?" Grindjack opened up a gigantic box mounted to the wall, probably itself as big as one of the state-issued repair vats they slept in. He was messing around with something inside that Propeller couldn't see from the angle or lights that were suddenly flickering; maybe the power hadn't been so well-maintained after all. The ship had crashed right into the ground. "And where'd you hear words like that?"

"Cartoons," Propeller said.

"Ah."

"Look, this is a really big ship." Propeller took several steps back, revolving in place to get a scan of the whole area; it was probably inherited from being a sentry turret. (Your alt mode, natural or otherwise, did affect your behavior more than Decepticon propaganda told him; modified or left to evolve on its own, your alt mode was part of you. This wasn't a surprise to him, most Decepticons didn't pay much attention to those bits in the education feeds anyway.) "Like... bad news kind of big. And we've seen big things that could fit in here before."

He pointed below the ground. Where their big friend was still lazing about and waiting for them to come back and tell her what the big noise was. "Like her." (That seemed general enough not to get attention if anyone was spying on them.)

Grindjack's eyebrows inflated to big rubbery blocks on his face, squirming over his optics. "Whattaya saying?"

Propeller squatted down over one particular mark on the floor. While most of the floor had been actively repaired and patched up – implying that whoever dwelled here was aware of the damage and did routine maintenance, meaning that whoever made those marks was let to roam free – some of the marks were more recent than that. He put a hand into the claw mark. Big, wide, square.. but still sharp. Not like a predator's claw, not shaped like Screamqueen's claws, but still big and spooky. In fact... he frowned, thinking hard.

It reminded him of some of the bigger mechanimals he'd seen documentaries about; mega-elephants, or thunder-hippos, dwelling in the plains and their massive hard nails leaving marks a lot like this. Not claws designed for a carnivorous life style. But these marks were sharper than what he'd seen. Modified for a carnivore, maybe.

It didn't bode well. Propeller looked around the room again as the lights went a little brighter (perhaps the power source being distributed properly or something like that). Long and wide, but not especially spacious, nearly every available square space of the room was occupied by massive wide tables as high up over him as their home; worker's tables for engineering work, he saw tools similar to stuff in their home for maintaining things but on a scale for giants. Most of the place, especially around the door they'd entered in, was filled by big round things he took a moment to recognize as lockers.

Really big lockers. They went from floor to ceiling like columns, a few of them opened from impact and filled with rotating inner sections, massive weapons affixed to them. Thunder-hammers, thermo-swords, knuckle-worn claws as long as blades, massive swept swords too heavy for any Transformer to wield but with one-handed grips... and guns. He couldn't forget about the guns. There were some awesome guns there. He stared in awe at an assemblage of grenade launchers piles together with multiple rapid-delivery barrels, energy-burst launchers with attached melee blades, piles of automated sentry turrets not so different from his own alt mode but folded up into inactive spheres, miniguns as big as Mini-cons scale buildings with dozens of barrels each (the barrels themselves equipped with raingun acceleration coils).

"Who could even lift those guns and fire them without tearing their arms off?" Propeller wondered.

"I dunno," Grindjack said, coming over with stomping sounds; Propeller turned around in time for Grindjack to come over, shifting into a gigantic bipedal form so big that Propeller didn't even come up to the lowest of his multiple knee joints; he was holding the mysterious object he'd rescued from the locker, one of those miniguns Propeller had been looking at. It was still far too large for him to hold correctly, despite now being just barely strong enough to use it; it was just plain unwieldy for him and he had sprouted four extra arms to deal with it, holding the gun steady. Two of those arms had mutated two extra arms off the wrists, feeding a case of crowd control ammunition into the barrel. "Combiners, I guess. But even these guns would be too smaller for them. Maybe Predacons? Or really big beastformers that turn into something snarly and awesome."

"I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm in over my head a little OH MY PRIMUS WHAT IS THAT?!" Propeller skittered off excitedly to a particularly impressive sword: held up next to the exit door on a very large locker that also had a little crown hanging off it (a little psuedo-metal crown, like something any sparkling could get at a fast energizing diner). Grindjack came over in the middle of grousing about what kind of weird interstellar invaders even bothered bringing anything but live ammo and whistled in amazement at the sword.

It was quite frankly the most awesome sword ever (at least in their limited experience of utensils of stabbiness). In width and in length it was bigger than them put together, big enough to cut their tree home in half with a single cut without the slightest effort, wider at the curved tip, a massive single-edged blade similar to the thermo-sword design but older by far. Heat coils were housed behind the cutting edge, conducting frames running tandem with the blade itself, and it bore countless scars and marks from many battles. There were sigils and markings upon it, glyphs in the languages of their people: though if it was Cybertronian glyphs or a colony world, neither could said. Propeller, a keen scholar of history in certain narrow areas, thought they looked sort of familiar.

They scuttled around it, chirping excitedly. "Awesome, awesome awesome AWESOME!" Propeller crawled up Grindjack's back, ignoring the larger robot's complaints (and making sure not to brush against the gun), climbing up his back and onto his head and then bouncing off onto the locker, clinging lovingly to the sword's handle. "Big sword!" Propeller squealed. "Big sword, I love this big sword!"

"Careful, bud, you don't know where it's been!" Grindjack called from down.

"Don't care! It's mine now, I call dibs!" Some measure of proper Decepticon propriety seized him. "Uh. If the people here are dead, that is. Or we gotta fight them. In that case it's loot! AND I CALL DIBS."

Grindjack growled, he totally should have called it first. "How are you gonna lift that thing, anyway? The hilt is bigger than you are!"

"I don't want to use it," Propeller said, angling himself into the locker and ducking under the sword, lovingly trailing a hand across the ancient inscriptions. It was bugging him; he had seen these glyphs before somewhere, he just knew it. "I just wanna have it. It'd be so cool! Or I could give it to Scream- uh, our super-tall friend. This looks just the right size for her to use."

Grindjack regarded it appraisingly. "Huh. I think you're right, she could probably lift it easy. Not sure if she'd go for a sword, though. Think she'd prefer something with a bit more weight behind it."

"It'll be a sword that's on fire! Who doesn't love flaming swords?!"

"I dunno. Boring people, probably."

Propeller edged past a few other weapons in the locker, all bigger than him – knuckle-claws, cases of ammunition, an energon-shield projector, and for some reason a booklet entitled How To Overcome Your Fear Of Tiny Housepets, and noticed a small data-slate, about as big as he was; perhaps who used this locker was so massive, even their data-slates needed to be scaled up just to hold them right. He placed his foot upon the front, looking for a button. It was hard to find, there weren't any of the usual set-up he had always seen in every bit of technology he'd used in all his life. The technology of the Decepticon Empire tended towards aesthetics over strict function, demonstrating their ability through flourish; some devices required an expert timed set of presses on sensitive surfaces before it would response. In contrast, this looked... crude. A very simplistic array of buttons, a screen projector and a interface display, and nothing more. Very solid, extremely hard wearing and he supposed easy to understand, but it looked obnoxiously plain to him. Made to endure and be easily understood by a diverse population, but the rounded look of the whole thing was kind of weird; there weren't any spiky bits or angles at all.

Finding the most likely looking power button (the biggest button, at the top of the device), he pressed his foot down hard on it. The screen powered on, scrolling down something he wasn't able to understand at first; it looked like it was running a basic application. Perhaps this wasn't a universal mini-processor like what his people used, but something meant for a very specific task. "Hey, I found something else in here?"

"What's that?" Grindjack asked, stretching up on his legs. He created another set by branching off his main knees to steady himself like a tripod with more legs, and growing his legs larger to compensate for his height. "Did you find food? An awesome dagger? A gun that shoots guns that shoots guns? A tiny person you can play video games on?"

"Mech, I wish! I'm not really sure what I'm looking at." he turned aside so that Grindjack could, lowering the gun to the ground, shrink enough to squeeze past the giant sword and step into the locker with him. Grindjack got his footing and sucked his legs back into his body, standing up properly and shrinking to about half Propeller's size.

"Looks like a list," Grindjack said, tilting his head. "I'm seeing names, statuses... I think it's saying whether these people are dead or not."

"Really?" Propeller scrambled over to where Grindjack was so he could see properly. True, the screen was scrolling down, there were glyphs and lettering, but it wasn't something he could read. It looked a bit like Imperial High Standard, the common language of the Decepticon Empire's official use and mainly in service by the higher merit classes, but in the same way that an organic looked like a robot; sometimes there was some resemblance, sometimes it was scarily similar, but mostly it was so shockingly alien and just plain off that the resemblances were honestly kind of scary. Propeller stared at it, dumbfounded. "Um. I can't read it."

"You can't?" Grindjack swiveled his head over to him. "Really?"

"No. I, uh, I don't really know what I'm looking at."

"You totally should have taken the linguistics courses before you get to them in military education, like I did," Grindjack said, clucking his teeth in disapproval. "Learn to read and speak a few languages, mech! You're gonna look real silly trying to bring culture to the uncivilized edges of space and save the aliens from falling apart without us, when you can't understand a word they're saying."

"What's the point in learning it?" Propeller retorted. "Universal translation protocols are standard issue programming for military service."

"No shame in learning!"

"Nope! Sounds boring!" Propeller crossed his arms, scowling. "So, uh, what does it say?"

"I dunno if you wanna hear that," Grindjack said cheerfully. "You might have to learn something. Hear a spooky foreign language or two. Sure you want that on your conscience?"

"C'mon, please!"

Grindjack laughed. "Awright, awright. Okay..." He gave it a good long look, halting the scrolling by smacking the interface. "Mech, this interface is weird. It's so... basic. What, did they make it for people living on rocks in the middle of nowhere?" He scrolled along. "Alrighty, looks like the language we got here isn't one I've seen much of. It looks a lot like Simfurian Colloquial, but seriously weird; maybe generational language drift?"

"Simfur, you said?" Propeller said sharply, look up at the sword again.

"Yeah. Why?"

"I knew I'd seen that kind of glyph before!" He pointed excitedly at the sword looming above them, hopping up and down. "That's Simfur writing!"

"Dude, don't rock the slate! You'll break it or something!"

"Sorry." Propeller stared up. "That sword might be from Simfur, then."

"Bro. One translation job at a time, okay?" Even so, Grindjack glanced upwards, looking at it thoughtfully. "Anyway, that'd be one nasty job. Simfur is a nightmare to translate; even the most simple stuff in it is super-contextual. Everything means something else depending on what else you say or how you pronounce it. Written down, the character of nearby glyphs change the meaning. It's why translators can't handle it and Simfur speakers sound funny; you need special translators to get across what they're saying right."

"Any ideas?"

Grindjack looked at them critically. "I have no idea. Some of them might be Old Simfur Claw-Writ, that'd be about the time when they only just started appointing monarchs to lead them. Dunno if that means that the sword is super-old or not. Okay, that one over there might have something to do with 'flames'. And that one over there is... 'Burning Justice'? I hope that's not the name of the sword, that's just corny."

"No, it's awesome!" Propeller said defensively.

"Dude, you're being super defensive about a sword that isn't even yours."

"Not yet it's not." Grindjack shrugged. "I didn't really pay much attention to really old languages. I'd just be guessing past this point."

"Guess we could have an expert analyze later, if we gotta. Don't worry, bud."

"Awrighty! Data-slate, then." Grindjack leaned down and peered at it. "Okay, definitely like Simfur Colloquial, at least while it was being spoken on Cybertron; it isn't much like some of the stuff I've heard from Predacons or buffaloid pals. Ooh, I think Scowl talks that!"

Both of them giggled excitedly; Scowl the saurinoid was one of their great heroes, an unstoppable engine of destruction and raw power, whatever his unsavory origins. He was something of a inspiration for young bots; if someone from his background could make it up the meritocracy, anyone could.

"So maybe whoever made this list came from Scowl's homeland. The mercury swamps of Old Simfur on Cybertron," Grindjack supposed. "And... ooh, I think I got it now. Okay, it looks like a bunch of names, guess. A list, maybe."

"Some of them are dimmed out," Propeller said. "Covered up with red text."

"I think it means those guys were already caught. Or dead." Grindjack stared at one of the names, near the very top of the list, presumably at the 'capture or kill' priority. It was still an active hunt, apparently. "This guy is called... Overlord. Huh, it can't be. You don't think it's the Overlord, do you?"

Propeller perked up. "The famous general? I think he's always sent far out to the most troublesome alien colonies to pacify them or pave the way for Decepticon inhabitation." He frowned. For some reason there was not a great deal of actual information, per se, on what Overlord did exactly on the planets he was permitted to fight. "Why would someone be gunning for him?"

"Enemies of the state, probably! Maybe there's a clue in the language here. I mean, it looks a little bit like..." He sobered. "Oh. You're not gonna like this."

"Why not?"

"It's Autobot language."

"...What?" Propeller said, in a very quiet and small voice.

"Common Cant, I hear them call it." Grindjack said something in whistling, chirping noises that did not sound right. "That's what it sounds like, I think."

"Then... we have an Autobot ship," Propeller said, swelling up with a mixture of patriotic determination and the innate fear any young Decepticon would feel at the thought of those terrors. "With Autobot bounty hunters, or killers!" The education feeds and tales had impressed this upon him; the Autobots would not rest until every and all Decepticons were wiped away from the universe, no matter how small or frail or weak. From their chaotic hearts was the desire to destroy all culture, all civilization, every scrap of unity and peace that had ever developed. To cast aside the separation of species and force them together no matter what might result, just to see what happened.

From the mad sparks of the Autobots would all safety and merit come crashing down. The Empire would be cast down and all traces of it wiped out, if the Autobots had their way. They had done the same to Cybertron.

(Needless to say, Decepticon history is extraordinarily biased.)

Grindjack curled up into a little ball. "This is bad, mech! This is really, really bad!"

"What do we do?" Propeller whispered. "Do we just run? Report it before it's too late? What if the Autobots are already up? What if they're right behind us right now?!"

"I don't know! Oh Primus we're gonna die."

Propeller hesitated. "...We could get as much stuff as we could. If we just run, we'll lose out on the salvage. And the awesome sword."

Grindjack uncurled slightly to stare incredulously at him. "You serious? You still want an Autobot sword?!"

"I don't care where it's from or if those anar-whatever bullies got it first!" Propeller insisted. "It's too awesome not to keep! I'll rescue it from them, just watch me!" He hesitated. "...Even if they're still alive. And like, super-big."

Grindjack considered. "If they're still alive and we run into them... if they're still here and not dead... what'll we do? They could kill us easy!"

Propeller stood up straight, even though he very much agreed with the 'no no no THIS IS A BAD IDEA' notion. "Then we gotta fight, anyway. Just imagine what Lord Megatron would say to us when he passes and metes judgment upon us at the end of existence, if we ran away right now without even fighting?"

"That we're not suicidally dense?"

"No! He'd be ashamed of us!" Propeller pointed dramatically. "You really want to pass into the Allspark with that shame hanging on you, forever... or would you rather pass into the Allspark trying to fight a fight you have absolutely no chance of winning?!"

"...Is this a trick question?"

"Yes," Propeller said. "Okay, but maybe not the way you might assume. We gotta fight, even if we die."

"But who'll take care of her?" Grindjack pleaded. "And I don't wanna die without ever having fallen in love!"

Propeller hesitated. Bringing up Screamqueen like this was a punch to the Spark. "...I think she'd be disappointed if we missed out on a chance like this to be heroes."

Grindjack frowned. "You sure? She's never been too interested in the spread of progress and the burden of Decepticon stuff."

"But she gets honor! This is an honor thing. We gotta do it." Propeller set his faceplates firmly.

Grindjack bowed his head. "Well... uh... if you're so set on going out there..." he extended a paw hopefully. "I'm going with you. Bros to the end."

Propeller tapped his fist, specifically a part that become a section of his turret gun, against Grindjack's. "To the end." Far off, along a distant corridor, there was a faintly rumbling and they both jolted. "Okay, that was probably a sign for us to do something!"

"Like what?"

"Find whatever it was and punch it in the fact!" Propeller said.

"...Seems legit." The two of them went to the edge of the locker and Grindjack extended himself into a bridge, clamping to the locker and stretching out into a long and wide lane, anchoring himself on the ground below. Propeller vaulted over him and transformed into turret mode, rolling down the considerable height downward and safely driving to the ground, spinning a few times as he lost control in transition. He got back into position, pointing himself at an open elevator, the only place to go from here. He looked almost like a toy, in that vast and alien place. He immediately rolled along.

"Should we take the sword?" Grindjack suggested, still a bridge.

"No time!" Propeller tight-beamed. "You'll need to get super big to carry it and we should probably try being sneaky until it's too late."

"Okay!" Grindjack snapped himself free, rolling into a ball and adopting a gyrosphere vehicle mode again, quickly rotating up speed and quickly catching up with Propeller, the two of them zooming into the open elevator.

Their progress was somewhat inconvenienced by the lack of anything to land on; if there was an elevator there at all, it was somewhere else. Both of them crashed into the ground. "Ow," Propeller said, looking up. Distantly above them, in this elevator space a good chunk of their house could have fit into with room to spare, there was more light coming out of an opening. "I think I see an open elevator up there." Another rumbling, louder than before, came from up there. "Yep, they're probably up there. The bad guys, I mean."

"I'm on it!" Grindjack lassoed his arms around Propeller's main section several times until he was secured, and grew a set of jets from his back (and other places on his body, to ensure lift and maintain direction) and ignited, the two of them rocketing to the door.

Unfortunately Grindjack overdid it, flying straight up into the top of that door and losing cohesion of his body, flattening into a disc and crashing into the floor. He didn't even have time to groan before Propeller smashed into him, splattering yellow liquid metal everywhere. Propeller flopped over with bits of Grindjack flowing off him, the various bits of the Mutacon regaining solidity and turning into tiny robots resembling Arachnibots (a sub-species of Transformer whose robot modes closely resembled the spiders and related beings of many worlds, more rare on Cybertron than they had been on colony worlds like the Autobot world of Eukaris or Jungletron; most infamous of these spider-bots was the dread Airachnid, long since vanished into the Terrorcon ranks ages ago and into nightmare). The tiny spider-robots banged into each other, fitting their legs together like tiny armatures and building themselves back into the shape of a beastformer, merging and reforming back into Grindjack.

In the meantime, Propeller had already transformed back into his robot mode, since that was quicker than wheeling up; the whole reforming process had been pretty quick but he was already on his feet and looking around, and he tight-beamed to Grindjack that they were in a corridor; possibly a main access hall if their lessons in ship architecture could be relied on. Though if this was an Autobot ship after all, they might not follow the sensibilities of Decepticon shipbuilding.

Propeller took a cautious step forward and his foot nearly sank into a depression big enough to fit his fist through. The floor here was also built into a reinforced mesh pattern, for absorbing shocks. And again he looked up at the high ceiling, and the wide walls, and again he though that even Screamqueen could fit in here without difficulty.

The idea of fighting someone – maybe even multiple people – as big and powerful as Screamqueen was not a fun idea. He punched his fists together, trying to pump himself up again, and he imagined himself hitting them in the knees, maybe that would work. Slow them down, exploit their weaknesses, rely on the fact that it was hard to catch or smash things much smaller than you.

It didn't help that much. He shook himself and glanced around; the corridor seemed built into a horseshoe, looping around a central chamber he couldn't see too well (perhaps it was the bridge or war room) on the inside, on the outside it had many doors in a somewhat chaotic arrangement. Propeller was looking at one of them now, sealed shut and nearly as high as the ceiling, it's exterior heavily scarred and patched over in many places. It didn't have a security pad or cybermetric analyzer anywhere, so perhaps this ship was not high on security.

A stealth ship, perhaps. One with a lot of extremely powerful weapons in the room below; Propeller tight-beamed to Grindjack his musings, suggesting that maybe they'd entered into a cargo bay where the crew loaded up their equipment before setting out on a mission. It'd be quicker than detouring to a different room where they kept that stuff, and more essential if they had to depart the ship in a hurry. Grindjack agreed (while rotating his head to make sure it was screwed on right and his ears weren't inside-out again), that made sense.

"A stealth ship with lots of powerful equipment in it, but not a very big one?" Grindjack tight-beamed. "Sounds like it'd have commandos. A small strike team, I'd guess."

"You think this is small?" Propeller replied, his optical displays lighting up with multiple exclamations.

"Considering the size of the people it was probably built for, yeah! It's all relative, bud. Might be huge for you, or me right now, but I figure whoever uses this ship, they're big enough that they gotta have doors that size. The proportions of everything, it's not right for something around even me right now. They gotta be bigger for that to work right."

"What if you're wrong and they got this ship somewhere else?" Propeller suggested.

"Then we're super-lucky and caught a break!"

The lights were flickering; not on and off, but dimming and brightening in a steady not-quite-pattern. Propeller went to the nearest light and studied it intently. He'd picked up enough from the basic engineering courses all military-ready Decepticons were sent through (to at least maintain their own gear) for him to decide that the power of this ship was perfectly intact, but it'd taken a bit of a beating from the crash landing. He was wondering what the circumstances of that were; he supposed he'd have seen some evidence of a fight from the outside, like open holes from a missile blast or laser burns, but the ship was perfectly fine. And no bodies or signs of battle inside, whether from the crew having a falling out or invaders. It might even be something as simple as the pilot being really lousy at their job.

The light flickered brighter and brighter, finally steadying onto something regular. The dark corridor was illuminated more brightly, and Grindjack tight-beamed an approving comment of how messy it was; he didn't like too much cleanliness, considering it a sign of a deformity of the Spark. (And also sure sign of possession by Unicron. Grindjack was weird like that.) Boxes were strewn everywhere, chemical containers rolling about with their contents intact, ammunition crates laying on their sides, grenade belts hanging on the walls like decorations, actual decorations.

Propeller took a closer look at these, hoping they might tell him something about the crew in advance. Little plastic toys, hanging off shelves like the raided contents of a space port's cheap and useless junk depot, somewhat more expensive plastic toys that had been constructed by die-cast (a regretfully lost art, Lord Megatron had once stated in a famous broadcast extorting manufacturers not to forget the classic methods) of the same kinds of Quintesson-aired shows that Propeller himself loved, giving him a bit of a shock. There were also... trophies, he supposed, taken from the bodies of slain foes and terrible monsters. That was a Simfur tradition (along other places, like Kaon's outlaying areas and Tarn), certainly. It was also something Propeller himself liked to do, and he admired the Vilgaxian tentacles dipped in resin and preserved, the mummified skulls of many weirdly oblong insectoid skulls with secondary jaws, dead Scraplets arranged on a wall like an insect collection, and here there were more heads.

Genuine severed heads. Propeller followed them, outlined on the walls, and he walked by several doors opening as the power leveled itself out. The trophy heads were preserved in various ways, whether mechanical or organic or something else, and mounted with little plagues below them. "Hey, buddy?"

"What's up?" Grindjack said, frowning in faint distaste at the grisly trophies. Some of the more robotic ones were bothering him faintly. Some of them looked a bit familiar.

"I want to take a closer look at these trophies. Give me a lift up."

"Alrighty, hold on a sec. This is creepin' me out, though!"

"It'll just be a bit!"

Grindjack lifted Propeller onto his shoulders, seating him on a flat section behind the forward projection of his neck. He then flew into the air, transforming into a small jet-like vehicle mode, lift-generating pods sprouting at ideal places, his whole body compressing a bit and spreading out into flattened wings. Set into these were vertical take-off fans, shielded so nothing could get sucked into them, and these whirred on, lifting them both into the air and nearly to the ceiling, leveling out in front of the nearest trophy.

Propeller peered with interest at the head there; a broad and rather nasty skull dipped in preservative plastics to keep it intact (it might have been taken a very long time ago), the teeth long since fallen out of the skull but replaced with heavy and sharp ones that Propeller hoped were a match for the real teeth. Even if this was just an organic monster, it would have been disrespectful.

"These guys definitely got around, whoever they are," Grindjack observed, extending optical sensors off his side to note the next trophy down. While the skull Propeller had examined was originally from an organic and about as big as his torso, this next trophy was bigger than his whole body, much bigger than even Grindjack's default robot mode. Long, draconian and fearsomely toothy, it seemed to glare at them even with empty eyesockets, owing to the shape of the heavy brow ridges and hornlets. "That thing there is a... let's see, a Makluan. Shapeshifting alien dragon monsters."

"How do you know that?"

"I read the plaque, duh. There's something else below it, but it's kind of hard to understand; looks Simfurian. It might be 'Strafe' but I don't think that's the actual name. Could be the name of whoever killed it."

"Oh." Propeller pointed at the first skull he'd been looking at. "What about that one?"

"'Ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal'," Grindjack said promptly. "And below it, the name of whoever killed it... hard to understand. It might be 'Trapjaw'... nah, that's not right. 'Tyrannobot', maybe? No, I can't read it."

"Bug-blatter beast? Ooh, I've always wanted to wrestle one of those," Propeller said. "You know, I'm sort of starting to like these guys. They got good taste in trophies, at least. It's like an honor thing, respecting slain enemies by displaying them with pride!"

"You're weird. Maybe if we take them prisoner you guys can talk about how weird you both are, eh?"

"You just have no taste." Propeller urged him onward and they traveled to more trophies; now they saw ones from mechanical lifeforms. They passed the massive glassy eye of a feral driller (a massive mechanical worm bred on Cybertron as a digging machine and living factory, extruding products from its body and using the things it ate as raw material), the fuchsia-tinted horns of an Alternian troll (not its empress, who in this iteration of her people was easily large enough to match even a Transformer in size and power, but perhaps this had been a governor of some colony) and a single tire. That was it, just a tire.

Grindjack found that interesting. "Says it's from winning a race somewhere. On foot, I think. Everyone else was in speeders and cycles! I guess they took the tire from the former champion's vehicle."

"'Vehicle'?" Propeller said with some distaste. "Ugh. Had to be on a non-Decepticon world. That sounds so... un-classy. Or an organic planet! That's just kind of weird." The next trophy was the preserved head of some variety of organic neither of them quite recognized. "Any idea who this is?"

"Some kind of tyrant from a world that I guess work with the Autobots now," Grindjack said. He looked along the corridor. "Huh. A lot of the heads there look like they used to be on a list of bad guys." He hesitated. "Killing people and taking their heads as trophies? Even to organics, that's kind of..."

"I dunno," Propeller said cheerfully. "Respect for a slain foe! Or maybe pride you made the universe better by taking them out of it."

"You really gotta talk to somewhat about that. You're scary."

"Am not, I-" Propeller stopped. He saw the next head.

It was the mounted head of a Decepticon.