This chapter took longer than expected, and because it went on for a bit, I opted to split them up; I'll be posting the next chapter in a couple days, as it's basically done!
Disclaimer: I do not own Transformers, Steven Universe, or any other copyrighted series appearing in this fic. This is a work of entertainment without monetary gain.
Two Decepticon soldiers, neither of them exactly experienced or advanced up the local meritocracy in any significant way but still looking forward to fine careers in conquest, were on quasi-active duty in a well-off city somewhere near the outreaches of the more rural areas a short while before they got the call.
Quasi-active duty was a peculiar notion but a common one in even the more divergent of Decepticon planetary practices (which could differ more significantly from planet to planet especially in outer colonies, a practice that some complained about as lacking strength or making it harder to maintain cohesion among soldiers of different homeworlds but did ensure a lot of doctrinal flexibility that made those same soldiers unpredictable to their enemies). Soldiers not assigned to direct action were set to... not patrol, exactly, but tend to a list of different tasks, ranked in order of urgency and difficulty. These tasks could entail a wide variety of different jobs: it might involve making high-profile deliveries to VIPs, it might involve assisting in an legal investigation or execute a troublesome criminal, it could deal with assisting in off-world mining interests, and so on: virtually any job even loosely connected with military purposes (or serving them, as in the case of earning them favors or good PR) might be carried out with soldiers.
In the case of these two Decepticons, who were called Jetstorm and Terrorsaur, this job involved pacifying the state of resentful unrest in the ghettos where organics, shamed Decepticons, robots of types or species deemed untrustworthy and second-class citizens of all models were mostly forced to settle. In other societies, such matters wouldn't be much worse than a harmless gripe session, but Air Commander Starscream had, even in the infancy of their movement, determined that such agents of potential disorder had to be harshly punished at the first sign of chafing at Decepticon rule, lest they rise up or slay any decent robots.
This state of circumstances wasn't always so grim as that. Most such citizens lived fairly well enough or peacefully. That said, any sign of unrest whatsoever would be harshly punished, to prevent such an uprising situation. In competent hands, this should have led to finding ways to get those people to feel greater loyalty to the Decepticon cause, but owing to general hostility and the superiority endemic to Decepticon political thought, this typically wound up involve shake-downs, calling in nasty favors, or intimidating people into compliance. Usually when smarter commanders were involved, diplomatic soldiers were assigned to this, since it was counterproductive to send a bully and thug to solve this sort of thing. In this case, whoever had assigned these two had totally dropped the ball.
It might have just been disdain for the people who had to live in places like this. Decepticon territory, though permitting non-Decepticons to live there, did not often treat them well.
Normally this sort of thing would be up for the local law enforcement to deal out. In Decepticon territory, while there were legal departments to sort out technicalities and resolve matters, there wasn't a whole lot of distinction between 'law enforcement' and 'military personnel', just as the average Decepticon didn't easily grasp the difference between a military combatant and a civilian who couldn't or wouldn't fight.
The people who lived here often dreaded the sight of soldiers walking around like they didn't have anything better to do. It usually meant someone was going to be unhappy.
"...And then she head-butted me, right in the chassis!" said Jetstorm, a recent graduate of a high-class school available to only the most skilled and promising students, and only a tiny fraction of those were selected to attend. Graduating with honors for his scores and combat ability (if not his strategizing, or social skills; stories about his destructive pranks on faculty and peers alike were legendary, as were his constant altercations with rivals and professors), he had declined the entry-level officer posting he had been offered in order to take a lower position, periodically transferring to different colonies and younger worlds at the edge of the empire. What Jetstorm lacked in personal charm, he made up for in political acumen; he wanted to get experience on the battlefield and in learning the ropes of climbing up the meritocracy and knowing who to work with, who was a danger or who was expendable. He didn't want to just advance, he wanted to reach the very highest tiers.
A fairly large Decepticon, Jetstorm had been born of a respected line of Seekers: bipedal, he walked upon legs with multiple knees like a beast of some kind, his feet broad and adapted to flat surfaces and landing, not running. His arms were broader and larger than usual for Seekers, his hands around the level of his highest knees and allowing him to run quadrupedal with ease. His head, long and elongated like a helm, was crowned by a visor of sorts that made up most of his forehead with a frontal-mounted optical sensor. If he had eyes behind that visor, or if that visor was his eyes, only his medics knew for sure. His kibble was arranged so that his body had a very angular design; like a set of broad triangles all connected together.
"Sounds like a keeper," Terrorsaur said in a voice that was deep enough, growling enough that it should have been scary no matter how he spoke. Something in his basic character seeped through, though, and he was incapable of sounding scary no matter how he tried, he just sounded snide or sarcastic, depending on how irritable or cheerful he was feeling. He was being sincere in this case: a beastformer who had arisen from the constructed wellspark of an asteroid belt with the alternate mode of a flying saurinoid, he was a political schemer and ambitious mech whose career was continually derailed by his own obnoxious demeanor and an inability to really make decent gambits without exposing himself as a schemer.
He was also a complete and blatant fanboy of Air Commander Starscream. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, assuming you didn't know Starscream's many personality failings, but it was somewhat off-putting in the independently minded Decepticons; idolizing was seen as something for Autobots and... other people who idolized, they guessed. Decepticons rarely had opportunities for cross-cultural comparisons. Terrorsaur's fascination with Starscream was clear in his frame, modeled to resemble his idol: his robot mode was tall and relatively slender, the sharp-looking kibble of his pterosaur mode similar to the long and sloping figure of Starscream. His limbs were longer than usual, enough that he could move on all fours, and with his elongated proportions it made him look somewhat gangly, but possessed of a deadly grace that made him look rather unnerving for all of his silly posturing. And he was more broad-shouldered, the head of his beast mode folding into the sections of his torso along with his wings.
Jetstorm glanced at Starscream, part of his visor folding in a way that looked like a raised eyebrow. "Is that a hint of jealousy and resentment I smell?" he said coyly. "Do speak up!"
"What, no," Terrorsaur said, his perpetual sneer fading into genuine surprise. For a beastformer (who tended towards morphological divergence, even by Transformer standards), his face was extremely close to the 'two eyes, one mouth, flat face and crest' pattern the Functionalist cult had surgically enforced in Cybertron's high societies. If you didn't notice the predator kibble and Predacon-style angles of his body, it was hard to guess at his alt mode at all. "I was being serious!"
"Oh, really? Very hard to tell with you, sometimes. You're a hard bot to read."
"Wish I could do it on command," Terrorsaur complained. "Then I wouldn't keep getting reassigned to backwater Energon farms like this cesspit of a planet! Ugh, all the times I've insulted superiors at the wrong moment... take it from me, you want to know how to not broadcast how much of an idiot everyone around you is. Jets like you get all the luck."
"Well, you know real worth when you see the frame it was minted in," Jetstorm said smugly, buffing his claws on his chestplate. There was a nasty screeching noise. "Oh, Primus delete it, I just polished there, I've only gone and ruined the finish! Oh, why do I keep doing that?!"
"Clearly your processor was not minted in the best condition," Terrorsaur replied, cackling unpleasantly. Even his laughs sounded like a screech.
"I hate you and everything you stand for," Jetstorm said, but cordially. Amiable hostility was how Decepticons from his part of the empire showed affection: it wasn't exactly a custom, but it showed that you respected someone enough to say challenging things like that and being confident that they wouldn't be offended enough to attack you over it.
(This says something about the Decepticons. Even their friendships were rife with aggressive politics and double-thinking, delicate balances of mutually contradicting forces that could make the whole system topple over into violence, kept contained by a firm sense of loyalty to the cause and warrior brotherhood.)
"How? We stand for the same things!" Terrorsaur thought about it, tapping a wickedly curved claw on his mighty chin. "I mean, besides the things we hate. Like assimilationists. Primus, I hate those guys! They're so preachy..."
"You and me both, flaps."
The two of them walked down a ramp, along one of the sides steepled to make broad enough steps for all but the largest non-combiner Transformers. (Those who were too big for the stars could use their alt mode and move down the middle, take a cab, or improvise; Decepticon culture was kind to those who could come up with tricky solutions to immediate problems, and cruel to those who lacked the imagination or quick wit.) Around them, rising out of the edge of a dried Energon mining pit established after the planet was seeded with Energon to aid the cyberforming processes and help the illusion that this planet hadn't been originally inhabited, was the vast spread of urban squalor, cheap and subsidized housing set in geometric patterns to maximize space.
The buildings were all roughly the same, mass-produced modular constructions meant to slot together, and normally they were supposed to be grouped together to make increasingly complex and useful homes. That was too much effort, and these modules were old, outdated and retired models, worn and rusted lumps of a module or two for each house. Little more than bare sleeping space and room for scant household amenities. Mostly, they were clamped together into huge and lumpy complexes, arcing together to make bridges and additional buildings and self-contained levels of a literal inner city; these apartments were cheaper, but even more squalid and small than the housing units.
A few people walked by them; going on foot and taking a wide berth around them (but not so obviously that it attracted attention), moving around in vehicular alt modes if they had any; rare, there were few vehicle robots in this part of the city, Transformer or otherwise. Mostly they were organics; aliens conquered by the Decepticons and directly assimilated into the empire, all but the most Decepticon-like aspects of their cultures ruthlessly stomped out and washed away to produce a culturally homogeneous population. They rarely were much like their ancestors, and now the descendants of proud warriors and defiant homesteaders recoiled from Decepticon soldiers, hiding behind windows or anxiously ducking into alleyways to avoid the gaze of Jetstorm or Terrorsaur.
The two Decepticons paid them little attention; most of the aliens were vastly smaller than them, and to them the organics were literally beneath their attention or effort.
Terrorsaur glanced at the buildings, shuddering as though the aesthetics were mortally painful to him. "I hate these tinytowns. Everything is too... small." True; most of the buildings here had been made to hold cargo, not living people; they were cramped and blocky, ill-suited for residences but very cheap.
"The smell is what bothers me," Jetstorm replied. He sniffled irritably at the perpetual smell of rust and broke down factories or sewage facilities the local governance allowed to run down until they collapsed, out of laziness instead of malice or stupidity. "Ugh. It stinks of meat-things here." A couple of relatively tiny aliens, barely as big as his claws, bristled with offense but ducked away when he glanced idly in their direction.
He probably also scented a powerful aroma of fear, and resentment. It curdled here, rising up from so many people and for so many reasons, getting thicker and boiling from no one having the opportunity to do anything, the governments refused to even listen to them except when other Decepticons argued on their behalf. It rankled them even worse, that they had no voice except when others presumed to know what was best for them and acted like they were too childish and dim to even do that. To speak up was to invite retaliation and get your whole life torn up just out of Decepticon spite. And that just made some people angrier, and start scheming.
The air here didn't just stink from pollution and neglect: the nearly terminal hatefulness was turning rancid.
Terrorsaur and Jetstorm were oblivious to all this. Or perhaps indifferent. Even if they knew that the people in this part of town would have gladly killed them just to strike at the Decepticons (however futile it was), they wouldn't have taken it seriously. Terrorsaur sneered at a small child staring balefully at him until its mother swooped down on feather-plucked wings to take it away.
But they were just two Decepticons. Two relatively small bots in a very large part of town almost on fire with resentment and no outlet for its fury. Sooner or later, enough would be enough and they'd lash out, only to be struck down. But the Decepticon Empire would bleed, at least for a short time. It had happened before, many times, and it would happen again. Jetstorm and Terrorsaur did not realize this, or ever think about it, or even think about the people who lived here. After all, they didn't consider them 'people' at all, and treated them accordingly.
And on that note, Jetstorm turned off the rampway to one of the smaller houses. Small was a relative term; it was much larger than the organic-scale homes, but still only a single bedroom module with a rounded attic that had apparently been added personally. A small mail receptacle sat out in front of it, knocked off its pedestal with a leering face and speciesist graffiti on it. Terrorsaur stomped on it for good measure and not even looking, like he was doing it on auto-pilot.
Leaning slightly down to fit between the narrow space between the door and the other home bundles lumped around it, Jetstorm knocked imperiously on the door, his claws rapping on an unpainted surface between the letters of a message declaring "SQUIDS GO HOME!" in blocky and shaky shapes.
"Seven for spirit but I'm docking points for style," Jetstorm remarked, talking about the graffiti. "The quints are terrible people but a little subtlety would be classier."
The door opened; it should have creaked but the pressure joints had been oiled and greased so that it moved silently, with a certain weight so that didn't even have to be pushed hard to open up. Jetstorm idly wondered if they could score a bit of entertainment for the day by getting the inhabitant up on a charge of illegal tampering with city property, he didn't actually mind fixing the doors like that but he was very bored. "Now you let me do the talking," he muttered to Terrorsaur. "We're doing this by the routine. I'm the nice reasonable one, you're the mean racist who makes me seem all better by comparison."
"I never get to be the reasonable one," Terrorsaur complained. "You never let me do the talking!"
"One, I have seniority, I get to decide who sounds good! And two, of course I don't, you're terrible at talking to people."
"This coming from the bot with, what, a dozen demerits for dishonorable levels of puns in a combat situation?" Terrorsaur mumbled, but it was a low-anger, spite-free kind of mumble.
The room beyond was dark; eerily so, even creepy. Jetstorm, who had once seen vid-picts of the laboratories of Shockwave on the Decepticon capital, shivered and just knew he would have nightmares about this. It looked so... spooky. A little bit beyond, he thought he could see glimpses of gauzy curtains studded with shiny stones, clumsily made storage cases for archival slates and genuine books (bound together by hand), and a small elegant table laid for multiple people, with dishes set on cozies over an cloth embroidered with some kind of mural.
The dishes, with their weird food, still looked warm. Jetstorm glanced at Terrorsaur, tight-beaming a query: 'Did we just wander into some kind of freaky poor people meeting?' and Terrorsaur nodded grimly. This might be entertaining after all.
Pushing the door open entirely and not quite blocking their view of all that was what looked like a female robot expertly assembled from the contents of a scrapyard. She stared at them levelly, with a dignity that was almost regal.
Bhanibhel she was called, and they weren't honestly sure if it was an assumed name or not. Her form was expertly made, though it had been cobbled together from cast-offs: you could barely see the seams, but there were seams, and oversized parts joined to sections clearly not designed for them. The overall impression was charming in spite of the unpolished and crude form, and she really was quite attractive; deliberately so, designed for that. It struck Jetstorm as a bit narcissistic, really. And it made him a little unnerved; the femme was just a face of what he was really looking at, so to speak.
She didn't look too different from a Transformer that might come to live here. She was just as tall as Jetstorm himself and just as wide in structurally significant locations. Curvy in a fashion that was common among many self-described female organisms across the universe for inexplicable reasons, her frame made of discarded parts machined and fashioned into mechanical body parts. Clearly she was a work in progress; while all her body was the same shade of reddish pink, little of it looked like it belonged on the same body. Currently her cover story was that she was a Junkion seeing the galaxy; while it made sense for her appearance, Jetstorm and Terrorsaur knew what she really was and therefore not to take anything she said at face value.
She looked politely at them, tilting her head slightly to see them at eye level due to the odd proportions of her body; one shoulder was larger than the other and her torso was shaped... wrong. As a consequence, her posture was shaped differently, though still humanoid. Jetstorm wanted to think of what she did next as blinking but this wasn't accurate; she didn't have eyes or sensible optics or a visor; the front portions of her upper face was a screen, ringed by binocular facing small optical sensors like little lights. This screen emoted through blue eye-shapes, crude and cracked so that the display wavered quite a bit.
The eye display... stuttered. The display was breaking down so much that the power to it was going off for a few moments, or she affected blinking by deliberately denying power for a few moments. The eyes flickered on and off, very quickly and it seemed like she was blinking. A learned trait from observation; she would have no reason to do it otherwise.
"Hello?" Bhanibhel said, her voice incredibly mellifluous and pleasant. She at least had a humanoid face, her mouthplates slightly edged and apparently made from redesigned mandibles. "Ah. I know you two. Right?" This was spoken in a slightly more uncertain tone, and her optical display 'blinked' again. A few of her limbs shivered; one main arm, and the two smaller arms at her midsection, bristling with a variety of tools. Jetstorm had seen her about town working on things, and supposed that she made a living doing repairs on tedious jobs too boring and dangerous even for drones. It certainly did a number on her frame. "Is this a social call?"
"Not really, no," Terrorsaur said offhandedly. He paused, evidently remembering Jetstorm's orders about opening his beaky mouth in the presence of people. "Except yes. Only in a way that's no social. So. Awk. Yeah."
She squinted at him. At least, her eye designs narrowed into little angles. It looked like a cutesy depiction of someone narrowing their eyes really tightly or shutting them. "Did you just squawk?"
"Yes!" Terrorsaur hunched his shoulders defensively, sections of his bodies starting to fold out. Specifically it was his wing kibble.
Jetstorm knew the signs of Terrorsaur losing his temper and about to shift into his more combat-suitable beast mode. "Settle down," he said lazily. Terrorsaur complied, skulking back and his body settling back entirely into robot mode, and he was still glaring at the femme.
Bhanibhel didn't appear to respond. Jetstorm was mildly offended at her stoicism, though he smiled nastily at the less relaxed tension in her mode. Her legs in particular were going very stuff; she had two of them, thick and round and no doubt very stable and strong, but they branched off at the knee into multiple smaller legs with multiple joints like fractal designs, or root systems. An artsy thing, he supposed. Now all these legs bent down, making her stance more stable and incidentally lowering herself a bit, looking shorter. Shorter, in fact, than Jetstorm.
He preened, overlooking that she might well have been taller than him if she stood up to her full height, though she likely couldn't maintain it for long. "You're late on your payments," Jetstorm said sweetly.
She stiffened, as if to argue. He stared at her, his claws flexing. Terrorsaur relaxed, grinning wide enough to show his pointed teeth. She stared at them, taking in them both with a wide stare, and her optical display became small, sad lines.
Time to push it a bit, Jetstorm thought. He moved his arm wide, with a flourish, indicating a part of the wall that looked wrong; made of the wrong materials, and bolted on with glues to keep it steady. It looked like there had been a big hole there, patched up inadequately at great expense. "Just paying up is easier than doing repairs," he said, trying to talk like a fancy salesman or something. To make a point, he poked her in the shoulder, hard.
His claws scratched, with a loud and painful noise, against deep and jagged scars in the metal of her shoulder. A wound that she'd remember, that would tingle and itch whenever she got too warm or cold, the living metal of her body aching there. Not easy to repair, even if she had the money for the expensive procedures for it. And the wicked slashes of the scars, deep enough that her muscular systems were compromised, were a perfect match for his own claws.
Jetstorm scratched at them, grinning at how she flinched away and tried not to look at him.
Terrorsaur stood against the wall, arms crossed and he chimed in, "Repairs cost money. Just think about it. You're smart. You know..." he nodded at Jetstorm.
Jetstorm grinned. "For a squid," he said, and the femme flinched like she had been struck across the mouthplates.
"Is that kind of language really necessary?" Bhanibhel said, sounding tired and too inured to it to really be hurt.
Jetstorm frowned, and almost smacked her across the room for her insolence: he forced himself to remember that just talking to him like he was an equal wasn't really insolence; she was a foreigner, she wasn't a Transformer, she was quite nearly organic (depending on how you looked at it) despite her exterior... you couldn't expect her to understand how real people thought. With what he considered to be great grace, he said, "What's necessary is that you learn your slagging place, quint."
"All right!" she said, nervously looking outside to see if anyone had heard. "Just... please, don't spread it around. I'll pay up, just... oh, please give me a moment..."
"So long as you don't annoy anyone," Terrorsaur said casually, putting a hand on Jetstorm's shoulder plates. Jetstorm straightened up, calming down.
She hurried away for a moment, disappearing into a side room. Jetstorm watched her go and said nothing for a long while; he indicated an audio sensor at the side of his head, nodded at Terrorsaur, and listened in.
He waited. He smiled, after a moment. It was a pretty nasty and unpleasant smile.
And he also received a message from global surveillance. Usual protocol was to drop immediate non-military concerns and check messages, instantly. Jetstorm ignored it, justifying this as a military matter of keeping stability in the area by reminding rebellious aliens of their place in the world and taking a bit of payback for quintesson oppression of the Transformer people, but Terrorsaur didn't.
"Sir," Terrorsaur said, frowning grimly. "We've got orders."
Jetstorm looked up at him, surprised. "We do?" He tilted his head, trying to listen into what he was sure was several other people moving in another room; shifting nervously, hiding out from them, perhaps illegal immigrants or criminals of some other stripe who really wouldn't want to meet soldiers like them. The quint could get seriously punished for this, oh yes; a little bit of money to pay them off would do nicely, and reminding people that it could be so much worse if they didn't toe the line, that made some fine impressions in the community.
"There's been a crash in a rural region, and we're the closest fliers in range," Terrorsaur reported. "Gist is, the thingy seems a lot like a spaceship and it came from Gem space. But it might be Autobot."
Jetstorm frowned. "...Huh. Understood." He broadcasted to the relays around them, "Orders received. Carrying out now. Jetstorm, out." He shifted into a slightly different stance, and mindset; this had been fun, but now was the time for proper work.
And now came the quint, scuttling back to them like a pink and robotic insect, just enough like a Transformer to be creepy. She held a credit slab and extended it to them. "Your money, here."
Terrorsaur took it. "Thank you for your service to the Decepticon Empire," he said snidely. He was probably sincere, though. She turned away, clearly repressing the urge to say something sarcastic but would likely invite violence; Decepticon soldiers were not known for their good grace in social work.
Jetstorm contemplated the wisdom of leaving her another mark or two to rub the lesson in, and decided that they didn't have time for it and it felt a bit like overkill. He couldn't resist one last jibe, and said, "We'll be in touch. See you later."
The two soldiers left, already assuming their alternate modes and blasting off in such a way that it tore the door off the quint's home. "I'll keep that in mind," Bhanibhel muttered to herself.
Back on the downed ship, Propeller and Grindjack were staring at the heads mounted on the walls, Grindjack still in the form of a flying vehicle but the horror of the situation causing him to lose control and focus.
They felt the horror of being on an Autobot ship once again. This was like something from a fear show, a story they told to scare or instruct sparklings. This was wrong, this was evil, this was... something they didn't have words for.
Not just trophy heads, from slain organics or monsters. These were the heads of people. Decepticon heads. Mounted on the walls.
Like animals.
Both minicon and mutacon alike shivered; Propeller's kibble rotated in place so that he twisted gently, and Grindjack's form wobbled threateningly, cohesion oozing away. Both of them stared at the face on the wall, slowly drifting away from it. "Sweet hands of Solus," Grindjack whispered, so quietly Propeller barely heard it. They dipped as he lowered, losing control of his shape and flight abilities. "Oh, oh Primus."
Propeller shook himself, and gently smacked his brother on the top of his hood. "No, no. Think! Get closer!"
Grindjack dipped and hovered at the same time, fans spinning up and leveling out. "What? Are you crazy?!"
"I said, get closer, please! We can... no, we should find out who that used to be."
"Why?" Grindjack twisted unhappily. "I don't want to look at that, mech, that is nasty!"
"Respect. We need to find out who that was. And... I dunno." Propeller felt uncertain. "Recycle them when we can, I guess."
Grindjack mulled this over. "...Okay," He said reluctantly, rising up again and approaching the head.
It was certainly a Decepticon; the trophy head seemed fairly old, though how old they weren't sure. It could have been older than this ship, taken from a dead bot ages ago and carried around all this time, but the idea was a little sickening. If it really was that old, the Autobots on the ship would have been old soldiers indeed, and Propeller knew his military history pretty well: any Autobot that old would be a frightening warrior indeed, and a whole crew would be rather beyond their abilities. It didn't make much difference to his decision to fight, but it did change the situation.
Propeller didn't recognize the face, who it originally belonged to. In the haze of bewilderment and disgust, a new feeling arose: relief. It made him feel a little sick that he shouldn't feel anything besides revulsion at what he was looking at, but there it was. He was relieved that he wasn't looking at anyone he knew right now; a figure from live feeds, or people he knew that he'd lost contact with, even training-friends who had gone into service before him and disappeared (though Decepticon training made this inevitable, new 'Cons would go into the battlefield and active deployment far from the worlds of their birth, and they might never see anyone they knew for ages to come; when reunions rolled around, they were rarely the same).
It would have been unlikely that he knew the old bot at at all. This mech was- had been old. Old when he tied, and killed a very long time ago. It was hard to tell the original color; he wasn't looking at genuine cybermatter exterior, it had been dipped and treated in various other materials; plasticine resins, treatments of transparent crystals, and other things that would prevent the usual decay of cybermatter that had not been infused with live energon long enough. Normally lack of energon would cause a transformer to gradually diminish, like the rot organics were accursed with; postmortem energon loss made frames and mechanical systems decay far more quickly. Displayed or preserved corpses required some trickery, and Propeller distantly decided that something like this had happened.
These particular methods, while diverse and originating from all over Cybertron, had their roots in the Simfur region. Parts of Simfur had been arid near the boundaries of their land, and incredibly moist in the vast swamps and metallic marshlands that made up much of Simfur. Mechanimals consumed for their energon and cybermatter mass had been preserved for longer periods of time – like the great nomadic tribes who had walked with the herds as the seasons passed, following what was most bountiful and battling the weather as they went – and those same methods had extended to preserving dead cybermatter from the effects of Simfur's hostile elements: rusting through, hollowing out or soaking up so much that they eventually broke apart into particles. This head hadn't been treated in exactly those same ways, but something similar had been done to it.
"I guess whoever did this really was from Simfur," Propeller said. "Maybe descended from somewhere there."
"Probably not," Grindjack said uneasily, staying in the now and trying not to get sick. "I mean... uh..." he trembled, doing his best not to look at the grisly sight in front of them. He tilted his present optical sensors from it. "Considering that list we found in the locker, the sword, and the writing on these trophies, whoever killed this poor bot probably was someone from Simfur."
"I'm not sure if I like that," Propeller replied. "I mean. Scowl the destroyer is from Simfur. It's weird. Thinking of a monster as coming from the same place as a hero like him?"
"Good guys and bad guys can come out of the same places. I mean, places like Iacon and Simfur were the birthplace of the Autobots, but plenty of good Decepticons came from there too!"
"Yeah. I guess so." Propeller took another, closer look at the head. Though it turned his energon pump to do it.
It was nice to see that the Decepticon insignia was still upon a raised section of the brow. He wasn't sure if it was a mark of respect, however muted. It was still shiny and well-buffed, but it was only a little upwind from the horrific wounds that had killed the 'Con; most of the head itself was entirely missing, massive wounds shearing right through. The trophy had been cleaned, the wounds not pared down so much as simply trimmed just enough to keep it intact without making the wound seem less impressive. Most of the skull on that side was gone; the claw marks, bigger around than Propeller's whole body (and frighteningly like Screamqueen's own claws) had... he didn't want to think about it, but it looked like some monster had ripped this bot's head open, crushed the processor and twisted around the insides. The whole face, while recognizable, was still stretched and warped from the resulting structural damage.
It also gave him a clue. The killer had been something strong, and with very large and sharp claws. Perhaps a beastformer using an alt mode with such features. A beast-class was also possible, and in fact somewhat more likely; feral robot modes tended to be more battle ready than beast modes did, it was a curiosity of Transformer physiology he'd never bothered finding out. "I bet whoever did that was really big," he said. "Look at the angle; they must have just reached down and dug in and... you know." He made a nasty, wet noise.
Grindjack didn't have a mouth, or face for that matter, in his present form, so he couldn't make a grossed out expression. Several sensory arrays on his top made offended buzzing noises instead. "Dude, that is nasty, don't make sounds like that! And, uh, don't jump to conclusions until we see the bad guys here. Okay? They could have been flying, or jumped up at an angle."
"But if they're huge, could be that's how the ship is so big," Propeller said eagerly.
"Assuming the ship was made specifically for them, mech! They mighta stolen this one and brought their own trophies along. Okay, so maybe who has it now might not actually be the guys who took the trophies, but considering all the Simfur-writing in the lockers and on these trophies, that's pretty unlikely." Grindjack rambled on like this and forced himself to focus, even though it reminded him of unpleasant stuff. "Just... don't expect specific stuff and get wrong. That's, I dunno, unscientific and stuff."
"Okay, okay." Propeller looked at it more closely, trying to avoid the empty cavity and broken casing. There really was nothing there; either the processor had been completely torn out, or so damaged in the fight that even preservation had not been able to halt the decay of the more delicate sub-systems for long. The exterior frames were more resilient to dissolution than the internals were; a preserved corpse could be almost completely hollow inside without showing much outside decay, if it was done right.
The head itself, in spite of all this, was quite recognizable. This probably wasn't a coincidence; the care taken to keep the head intact all these ages suggested that the killers had wanted the head to be recognizable for all eternity. Propeller imagined doing something like that, and seeing the head of an enemy every so often and getting a lovely, satisfied thrill now and then.
He wondered who the head had been, that the killers might have taken such vindictive joy in his death.
After some thought, he pegged the Decepticon as having been a mech; the squarish and angular shapes of the head were a suggestion but plenty of femmes had masculine body types and head shapes, as did neuter-gender. However, facial growths were almost exclusive to mechs, and this bot had quite an impressive beard before he'd died; postmortem, it had fused into a single mass, only the bits closest to the head showing signs of corded growth from the faceplates. The mouthplates hung slightly open, not so much pained as embarrassed or surprised. It might not have been a final expression; the jaw hydraulics didn't seem very intact on the busted-up side. Similarly, only one of the paired optics was unbroken, and above this was a great horn, slightly curved like an elegant diadem.
The plaque below it was in the same language that Propeller couldn't read; it was probably by the same bots who had taken the other trophies, he guessed. There wasn't any significant differences, which he found offensive. Dead Decepticon corpses being treated the same as dead animals he found offensive; dead organics, on the other hand...
He did his best not to follow the thought all the way through. It made him feel uncomfortable. "What's the plaque say?" He asked, trying not to think about this too much.
Grindjack lowered himself, happy to get away from the head. "Well, Simfurian is hard to reach. Super-contextual, like I said. So I'm not sure but based on the way the name all fits together, it was probably a mech when... he, I guess, was alive?"
"I knew it!"
"And the bot himself," Grindjack continued. "I think his name was... let's see. Dominus Trannis."
Propeller blinked. "What, really?"
"Yep." Grindjack tilted a section of his sensory arrays up inquisitively. "You're looking kinda freaked out. More than before, I mean. You know who that is? I don't!"
"You did say Trannis, right?" Propeller repeated. He stared at the great head (easily bigger than the whole of his body), and the remnants of metal beard. "I... yeah. I've heard of him."
"You have?" Grindjack's voice sounded a bit concerned. "Oh mech, I'm sorry. I, I didn't mean... he was someone you knew? Oh Primus, I can't-"
"No, no, it's okay, bud!" Propeller patted Grindjack's shell. "I never knew him. He died way before either of us was ever forged. Before this planet was inhabited... I think. He died when the homeworld was still inhabitable! Don't feel bad about it."
"Oh, okay. Whew! Uh, not that I'm glad he's dead. Just that you didn't know him. Wait, that makes me sound like a sociopath..."
Propeller giggled. "Nah, just kind of a goofball."
"Welp, the mechs and the femmes, they like goofballs." Grindjack returned to the trophy. "So who was he? I've never heard of anyone like that?"
"Seriously? Don't you know your history?" Propeller stared at the head of Trannis again, with a sense of not quite respect. This was like looking directly at history, or seeing a window straight into the past. This was something old, long before his time, and not exactly something he wanted to get directly associated with.
"He was one of us. A Decepticon. One of the first, even." The historical records set into mandatory simulation games, encoded into children's series and stories, and all the other methods to get young sparklings to want to learn history in a way that made them understandable without compromising their utility to the Decepticon cause, it came back to Propeller. It was a little like diving back into a pool with many squirmy, slippery things in the water, and some of them certainly with nasty teeth.
Generally speaking, early Decepticons often did not have the finest of records. (It was claimed that they broke off from Lord Megatron's leadership, perpetuating terrible acts for the good of Cybertron and acting without his sanction. The possibility that they had done so on Megatron's orders anyway, and the histories lied to make it sound nicer, had certainly occurred to him. Propeller preferred to think that Lord Megatron had understood the complexity of the revolution and had done what seemed necessary to build something better. It didn't help Propeller's guilty feelings much.)
"An old pit boss, who ran the soldier's militias in Kaon," Propeller said, trying to sum up what he had been taught. "He used to be a gladiator, back when the pit fights were technically legal. Before that, he'd been a soldier in one of the wars with the Quintesson Co-Prosperity Sphere. Got highly decorated, and I guess that's why they let him get away with a lot. A lot of the stuff he did wasn't exactly legal, but it set up room for the pitfights where Lord Megatron refined his skills and attracted the first Decepticons. Trannis joined him there after... some stuff, I'm not exactly, to be honest. The history stuff doesn't go about it into detail, but it seems like there was a lot of politics stuff and big adventures to earn his respect."
"Probably," Grindjack agreed. "Trannis certainly has a lot of scars... guess he was a soldier, way back when. So what happened?"
"Well, when Lord Megatron got him on his side, Trannis still had a lot of military people listening to him. Not high command or the big militias in any region, but plenty of experienced soldiers, people he had trained back in the day, disgruntled revolutionaries, and exiles hiding out in the far reaches. Enough of those people came when Trannis called them in, and the ones who stuck around became the backbone of our people's first battle units and military forces. Like that's how the first of the Combaticons signed up."
"Ooh, I never heard that!" Grindjack said, much impressed.
"But Trannis wasn't exactly popular after the Autobot and Decepticon revolution against the Functionalists got started. Trannis didn't have a lot of respect for Lord Megatron or his inner circle; he thought they were too inexperienced and he wasn't getting the respect he deserved. I'm not totally sure how it happened, but he got fed up and started doing stuff to impress people and win glory." Propeller hesitated. "He... was pretty nasty about it."
"Uh, by what standards, exactly?"
Propeller stared at the head again. He wondered if those optics were now seeing fresh torments in some awful corner of the pit. Perhaps they were merited. "He took control of an entire section of Tarn, blew down the buildings to barricade everyone in there, shot down anyone who tried to fly out, and turned the entire place into a little fiefdom after he... killed everyone who was already there."
"What?"
"First he wanted them to give their allegiance to Lord Megatron," Propeller said. "They didn't answer fast enough. So he, uh. Just killed them all. Every single one." He swallowed again. He was finding it hard to look at Trannis' head again, but for different reasons than before. "Down to the last sparkling. He melted the bodies down to start minting new drones. And there were Decepticons there anyway, and he never bothered to find out. He said everyone was guilty. Just to make an impression to his rivals." Propeller frowned tightly. "He ended up coming back to Lord Megatron with the army of Vehicons he made from the dead, and he eventually ended up being sent to Simfur when a chieftain declared war against the Decepticons. He disappeared after that. Trannis, I mean. I know he was declared killed in action, but I never heard how exactly."
"I guess he had it coming," Grindjack said. He looked at the head of Trannis again. "I thought he was a Decepticon. What's he doing acting like a bad guy?" He scrunched up in a whole-body frown. "And there's that Simfur name again. Whoever killed him, their name was... uh, it's not Trapjaw but it's... I dunno. I've seen it somewhere."
"I, I wish I knew why he was doing bad stuff like that." Propeller tried not to think too much about the unkindness of history. "Even so... did he really deserve to die like this? They tore him apart!"
Grindjack looked away, perhaps to not see the awful sight anymore, and froze. "He wasn't the only one. Don't look, bro. Don't look."
Propeller looked. It would have been hard not to after hearing something like that.
More heads. Many more heads, mounted on the walls. Cybertronian heads, Decepticon heads from the insignias on them. Others were not, perhaps unaligned, and still others were even Autobot; yet on those, their insignias have been carefully and angrily removed, scratched out or chewed off. All of these new trophies had been savagely torn apart, like Trannis had been.
"...Oh."
"I'm starting to think that maybe we should get out of here after all," Grindjack said. He nudged his brother with a little tendril. "Come on. This is a seriously bad place. We can, I don't know... get outside, call for help, rally up when they send real soldiers to fight. We can help them, but this kind of thing is way over our heads."
"But, it's not right to just leave, not now."
"Bro, please." Grindjack slowly floated back down, taking Propeller with him. "This isn't just a crashed ship. This is something out of, I don't know, a horror thing or something! This is bad stuff, really bad! This ship is built for giants or something, giants with claws and, and teeth, I saw fang marks on some of those heads! This isn't a ship of Autobots and enemy aliens or something real like this, this ship has got monsters on it! They'll eat us alive or skin us to wear like little fancy hats! I don't want to be a fancy hat at a monster tea party!"
Propeller blinked. "What's a tea party?"
"I don't know. Heard a nebulon talking about it once. But I don't want to find out first hand, I am not gonna be a fancy hat at a, a social occasion where they get really intense about spelling contests!"
"That sounds like literally the most boring party ever."
"Exactly! So can we please go?! I don't want to go to the Allspark and tell anyone that I got killed by giant cannibal monsters who turned me into a hat for super-boring parties. No one would ever stop laughing! And you! Eh. They'd turn you into a, a cup cozy or something."
"A cup cozy!? That's just sad!"
"Well, you're so tiny," Grindjack said reasonably. "Probably you wouldn't even be more than a mouthful for them. Even after they skin you there won't be much left."
"Primus but you get morbid when you're freaked out."
Grindjack probably would have normally stuck his tongue out, amid mild bewilderment from bystanders (tongues, as such, being a super-weird physical trait that most Transformers didn't have, vocal processors being suitable for speech and not the primitive molding of air with muscular twists), had he been in his robot mode. He made do with hovering sulkily.
"Look," Propeller said while the moment was still good. "We can't leave yet. We still got a job to do."
"Dude! I just literally spelled out all the ways that is an incredibly bad idea! We are on a ship of probably giant monsters who take people's heads off, are super old, experienced enough to have taken out one of the founding Decepticons, and oh yeah, they're crazy enough to kill people and take their heads as trophies!"
"Don't some people in high command do that?"
"Yeah but it's cool with them, it doesn't count if you do it to bad guys."
Propeller clicked irritably. "I dunno, mech, that sounds like... I dunno, how do you say it, that thing when something is bad when someone else does but when you do it, it's okay just because it's you?"
"Narrative-centered morality?"
"I dunno. Maybe? I just, it doesn't sound right, okay?" A bit of inventiveness seized him and he said, "And neither does running out on this fight. What'll we say if we run now and missed out on a totally righteous fight that we could have won! Or lost, but died in a totally awesome way! That's pretty much the same thing!"
"No it's not!" Grindjack pouted. Trying to think of a way to put this properly, he failed to notice that his weight suddenly shifted dramatically, as if losing a burden. "Look, bro. There's fights you can win, and fights you can't. You get us into those kinds of fights all the time, like when you poked Screamqueen in the eye when she was asleep because you wanted to see if she was a morning person, or when you and Bhanibhel stole a looted war machine from a scrapyard and ran it right through some rich people buildings for... I don't remember, a political statement? Modern art exhibit? Oh, right, someone totally dared you guys to. And she plugged herself into the thing, she didn't drive it like you did. Man, that was weird to watch. You're a Transformer, you shouldn't drive! Driving is for pedestrians and organics and people who lose control of metaphors."
Grindjack was by this point floating nearer to the ground, and a lot lighter than he had been. "And that reminds me of all the times we went snooping around those weird old buildings that really don't belong on this planet. Like, older than the Decepticon inhabitations, Bhanibhel said they were. Phooey, I say, that don't make any sense! It'd mean the government was lying to us! More than usual, I mean. All governments lie, especially organic ones. But not robot ones, we're more awesome and stuff. Or is this treason talk? I can never tell. Oh man, I hope no one is listening on this!" Beseechingly Grindjack said to empty space, "If anyone is listening in on this, I promise I didn't mean any of that! I was... reading someone's spy thriller fan fic. No, really. I was. But you don't want to see it, it's got totally nasty pairing and alternate universe junk and seriously creepy kinks. Like, organic/robot pairings. Robot to meat conversion plot points! Is that gross or what? You should probably get away from the screen before you get sick. Also, be a friend and delete the whole conversation. Don't want your supervisor seeing this and concluding you're into some sick stuff! I am horrified to know you're into this. Just, ew, mech."
He reached the ground. Automatically, he assumed his quadrupedal robot mode. He barked in some relief, he had missed his legs. "...And I feel like I'm missing something." He looked up.
Propeller wasn't on his back anymore, and had apparently left a while ago.
Grindjack looked around. "Oh mech, not again!" He looked up at the trophies, as if Propeller was hopping along on top of them (it wouldn't be the first time he had used horrible corpses as stepping stones to punch something), but he wasn't there. He looked around the corridor, but didn't see his brother anywhere.
He growled. "Dang it, not again! Stop running off in scary places!"
