Okay, this is the first of three chapters that take place during the events of Human Error. I like them all, I think, but the second one is reeaally short. The third is my favourite, but sadly that won't be posted for another two weeks :P Anyway, I really hope you readers like this chapter, I certainly enjoyed writing it!
Chapter Six: Organic
Christmas spirit was taking over Detroit. The decorations were going up, the shops were overflowing with stock and the adverts for children's toys had increased greatly on the cartoon channels. Blurr had taken to watching cartoons with Bumblebee when neither one had anything better to do and the speedster had become particularly fond of one about a super speedy hedgehog. Flash Bang watched with the mechs, and occasionally took to playing videos games with them, too. She'd relaxed since running away to Dinobot Island, which made Blurr feel rather relieved. He appreciated her efforts, he really did, he was just worried about how the whole thing was affecting her.
Flash Bang had taken to the snow, in fact, she loved it. She giggled childishly when she saw her tyre tracks and footprints behind her, and enjoyed trying to build snowmen. Unfortunately for Blurr, she was a very childish femme, and he walked into a great many snowball attacks headed by her and Bumblebee. Blurr wasn't one for taking and not giving, however, and used his speed to more or less bury his two friends in snowballs.
Sari insisted on decorating the Autobot base, having missed out on doing so the year before, and had Bulkhead help her bring in a large fir tree. She'd collected old road signs and traffic cones from around the city, as well as "borrowing" some of the large strings of lights from the shopping district, all of which she used to decorate the tree. Sari had explained to the Autobots about Christmas, telling them all about presents and Santa Claus. Obviously, the Autobots didn't really understand what the whole thing was about, but they enjoyed the feel of it al.
"So, you buy presents for your friends?" Blurr asked Sari one afternoon. Christmas was just two days away, and Blurr was helping Sari with the last of the decorations.
"Yep," the organic replied. "It's tradition. Are you gonna get anything for Flash Bang?" Blurr froze for a moment.
"Do you think I should?" Blurr asked "I don't know if she's getting anything for me or not, and I wouldn't want to disappoint her if she does."
"I think I heard her mention something to Bumblebee…" Sari replied, a cheeky tone entering her voice.
"Maybe I should, then," Blurr said, mostly to himself.
"I have the perfect idea, if you want some help," Sari said, a huge grin spreading across her face. She jumped down from her perch on the cherry picker she'd been stood on and dashed over to a thick catalogue on the table. She flicked through it and came to a stop on one page with a brightly coloured double page spread showing pictures of LCD photo frames.
"What are those?" Blurr asked.
"Photo frames," Sari explained. "You take pictures and load them onto a memory card, which you put into these and they show them in a slideshow."
Blurr used his optical zoom to get a better look at the catalogue. It did seem like a good idea, as Flash Bang would surely like something to remember her trip to Earth by. But how would she take photos for it?
"I have a camera," Sari added. "I can take some photos of the base and the city and load them on for you."
Blurr grinned as the whole thing came together before him. "That would be brilliant, Sari. Thank you."
Sari was out for the rest of the day, choosing a nice frame and taking lots of photos. She put everything together back at Sumdac Tower so as not to be discovered by Flash Bang, who had also gone to her for help with a present, not that she'd let that on to Blurr. Once she had the photos on the frame and the box nicely wrapped up, she headed back to the base, where she put the box under the tree with all the other ones she'd bought for and in the stead of the Autobots. Everything was ready, and the next day was Christmas Eve.
Flash Bang was reclining on the sofa, watching Bumblebee and Bulkhead shake their presents in order to guess what was inside them.
"What do you think we got?" Bulkhead asked.
"We could run them through Ratchet's x-ray scanner and find out!" Bumblebee suggested.
"Not if you want to end up on Santa's naughty list," Sari chided them both. They put the presents down and went to help her with the decorations, and not a single Autobot or techno-organic present noticed Bulkhead's present shake on its own.
"I just don't see how this "Santa Claus" could deliver billions of presents in one night," Ratchet said to Prowl as they entered. Flash Bang had to agree, how could any one person do such a thing?
"I can think of a way," Prowl said, activating his holo-projector and creating two images of himself. "Ho, ho, ho." Optimus entered then.
"Sound theory, Prowl," he said to the ninja bot. "I did see multiple Santas in the shopping district tonight."
Blurr came in from the med bay, having had one of his now-regular processor-checks by Ratchet. He was rubbing the side of his cranial unit where Ratchet had been poking around, helm under his free arm. The sight of Blurr without his helm on reminded Flash Bang of when he'd been put in a new protoform, but he'd had no armour at all at that point. The thought of Blurr without his armour on made Flash Bang's faceplate heat up slightly. Blurr came and sat down next to the femme, replacing his helm and turning to give her a smile.
"How are you feeling?" she asked him.
"Ratchet says my processor is coping better now," he explained. "It was probably just the massive overload of memories I got when I saw Sentinel that fried me. It's weird how vivid everything seems."
"I can't imagine," Flash Bang confessed. "It must be so peculiar, not knowing anything and then suddenly having it all back."
Blurr didn't reply, he just sat back and relaxed. He was enjoying this "Christmas spirit" feel in the air, and he was very excited to see Flash Bang's reaction to her present. He hadn't dared to tell anyone about what he'd bought, particularly Bumblebee, who he just knew would tell Flash Bang. He thanked Sari when he could for her help.
The TV kicked into life then, blazing out a Christmas tune that had Blurr tapping his heels together to the rhythm. He shot a cheeky glance at Flash Bang out of the corner of his optic, then jumped up and pulled her up with him. Flash bang yelped in surprise, but then descended into fits of giggles and began to follow Blurr's lead as he pulled her through a rather haphazard dance. Blurr laughed along with her as they moved in unison, Blurr being swift and graceful, but Flash Bang being slightly indelicate, but as she got used to the movements she grew more and more graceful. Eventually, she was swinging and pirouetting and spinning about the room with more grace than Blurr.
"You're amazing!" Blurr complimented, stunned at her performance. Flash Bang grinned at him, her faceplate heating up.
"Gearshift taught me some of his ninja techniques," she told him. "But Mercury always dreamt of me being a dancer at one of the fancy hangout spots like The Circle. So, I put the two together."
"Well, it's fantastic!" Blurr applauded her. The two went back to the sofa as the song finished. Bumblebee came up to them, holding an oil barrel.
"Oil nog?" Bumblebee offered, passing the oil barrel to Blurr before picking up another one for Flash Bang. Flash Bang took a sniff of the stuff through her olfactory sensor, wrinkling up her faceplate in suspicion before taking a small sip.
"It's good," she said, smiling and taking a bigger gulp. Blurr took a deep glug, then threw his cranial unit back and chugged the rest. Flash Bang drank the rest of hers down greedily and instantly her processor began to feel horribly fuzzy. Disturbance messed up her vision and her audio sensors were filled with white noise. Blurr was much the same, and had even slid down the sofa till his aft was hanging off it.
"What's in this stuff?" Bumblebee asked.
"I don't know, but my processor's real fuzzy," Bulkhead replied, reclining and rubbing his cranial unit.
"Yeah, it's sure got me ready for a stasis nap," Ratchet added. The Autobots all got up, one by one, and filed out to their rooms, moving at a slow and sluggish pace. Flash Bang had to pull Blurr up from his spot – half sat on, half hanging off the sofa, empty oil can slipping from his servo as he slumped.
"What, no waiting up for Santa?" Sari asked surprised. "You guys are a bunch of party poopers."
"There's still tomorrow, Sari," Optimus said. "Oh, and, er, merry Christmas," he added as he yawned.
"Merry Christmas, big guy," Sari replied. "And pleasant dreams."
Flash Bang had Blurr's arm slung over her shoulder, though she was feeling like she needed some support, as well. She struggled with the release for the door, pawing at the wall until she found it. She helped Blurr to his berth, after which she managed to fall on top of him.
"Whoa!" she cried, falling to lie on his chest. "Sorry, Blurr." Her faceplates heated up as Blurr sat up and helped her back to her feet.
"Stay here," he slurred, a slight, cheeky grin on his face. To a human he would have looked very drunk.
"If I fall over before getting to the door, then okay," she replied, turning on her heel strut and taking a very wobbly step, after which she stumbled to one side, grabbing onto a crate for support.
"I count that as a fall," Blurr laughed.
"It was a stumble," Flash Bang retorted. Blurr insisted it was the same thing but she shook her cranial unit and wobbled further on, but then she completely collapsed and didn't get back up. Blurr had fallen into recharge by then and so didn't react.
A small noise escaped Blurr's mouth as he came to. It wasn't quite a moan, but not quite a grumble, either. He rolled over on the berth, scratching at the spot where Ratchet looked into his processor and brushing a hand through his hair.
That's when he woke up with a fright.
"What the?" he yelled, tugging at the soft blue fuzz on top of his head. As he did so, he noticed his arm – long, slender, pale flesh wrapped in a blue zip-up sports jacket. His legs were much the same and clothed in light blue skinny jeans with blue running shoes. He rolled off the berth in a panic, winded by the impact as his small human body landed with a thump on the ground so far below. He ran over to a shiny piece of metal on the wall and looked at himself. He screamed as he saw his angular white face, blue eyes and his blue hair with a dark blue streak where his fin should be.
"Blurr…?" he heard Flash Bang moan. He'd not realised that she'd collapsed on his floor. He looked over to her, but, like him, she wasn't a robot anymore. But when he saw her, he was stunned. She was a young woman with brown hair in tight ringlets. Her skin was a healthy golden-brown, as if she'd been sitting in the sun on a summer afternoon. She was dressed in a black vest under an open red and black lumberjack shirt with a pair of black skinny jeans and skateboarding shoes. When she looked up at Blurr, he saw she had emerald green eyes and heart shaped face.
"What happened to you?" she asked, shocked at her friend's appearance.
"I could ask you the same thing," Blurr replied, running over to her and pulling her up from the floor. His speed was gone, and because of that he felt oddly vulnerable. As he pulled her up, he realised just how weak this little body was, and actually had to lean back to get her off the ground. Flash Bang was similarly troubled, having lost the grace she'd had the night before, although, unbeknownst to her, that was from sleeping on the hard floor.
"We need to go find the others," Flash Bang declared. Blurr nodded and turned to the door.
The two went out into the corridor, where the first thing they saw was humanised Bumblebee charge headlong into humanised Bulkhead. Ratchet came pottering out of his room, now an old man. Last to appear was Optimus, who had become a middle-aged man with greying hair and blue eyes.
"Prime?" Bumblebee asked incredulously. "Look at you! You're hideous!"
"We're all hideous!" Bulkhead added, staring at his enormous podgy hands. "We're… people!"
"There must be a rational explanation for this!" Prime declared. The human-Autobots charged into Ratchet's med bay, where Ratchet scanned Prime, brining up a scan of a perfectly human body.
"There… is no rational explanation for this," he declared. "We've become one hundred percent human!"
"Where's Prowl?" Optimus asked.
"He's not in his room, I checked," Ratchet replied.
The group went outside, where they found Prowl stood with his hand out to the snow. Blurr looked over Flash Bang's human form again. She didn't look bad, for a human. In fact, he thought she was really rather pretty.
"We need to get to Sumdac Tower," Optimus said after they'd spoken briefly with Prowl. "Auto… men? Transform, uh, roll- ah. Let's just go."
The group walked through Detroit, wondering what in Primus' name had happened to them. Blurr was amazed by how different everything seemed from the far smaller height, but his thoughts quickly turned to Flash Bang when he felt her shiver by his side.
"Are you okay?" he asked her as she rubbed her arms.
"I'm… I'm cold," she told him. Blurr gave her a worried look and then took off his jacket, revealing a plain black sports shirt underneath. He threw it over her shoulders and rubbed her back as she pulled it over herself.
"Thank you, Blurr," she said. "But what about you?"
"I'm okay for now," he lied, holding back a shiver. A car drove past then, spraying the lot of them in slushy snow.
"Watch it!" Ratchet yelled as the lot of them gasped and shook the snow out of their hair. "How do humans survive in these soft, fleshy bodies?"
"I don't know," Bulkhead replied. "But my fuel tank's making a funny noise." He rubbed his stomach as he said this.
"Perhaps our human bodies need some refuelling?" Optimus suggested, looking over to a nearby Burger Bot restaurant.
"I always wanted to chow down!" Bulkhead cheered, running over to the restaurant in glee.
Inside of the Burger Bot – somewhere where none of them had been before – it was nice and warm. Flash Bang returned Blurr's jacket as they sat down at two adjacent tables, waiting for the waitress. The restaurant was coloured in bright shades of gaudy orange and a far mellower pale yellow. It wasn't unpleasant, just startling. Blurr felt himself sliding off the cheap leather seats as they waited for service.
"What can I get ya, sugar?" the waitress asked once she finally came over. Both Blurr and Flash Bang were getting a little impatient; they didn't like this "hunger" thing.
"Um… I'll have one of those, please," Blurr said hesitantly, pointing to a burger being eaten by a small boy on another table.
"One quarter pounder for the jock," she said as she wrote down the order. "What about you, lumberjack?" she asked Flash Bang in reference to her shirt. Flash Bang looked up from the menu card she'd been reading.
"Err, a large fries?"
"Good choice," the waitress replied as she wrote it down. She quickly moved on to Ratchet, who was sat on Blurr and Flash Bang's table, before moving onto the next table with the other four "Automen" on it. Blurr shot a quick glance over at Flash Bang, who had discovered that breathing on the window made it cloud up. She was curiously looking at the condensation, running a finger through it and frowning when it became wet. Blurr smiled whimsically; she was such a curious femme!
The food came before long, and Blurr was disgusted to see Bulkhead put away three burgers before he'd taken three bites of his own. The food wasn't great, but none of them had anything to compare it to and ate it up anyway. Flash Bang enjoyed the fries and ate them up quickly, but was a little annoyed when she realised she hadn't had as much to eat as everyone else.
"Did anyone ever stop to think about how we're going to pay for this?" Blurr asked Flash Bang after swallowing another mouthful of burger. Flash Bang just shrugged and began to eye Blurr's burger.
"Any good?" she asked. Blurr followed her gaze to the burger and shrugged in reply.
"Take it or leave it, but I'm not exactly a human food connoisseur," he replied. The two looked up suddenly as Bulkhead stood up and charged through a door with a very basic drawing of a human male on it.
"Uhh, Ratchet," Bumblebee said, "you're the doctor, maybe you should go check on him?"
"Oh no, I am not going in there!" the old medic replied. His attention turned to Prowl, shortly after, when he noticed the ninja playing peek-a-boo with a baby sat at another nearby table.
"Here I am," the ninja said, covering his eyes. "Peek-a-boo." The baby squealed in delight as Prowl repeated the gesture to her a few more times.
"You think she'd be laughing if you were a giant robot?" Ratchet demanded.
"That's the point," Prowl said. "Being human has given me a greater understanding of what this holiday season means. I'm… thankful to just be alive in any form."
"I'm thankful, too, let me tell you," Bulkhead declared as he reappeared and sat down to resume his meal. He suddenly dropped his burger as the building suddenly shook with terrible force, throwing his hands into the air and saying, "Wasn't me." The group dashed back outside into the cold, and all any of them could do was stare as the sky was filled with Decepticons.
"Oh, we are so slagged," Flash Bang mumbled to Blurr. The Decpeticons transformed one by one in front of them and began to tear up the city mercilessly. Optimus and his team quickly grew angry at what was playing out before them, but all Blurr could do was stare in horror as Shockwave landed on the asphalt.
"No…" he whispered. "He's gonna kill me!"
"Blurr, calm down," Flash bang cried, grabbing his shoulders and forcing him to look at her. "You'll be fine! He' doesn't know you've become human; as far as we know, he doesn't even know you're here."
The group dropped to the ground as a nearby tower block fell under Shockwave's fire, rippling the air with the force of the subsequent explosion. The lower half of the building remained intact, but was quickly being devoured by the hungry flames. Fire trucks were on the scene in minutes, but Prime and his team were already in action.
"Bulkhead, Bumblebee, suppress that fire!" Optimus commanded. The two instantly took to grabbing a fire hose from a case on the wall and blasting the fire with it. Ratchet and Prime began helping a woman who was laid out on the floor, choking badly on the smoke. They picked her up between them and helped her outside. On the way, however, they heard someone calling for help.
"Help, Mommy!" a fearful young voice called out.
"My son! He's upstairs!" Prowl was off before she could say anymore. Blurr and Flash Bang followed him up with every intention of helping him with the boy, but a silhouetted figure in one of the other rooms grabbed their attention.
"Sir, you have to get out!" Blurr cried once he noticed the man had nothing stopping him from leaving. The man didn't move, however, he just stood where he was, staring out of the window at the carnage below. Blurr moved towards him, Flash Bang staying by the doorway. As Blurr approached, he was wary of the flames trying to scorch him, and danced away from them from time to time when they spat out. The man didn't move as such, he just stood as if there was nothing at all to worry about and all he cared for was the sunny blue sky.
"Sir…?" Blurr asked. All of a sudden he had a terrible feeling about what he saw before him. The man turned slowly, far too slowly to be real. When he looked at Blurr, all the speedster saw was a single red eye flashing cruelly at him.
"Hello, Blurr," said the humanised Shockwave. Blurr didn't need anymore encouragement than that to turn tail, grab Flash Bang and run, and all the while one thought chased through his mind.
"Shockwave crushed me."
Revelations~ LOL!
So, Blurr seems to know a little more of what's what now, so hopefully things'll get easier for him and Flash Bang. We've still got the human form problem, however.
Thank you to Jaacs McHenry for adding the story to your watch! Much appreciated!
Anyway, stay tuned for the next update in a week or so, and please review!
:D