Mine!
When Terrorsaur died, he'd never expected the Pit to be run by bureaucrats. It made a kind of twisted sense when he thought about it, which he had time to do at length in the following run-around of filling out paperwork. Who knew that death required so much red tape?
"No, no, look, I died on a planet with two moons. TWO moons. It wasn't Earth!" Waving his hands, the red Predacon tried to get this important point across to the heavily armored Decepticon sitting behind the desk.
Red optics peered officiously at him. "Well, your entry SAYS Earth," the robot said with a certain stuffiness only a career bureaucrat could pull out of his aft. "If your place of death says Earth, then that's where you died."
"I KNOW that's what it says," Terrorsaur gritted out. "That's why I'm here talking to you. I'm supposed to get the entry changed because it's wrong. So will you PLEASE just change the planet's name to the right one? I filled out Forms 180B through 360A, got two approval signatures from the Office of Fatal Registrations, and all you need to do is correct the name." Then he'd have to start all over again to correct his time of death, which was ridiculous enough that the politician who'd first met him at the entrance to the Pit had pulled him out of the line to yell at him. As if it was HIS fault this place had somehow screwed up the details of his death?
The Decepticon sighed as if the weight of the world was upon his shoulders. "Let me see the forms."
It was Terrorsaur's turn to sigh. With a resigned nod, he began taking sheaves of paper out of subspace. Actual paper, piles and piles of actual paper, the kind that he'd had to fill out with a real stylus, all the while cursing because genuine paper had a nasty habit of combusting. The Pit's slang name wasn't the Inferno for nothing. He'd nearly crisped a wing when Form 230R burst into flames in the heat, and now he beat at a corner of the growing pile on the desk as it began to smolder. "That's all of it, unless you need to see the forms I had to fill out to get these forms," he grunted, wiping ash off his hands. The desk, sized as it was for a Decepticon, seemed to groan a plea for mercy at that, and the small Predacon smirked mirthlessly.
"This will do for now," the Decepticon said, and Terrorsaur settled into an outsized, uncomfortable chair to wait while the larger Cybertronian dug into the papers.
He knew the drill. The bureaucrat would read through the pile, only to point out that Form #whatever had been forgotten or burnt up somewhere along the line, so he'd have to go back to the Office of Screw-ups and Confusion--it probably had another name, but that's what he'd decided to call it--to start the whole process over again. He'd request another form from the evil old computer at the office, which had long ago gained sentience and dedicated itself to indiscriminately hating everyone who tried to use it for its intended purpose. It would misdirect, misprint, or otherwise mess with his mind and the forms he had to have in order to request the next set of forms for what he needed to do. By the time he got his hands on the right forms, the politician who ran the Office of Misfits--or Fatal Registrations, to those who didn't have to deal with the people working there--would descend on him and demand to know why he hadn't properly registered yet. After explaining, yet again, that he'd been told he couldn't register until his entries were correct and was henceforth ordered to correct said entries, the politician would add another time penalty to his record and threaten dire consequences if Terrorsaur didn't hurry up the process.
Terrorsaur wasn't entirely sure how one penalized a dead 'bot, but he already knew that while his fists passed through anyone he tried to attack here, they could damage him quite easily. That didn't seem fair in the least to him, but, well, he WAS dead, and this WAS the Pit. The life of a Predacon wasn't conducive to an afterlife of fluffy clouds and harps. It was in his interest to register as quickly as possible, because no matter how bad he thought it was, there was always a form--to be filled out and filed in triplicate, probably--to make it worse.
Half the time he wondered if he hadn't already entered the Pit, and this was his eternal punishment: paperwork forevermore.
He was jolted out of his thoughts by a loud thud. "Looking up, Terrorsaur blinked at the slip of paper being held out to him by the Decepticon. "You're done? That was quick." Too quick; bad sign.
"No," the desk-jockey said, and the Predacon flinched as he took the paper. "You need to take this to the Directory Operator. I can't find the planet you died on." He frowned, dull puzzlement in uncaring optics. "Are you sure it wasn't Earth?"
"Two moons," Terrorsaur insisted, holding up two fingers as he read over the paper. "Directory Operator…is that in this building, or do I have to go back to the Office of Mis--uh, Fatal Registrations?"
"Fourth floor, Office of Fatal Registrations."
"Oh, joy."
Somehow, half an eon later--don't ever ask someone standing in line to measure time--this all led to Terrorsaur being dragged by the old, familiar evil politician to a higher-ranking, unfamiliar, and probably eviler, politician. This politician looked like the first, only more so. All of the Pit's employees/torturers all had an interchangeable air of bureaucratic drudgery hanging over their features. The only way Terrorsaur could tell who was in charge was by the level of apathy: if someone was actively getting in his way, it was an authority figure and had probably been a politician before it died. That would have meant he wanted to avoid them, anyway, but in the Pit he rarely had that liberty.
It had occurred to him, as he was being dragged through never-ending dreary corridors, that this higher authority might just beat the slag out of him instead of slapping yet another penalty onto his record. Just because he couldn't touch anyone here didn't mean THEY couldn't hurt HIM, and pain didn't stop being pain after death.
So he started talking the moment he saw the higher-up. This one was a Maximal, which at least proved that the love of redundant paperwork was universal among Cybertron's factions. "This is NOT my fault," Terrorsaur protested before anyone could start in on him. "Nobody knows what the name of the planet I died on was, but I didn't die on Earth! And obviously I couldn't have died before I was sparked, but every time I apply to change the date, the Powers That Be revert it back to the original entry. Take it up with THEM if you have a problem!" He shot nervous glances around the room, automatically looking for an escape. Unless he counted hiding underneath the desk, escape was a dead end. He began to feel the way he had when Megatron had cornered him: full of fear-energy with nowhere to run, and his voice climbed to an unpleasantly irritating screech. "My cause of death entry has been corrected, hasn't it? Isn't that enough?!"
"The final two entries have been put on hold," the Maximal interrupted his hysteria. "Your case is pending. Until then, however, we have to find something to do with you." Terrorsaur eyed him warily, not liking the look of the stack of papers now being held out to him. He'd had to read through too many stacks that looked just like that to assume it was good, or even mediocre, news. "This is your new assignment," the Maximal said as the red pterodactyl took it and began to flip through the pages.
Terrorsaur looked up, optics wide, only a couple paragraphs in. "You're not serious!"
The whole room began to fade from sight, but the politician leaned forward and smiled unhelpfully. "We don't joke. Don't worry, Terrorsaur. This is only until your registration clears." As Terrorsaur disappeared from the Pit, he was almost certain he heard ominous laughter follow that statement.
Somehow, it didn't fill him with confidence that the assignment was temporary.
He reappeared back in a place he'd never expected to see again, much less how he saw it now. He felt so…small. "This is ridiculous," he muttered to Waspinator, settling down on his fellow Predacon's left shoulder to read his assignment. Being dead, of course, he didn't expect an answer to his grumbling.
Which is why he shrieked and nearly fell over backward when someone did: "I know what you mean," Airazor said from her perch on the wasp's other shoulder. She watched with no little amusement as the dead red Predacon flailed his arms and accidentally created a paper blizzard when he lost his grip. Transforming from beast mode, she leapt up to crouch on Waspinator's head so she could look down on the show.
Terrorsaur's shrieking fit only got worse when he saw who it was who was talking. "What are you doing here?!" he screamed, then sputtered and cut himself off with another question. "You can SEE me?" He blinked. "You're as small as me. You're…dead?"
"Brilliant deduction. Dying didn't make you any quicker on the uptake, I see." The Maximals blue optics sparkled with mischief.
He almost launched himself at her for an old-fashioned tackle--crude was often effective, as he'd found in the past with this particular flyer--but caught himself at the last second. He didn't know why Airazor was here, but it was a fair bet that if she was dead, she was supposed to be. If so, he was better off finding out what he was supposed to be doing before he screwed it up and was buried in yet more paperwork for his foolishness. Standing in lines for eternity on end had finally taught him to rein in his impetuousness. "I," he announced, "am going to finish reading. You, go over on his other shoulder and leave me alone." With that, he proceeded to ignore her and went about gathering his papers.
She didn't obey him, but she did restrain the next few comments that flew to mind. She grinned instead and sat down more comfortably, crossing her legs primly as she watched Terrorsaur find a new seat on the green-yellow Predacon's shoulder. He sat with his back against Waspinator's neck this time, legs stretched out in front of him. This had the side effect of letting Airazor read along with him, but he didn't seem concerned by that. A couple paragraphs into the document, and she understood why.
He must have been waiting for her stifled moan as the headache bloomed. "Believe it or not, you get used to it," Terrorsaur said, a smirk in his voice. "I can almost translate this into something readable by now."
Staring down at the back of his head, she decided that he really wasn't kidding. She gave it another try, but whatever language had been used to write that paper used words in ways she'd never seen before. Her disgusted snort was met with a scratchy chuckle, but Terrorsaur didn't look up. She left him to his reading and looked around.
Waspinator dozed beneath her feet, the sporadic flutter of his wings the only motion in the room. For some reason, he'd fallen into recharge slumped backward in a chair, arms draped over the back and head resting between them. He'd been asleep when she arrived, but that would change soon if her sense of time was correct. Well, if this Predacon woke with the sun. She didn't have much of an idea of what Predacon base life was like, but if it was anything like the Maximal base, the day shift started at dawn.
She frowned thoughtfully at the green-yellow Predacon's room. While not as disorganized as she'd expected, evidence of a half a dozen projects lay abandoned in the corners. The rest of the room had layers of dust and grime she also hadn't expected. From the looks of things, Waspinator not only didn't clean the place, but didn't spend much time here at all. Why?
The curious question came out before she could stop herself, and Terrorsaur looked up at her. "'Why' what?" he asked without much interest, returning most of his attention to the papers.
What could it hurt to ask? "Why is this place such a dump? It's not like the rest of your base is clean, but I'd kind of expected something better from your quarters." She gestured at the dusty floor. Except for footsteps leading to the chair and some ripples from air currents from Waspinator's wings, it covered everything. "This looks abandoned."
He looked up long enough to give the place a glance. "Probably is. We used to share Scorpinok's room when we recharged." He caught her disbelieving stare and shrugged. "He had the biggest room. One of us was always on duty, anyway, and there's safety in numbers when it comes to avoiding Tarantulas' newest gadget testing. He used to love trapping Waspinator's berth." Terrorsaur shook his head in remembered irritation. "It was safer to sleep on the floor with Scorpinok around than try your luck by yourself." She tried to imagine that, and shuddered when she could.
The last page turned over finally, and the red Predacon stood up, folding his arms and tilting his head to look at her. "So, how did a Maximal like you pull this slag assignment? Are you in bureaucratic limbo, too?"
"Sort of," Airazor said after a moment's thought. "They told Tigatron and me that we're not dead yet, so we can't get into the Matrix."
"Wait, what?!" His boosters kicked in, and he flew up to give her a once-over. She looked just like him: small and slightly transparent. "You're not dead?"
She shook her head. "Not according to the Autobot who sent me here."
"How do you…not die?" He held up a hand suddenly. "And don't tell me you're another Starscream, because the only reason he's still wandering around is because somebody in the Pit lost all his information, and I don't think the Matrix would mess up like that."
That earned him a blank stare, but Airazor apparently decided she didn't want to know. "It has something to do with the alien plant that destroyed my body--" His flat look cut her off. "What? What's wrong?"
"Alien plant."
"Yes. It sucked me and Tigatron up and--"
The flat look, if possible, got flatter. "Maximal, why don't you pretend that you're talking to someone who has no idea what slag has been happening in the Beast Wars since he died? In fact, don't pretend."
"Ah." The bird blinked at him for a long moment, collecting her thoughts. "Right. Well, when the Transwarp blast hit the planet and--Where's Scorpinok, if I may ask?"
Terrorsaur glanced around the room. "Somewhere in the base, I would guess, probably surgically attached to Megatron's aft. What does he have to do with anything? Did he grow the alien plant?" The last came out with a hint of a sneer. As unexpected as the Beast Wars had been, an alien plant that sucked up Maximals and didn't quite kill them pushed the limits of credibility.
Airazor cocked her head. "No, he died when you did."
"He…did?" He stared at her, mouth drooping slightly open as his mind wrapped around that tidbit of information. It was like finding a toy at the bottom of a box of arsenic-laced cereal; good news, but told a little late to celebrate over. He wondered vaguely if Scorpinok had fit into the bureaucracy of the Pit--it seemed like his kind of place--or if he was put through the paperwork run-around, too. While it didn't upset him at all that the smarmy scorpion was dead--huzzah!--it DID upset him that there was the possibility of running into him in the afterlife. Actually running into ANYONE he knew in the afterlife gave him fits of paranoia. Fighting old enemies for an eternity didn't quite sound as bad as paperwork, but Airazor was, uh, living proof that it certainly wasn't paradise. He felt like a big target had been painted on his backside. "Are there any OTHER dead 'bots I should know about?"
"…yes."
"Ugh. Take this slow. I think you might break my mind."
She smiled sweetly and let the straight line go for the moment. There would be time enough later to humiliate him. After all, no one in the Matrix had ever said that the Good Conscience had to play fair when fighting for a spark's redemption…
.
.
I had a poem for a placehold for this idea. The ficlet brings demons and angels into a much more Beast Wars-canon plot. Something about the poem still makes me grin.
Basically, it's the idea that Waspinator almost dies every time he gets blown apart in battle. Therefore, Good and Evil converge on his spark, both sides wanting him. It has to do with how Waspinator never quite seems as evil as all the other Predacons, and how in the end he defies Megatron. So who gets his spark? The demons have a natural claim. Well, he plays blackjack with the Devil and wins his spark back, but his spark is, after all, a Predacon's. The angels look at this offering of a dark soul and are charmed. He is a loveable little Pred, wandering all over Earth and creating humor where none really belongs. This is high entertainment for Good and Evil, of course. When he dies, they want him, and nobody can decide who really gets him, so they let him go for just one more day, and into the CR Tank he goes.
Slaggit, he's just cute like that.