Chapter 3: Mangled
Meanwhile, the Nemesis
After Starscream and his crew had gone to explore the mystery ship, Megatron settled in the Command Center to wait for news. They were supposed to contact him every fifteen breems, and the warlord was... nervous. After the incident in his quarters he had been a little fidgetty but he had managed to hide it well. He was Megatron, the SLag-Maker! No one and nothing scares him! But still... he had a bad feeling, something creeping on the back of his processor. And he hated it... Not being in control was worst then anything for him.
He heard a faint sigh and shot a look at BlackArachnia, seeing the femme bent on her console and looking very concentrated. She was watching the comm and sensors until the exploration crew comes back. She seemed as cold and uninterested as ever but this could very well be a facade. The tyrant knew her well enough to know when she was putting up an act.
Like right now.
"BlackArachnia." He called her casually and the femme jumped only slightly, as if she had been deep in thoughts.
"My lord?" She sounded a slight bit nervous even if that wasn't showing on her features or the way she was holding herself.
Megatron smiled at her coldly and she had a little gulp. She never liked to be alone with the large decepticon. He could overpower her easily. But she usually manage to keep as far away from him as possible, and the others mechs too. The Decepticons soldiers were all but friendly, and they weren't gentlemechs. She always has to defend herself agaisnt harassment and taunting. ANd this situation wasn't helping the fact that she could feel... Something strange, like optics on her, mapping her frame. Not Megatron, something else... ANd the Decepticon Femme didn't liked it one bit.
"Can you pick up the exploration team on the scanners? They were due to call two breems earlier." He ordered and gave her a stern look.
The lithe techno-organic femme sighed and nodded slowly, turning back to the console she had been working on. She started to type some commands and tried to locate the energy signatures of the team. For some times there was nothing, then she did got a blip on the sensors. But they were faint and barely noticeable. Megatron had stood up and walked to her, so now he was standing right behind her and looking at the screen from above her shoulder. She said nothing but tensed and let out a little hiss.
SHe didn't had time to say anything anyway because, all of a sudden, all of the comm channels came online at the same time and released that horrible screeching noise on the bridge, and probably the entire ship. Megatron's and BlackArachnia's hands flew to their audio to cover them, and they paled. The warlord gritted his dentas and took a step backward. The sound was deafening! And laced with it, there were... screams. Wails of excruciating pain and anguish. Even the cold and ruthless Decepticon Warlord, and Megatron felt like tearing his own audio off if that doesn't stop soon.
FOr the lithe Decepticon femme it was even worst. He audio receptors were finer and more sensiti ve the most Cybertronians because of her techno-organic status and she felt like her head would explode. She screamed and fell to her knees, her optics flashing wildly, overloading with the rush of inputs. On her part she could hear every single voice in that chilling, unnatural screeching, and there were femme, mechs and sparklings melted, all screaming in pain and despair, and torment! It was like listening to an open portal right through the pits!
They were thousands! Undred of thousands!
Suddenly, it stopped as suddenly as it began and both robots stayed frozen where they were for a long moment. Megatron blinked a few times, his optics locked on the image of the mysterious, dark ship out of the viewscreen, and he frowned deeply. He knew this was the source of all this... But he would not be scared off by some ghosts! He was Megatron! He would not back away in fear! He snarled and growled deeply, balling his fists.
He wasn't going to back off! Never!
For a long moment, BlackArachnia just stayed kneeling where she was, shocked, and a small trail of energon blood was seeping from her abused audios. She felt ill all of a sudden and she stood, using the console to steady herself. She tried to push the sickness away but it only rose until she couldn't hold it anymore and she bent over the console to throw up on the recycling bin next to it. After a moment, she was kneeling there again and throwing up more and more.
After a few minutes, Megatron thought that something was not normal at all... She couldn't have had that much in her tanks could she? She was looking pained beyond words and it was... Megatron's hand slowly lifted to his mouth, he was feeling slightly sick by the sight of it... It was now looking like she was literally throwing up her innards, and there was nothing he could do to help her. She threw him a pleading, desperate look, and bent over again to throw something thicker, like bits and parts of inner circuitry and organs. Megatron took a step back, he couldn't help it...
"BlackArachnia?..." He asked in a slightly broken voice. "BlackArachnia, control yourself!"
But the femme was trying just that for the last few minutes, but she couldn't help it! SHe was being gutted alive through her own damn mouth like... SHe couldn't describe it, and it was too painful for her to think! SHe was going to offline... She knew it! SHe couldn't survive this! ALready the world was becoming dark around her and she was slipping into unconsciousness, but she was forced to throw up more and more, until she screamed at the top of her vocaliser and finally collapsed in a puddle of her own innards and energon blood.
Megatron had taken another step back when she had let out that spark-wrenching scream and collapsed. She was already taking the grey coloring of death... But it wasn't over apparently. From the corner of his optics, he caught a movement and turned this way quickly... Only to freeze in shock.
A sparkling? A little sparkling of 2-3 Vorns old of age was standing in the corner, looking at the collapse body of the poor femme. Megatron blinked again and growled something through his breath. What in the Pit was happening here? The sparling's optics left BlackArachnia's body to turn to look at Megatron nd he had a little smile, a laugh, crystalline and clear, and then he turned away and bolted running down the hallway out of the Bridge.
"Hey you! Come back here!" Megatron shouted and bolted after him, leaving the cold and grayish shell of the deceased femme behind him, There was nothing he could do for her anyway... "Kid! Come back!"
He ran down the hallway outside the Bridge and, as he was running, the lights started to go off on his path, until he was in the complete dark. The only light was coming from his optics. He stopped and felt a coldness, like a freezing wind, rush down the hallway and blow all around him with a hollow, slightly disturbing howl. He stops and looks around, trying to spot something through the darkness. It was impossible... Usually he could see in the dark but... This darkness didn't seemed natural.
He jumped.
Something had touched him! Something cold and slightly wet... There were hurried footsteps all around him, and there were whispers, some angry and raging others quiet and shy and many more terrified and pained. But all seemed to be pleading, asking for something... Or maybe trying to attract him somewhere. Megatron gritted his dentas and kept walking down the hallway, using to walls to guide himself. Sometimes his digits would bump on something wet and cold, and downright gross... He just grits his dentas and keeps moving.
Finally Megatron reaches another hallway where the lights are still on, and the transition to total darkness to normal light is abrupt. There hadn't be the gradual lighting process, no, it was more like he walked out of a puddle of black oil to see the light in full. He bliks a few times and rub his optics. Megatron looks around to see where he is, and he could tell he's close to his own quarters. He's about to take off on the direction when he feels something touch his back and shoulder from inside the darkness that still drowned the hallway he just went through.
"Frag!" He jump out of reach and look back, then paled some. "What the Pit...?"
There were... limbs sticking out of that wall of pith black like a living thing marking the end of that hallway. Scarred, torn and rotten limbs, like dead claws trying to grip him and pull him back in this... thing. Megatron back off some, fear, REAL fear this time, gripping his spark. He clech he dentas hard, almost grinding them, and he turns back to run to his own chambers, leaving the screaming hallway with its inhabitants behind. He almost tear the door out of its hinges when he arrives and bolt through the frame then slam it close on his back. Only then he lay on the panel and take his breath back.
The Mighty Megatron, Leader of the Decepticons and future ruler of Cybertron and the Universe is scarred out of his wits. And he's shaking against the panel of his own door like a sparkling afraid of the monster under his berth. It annoys him yet he can't do anything to help it at the moment... At least there's no one to see him. He rub his faceplates with slightly shaking hands and then stand up straight and walk to a cabinet on the wall, open it, and takes a high grade's cube. He gulp it down in one go. He's almost done when, through the transparent sides of the cube covering his vision for now he see something that makes him stutters and almost choke.
He let the cube fall from his trembling hand and it shatters on the ground, then he open his mouth the scream... but the darkness swallow him before a sound can get out of his vocal processor.
A moment later the room's empty and silent again.
oOo
The Bridge...
The grey body of the decepticon femme laid there unmoving for some times. The bridge was now silent as a grave and in the shadows there was... slight movements. Those movements, like a pulsation in the dark corners, started to grow, making the shadowa slowly drown the entire room, until the last spot remaining was around the already cold and lifeless for of the previously beautiful Decepticon femme.
Now, after the previous... incident... she was looking more like a skiny pile of bones and metal parts. ALl her organic parts were gone, and some of the mechanical, composing her inner organs and circuitry, were gone. A force outside of her will had... forced her to expel them, painfully... Her death hadn't been peaceful at all. But...
The shadows, moving and slithering and pulsing, that were now surrounding her, soon covered her body, and there were soon disgusting cracks, creaks and ripping sounds from within the darkness. And something moved, something more tangible and bigger than the faint shadows. After a few more moments, a low hiss, both electronic and insect-like, came from the darkness, the moving and somehow... distorted form of a creature. A familiar form though... with many limbs and a lithe body.
Red optics suddenly brightened in the dark and a louder, gurgling hiss could be heard. There were shuffling, unsteady, like someone trying to walk with a broken leg or crawling on the floor and all four. Then a sound like gripped parts and broken plates shifting into a new position. There was another feral hiss and then faster and lighter steps, then the creature apparently leapt into and wall, then to the ceiling, and crawled to the airlock that was used to connect the two ships. The door was opened, wrenched from its hinges in fact, and the arachnid creature crawled in the other ship, going to a specific location...
oOo
Somewhere in the Primus's Hand...
Megatron slowly rebooted.
the first thing he felt was his aching processor, and the second... He cursed and went fully online at the feeling of the bounds on his wrists, ankles, neck and midsection. He pulled on those fruitlessly for a moment before finally having a look around... and feeling he jaw drop in utter shock.
He wasn't in the Nemesis anymore, this much was a fact, and he may not even be in the same dimension as before for all he knew. Everything looked... distorted and mismatched, and somehow ugly and disgusting. But the other thing he noticed was his men all dangling from the same sort of bounds all around the room. All except for Lugnut and BlackArachnia... ANd then he remembered.
He was in his quarters after all that madness was unleashed on the Bridge of the Nemesis, and had a well-needed cube of High-Grader when... Lugnut was there! Yes, he remembered now, but... his loyal soldier had looked so utterly and completely different... changed... that it had shocked him and made it easy for the large mech to render him unconscious. For one thing his armor... was all black. And he meant pitch black like it was absorbing the light and not reflecting any. And the other thing... was that his face was all mangled. He had... two holes instead of his optics, filled with what looked like flames, and his lower jaw was missing. The sight shocked him to the core...
Megatron tried to control his emotions, he won't let fear overcome his processor. To take his mind away from the dire situation they were in, he looked at the other mechs. Starscream looked alright, but he was still offline for now. he didn't seemed hurt. He was dangling in the same kind of techno-organic looking alcove as Megatron, and soon he started to stir. He was waking up and soon... He screeched at the top of his vocaliser when he got a eyeful of the room they were in, making Megatron's audio ring some.
"Let me gooooo! Where the frag am I?" he screeched again and struggled. "HAAAAAAAA!"
Megatron just observed him for a few moments and then snapped, very very irritated.
"Would you just SHUT THE FRAG UP Starscream! No need to try and wake the dead..."
He wasn't sure that last comment was so wise and he bit his lower lip. Blitzwing, on the third alcove, started to come by too and the mech started by look around with a startled expression. The his angry personality took over and he started trashing wildly.
"VAT IZ THE MEANING OF THIS? LET ME GO!"
If he could he would've blasted his way out of there, but he was unable to move much just like the others. Megatron watched the both of them scream and trash about for some times, feeling like he could blow their fuses himself, but he didn't had time to do anything of the sorts. Soon the room became colder, and ice started to form on every surfaces, freezing them to the core. The two others fell silent, Blitzwing's face switching back to his cold personae, and Starscream just staring at what was happening on the ground, his jaw dropping. And they had all rights to be starring in shock and fear... Because there were a lot of... what looks like bodies, or parts of bodies, some looking fresh others ancient, some were only bones moving by themselves (or empty exostructures for the mechanical ones) and other somewhere in the middle...
The stench was... indescribable.
There was hundreds of those... Maybe thousands... Agglomerating together to start forming... something else. Something that was growing quickly, filling the room until the middle of it was completely filled with... whatever it was. An amalgam of bodies meted together but with a conscience of its own... and Megatron could tell it was an ancient, evil conscience. He had seen many evils in his long life, and most had been done by himself but, sometimes, he encountered other kinds of evil, forces that were haunting the universe.
And often destroying what they came across. He felt like this thing... was one of those ancient evils that were still roaming the universe, but... worst then anything he had ever encounters before. After a few more minutes of hearing Starscream gag and Blitzwing repeats endlessly that this wasn't happening, the entity stabilized and its 'head' if you can call it that, was overlooking IT's preys like IT was about to pounce.
A pair of blood-red eyes opened, filled with raging flammes, and fixated on Megatron, making the ancient Cybertronian shudder and recoil in his bounds, struck by a sickening fear.
A booming voice filled the room, and banshee screeches ringed at the same time but the words were clear enough for them to hear.
...Welcome... To your Nightmare...
-TBC-