Bumblebee's first night on Earth was an exercise in disorientation.
The distance to Earth was incredible, and up until recently thought to be insurmountable. But it wasn't the journey to get there that upset Bumblebee, it was the shock of the difference between the world he'd left and the one he'd arrived on. The buildings and roads that had made up the entirety of Bumblebee's home-world were nowhere in evidence. Instead, there were things he couldn't describe, and had no name for. Big things, small things, noisy things and quiet things. Things of shapes he'd never seen, and in a variety of colors that were as varied as they were dazzling. Even the sky was a different color.
He'd arrived at night, and one of the first things he managed to absorb enough to understand was the fact that the stars were different. Not only were they brighter, they were placed differently. He'd known that would be the case, space travel wasn't new for Cybertronians. But knowing how something would be and experiencing that reality were -in this case literally- worlds apart. It was one thing to know the stars would be different, that their positioning would look so different from this angle that he would be virtually unable to pinpoint his home-world by means of the stars, even given his not unusual ability to picture in his head how the same stars would look from another angle. But it was quite thoroughly another to actually look up and see that.
Most Cybertronians traveled by GPS and other tracking systems. But those could be picked up by sensors looking for such things. Scouts -and indeed anyone who traveled near or behind enemy lines for long- learned to travel and mark their location by the stars. Landmarks were too subject to destruction to be trusted. But stars were slow to change. Bumblebee hadn't lived long enough to see the stars change significantly. He wondered for the first time if anyone had.
It was not idly that he gazed at these strange stars. From now until further notice, Bumblebee would be traveling an unknown world. Strange as they looked to him, the fact that there were stars he could see meant that he would never be lost. The stars would always tell him where he was. And -somewhere out there in the depth of space- there was Cybertron, and what remained of her people. So long as there were stars in the sky, he would never be entirely cut off from home, no matter how far it seemed.
And right now it seemed very, very far away.
What was most immediately extraordinary of all to him was how the ground felt. It wasn't just that it was made of tiny loose particles instead of something solid either. Bumblebee had walked enough sites of bombings to be used to stuff so finely broken it was little more than dust underfoot. It was the way the planet seemed to almost throb. It wasn't a thing he felt physically, but he could sense it right down to the core of his being. It was like a pulse somewhere beneath the surface, almost like the way the beat of another's spark felt if you were unfortunate enough to have experienced it. Only there wasn't anything terrible about it really, though everything was a little scary right now because it was all new and strange. It finally hit him: the planet felt alive.
Until that realization struck home, Bumblebee hadn't fully comprehended just how deathly sick Cybertron had become. He'd never had another planet to compare it to. Not really. But now he did, and as the life beat of Earth pulsed beneath him, he felt suddenly smaller and weaker than he'd ever been. Cybertron was home. He'd known he might never see it again. Known it was dying. Yet still it both deeply hurt and inexplicably excited him to know that he was standing on a planet that was very much alive, that had perhaps eons of life left in her. The world was so alien to him, he couldn't imagine spending the rest of his life here. But he at last understood consciously what he had known without realizing it all along; not only was he unlikely to see Cybertron again, there really wasn't anything to go back to anyway. Cybertron. His home. Gone forever.
It was a sobering insight, and it made this world seem all the more menacing and strange.
The information that could be obtained remotely about the planet was disturbingly limited. He had a few surface-level facts, and knew what the specific lifeforms to which the planet belonged looked like, but what little he knew was nowhere near enough.
Turning his face from the sky, Bumblebee looked about him with an amount of wonder and curiosity, but primarily a coldly gnawing fear, the same that slithered through the energon in his veins whenever he was sent on a mission with too little intel. Danger lurked in every shadow, around every corner in those missions, because he never knew what he'd meet and when. But this was an immeasurable number of times worse, because danger could be staring him in the face and he wouldn't know it until it was too late. Anything and everything could be a threat, and he had no way of knowing one way or the other unless and until he investigated.
Bumblebee had arrived in an area that was clear but sheltered by great stones that reminded him of the bedrock of Cybertron, what lay underneath all those streets and buildings. Some of the stones were smaller than one of the joints on the fingers of his hands, others stood several times taller than he did, towering over everything and casting black shadows across the landscape, even blacker in the night. Cliffs and canyons and mountains lay behind and around him. In front of him was something he had difficulty comprehending at first. Organic poles taller than he was spread branches from which hung what seemed to be strings and strands of dark green organic matter.
It was the first time Bumblebee had ever seen trees, and he had no name for them.
There were many things for which he had no name, and he quickly saw that it would be insufficient to simply identify these things as "organic" because everything here seemed to be except the rocks, and maybe even those. He'd never seen so much organic matter all in one place, a thick tangle of bright and dark interwoven, all without aid of technology. Cybertronians themselves were bio-mechanical, which to them meant something both organic and inorganic, both machine and living being. While it was possible to build purely mechanical devices, it had never occurred to Bumblebee that a thing could be entirely the opposite. No metal parts, no nuts or bolts or wires held the things here together. Instead, they were built of and kept in form by mysteries means the nature of which escaped Bumblebee.
And so many things were so small. Smaller than a minicon. Smaller than a scraplet. So small that he had trouble seeing some of them. Some might be smaller still, like the components that came together to make energon, which could only be seen with the aid of manufactured devices designed specifically for looking at things tinier than even the most powerful optics could make out.
And Bumblebee had good optics. All Scouts had excellent vision, second only to that of snipers. It was necessary for their job. However, unlike any other soldiers, Scouts had the ability to not only record what they saw and play it back for themselves later, they had an internal system that was able to extrapolate details from what they saw and make educated guesses, and give a playback that was essentially in third person. It was useful stuff, but kind of disquieting the first time you did it.
Bumblebee would not only memorize what he saw and offer written reports, but would send back snapshots or motion capture of what he'd seen, allowing insight to those on Cybertron that was beyond what he could merely write. It would be beyond what he guessed and supposed and theorized, and above what he thought was important to share. It would be literally everything he knew, even the stuff he knew without knowing, because things would be captured that he wouldn't necessarily consciously remember, or that he didn't realized the significance of.
Noises, loud and quiet, made their assault on his senses. Cybertron was actually a pretty quiet place. Outside of battlefields, the cities lay like graveyards, without residents or machinery to generate any sound. In a few, you could hear the scuttling of scraplets or insecticons if you paid close enough attention. But otherwise it was just the keening wind, and the indescribable essence of sound that came with both night and day. Here though, there was noise. So much noise Bumblebee found himself slightly stunned, standing still and trying to sort it all out. There were so many sounds that at first it seemed like a single deafening voice just shouting mindlessly into the cosmos.
He did not know birds or insects. He did not know the sound of wind fluting through the trees, did not know the creaking of wood as the air buffeted against sturdy trunks and swaying branches. He knew the sound of dust rattling in the air when it was picked up by a breeze, but did not know the sound of tiny pebbles against great boulders as the wind shoved them along. Beneath it all was the sound of the Earth itself, inaudible to most of the creatures native to its surface, but at first overwhelming to Bumblebee not because of its volume, but the sheer power it conveyed. The Earth itself seemed to be a great beast upon which myriad other creatures scurried, slithered and flew.
Gradually, he began to filter out the noises. He soon gave up trying to guess what they were, but he did a first impression assessment of whether the sounds were sudden, sharp and infrequent or seemingly continuous. Some of the noises he determined were just the ambient sounds of this place, a kind of tuneless background music that was unceasing and eternal. Nothing to be concerned about. But so many more noises -a truly, deeply alarming number of them in fact- had to go into a mental bin marked "I Have No Idea What That Is."
Most things seemed small, somewhat slow and probably harmless. But Bumblebee knew only too well that the most dangerous thing to a Cybertronian -Autobot or Decepticon- was a scraplet, and scraplets were tiny. Small didn't mean harmless, it only meant harder to notice and keep track of.
An ululant sound, like the sharp wail of worn brake pads, pierced the night and Bumblebee flinched, crouching instinctively as he sought to pinpoint the source of the sound. The cry rose, fell, rose again, and finally faded away until only its echo remained in the rimrocks. It was answered by a shriek that filled the air like a shrill rebuke, a sound that seemed set to consume the night, then cut off sharply. The high howling sound repeated like a challenge, Bumblebee felt it rumbling in his chest, bouncing off the empty spaces under his armor, but this time when it faded it went unanswered.
Rather than immediately mobilize, Bumblebee decided to stay put for the moment. He needed to listen to the night, and learn what it was before going out in it. Not that there was any guarantee of safety if he stayed put. But with so little security anywhere, he clung to the imaginary bit of safety in this falsely familiar location where he'd started as if it were a life-raft.
This was a long-term assignment, and nobody would be asking for hourly progress reports. In fact, he wasn't entirely convinced anyone would receive his reports at all. He had no means of telling if the reports he sent out ever reached their destination. There were ways to establish true communication between Earth and Cybertron, but the resource cost was beyond unfeasible; such a setup would be absolutely indefensible. And the last thing the Autobots needed was the Decepticons zeroing in on Earth, especially since they only had one lone Scout on the whole of the planet just now.
With the quiet patience of the experienced Scout, Bumblebee sat and waited for the dawn, listening to and recording every sound he heard in the night, watching the moon traverse across the sky and eventually drop from view, feeling the wind as it brushed past him on its way across the planet. Gradually he began to categorize the things he saw and heard, to file them away in his memory for later recollection as needed. And then out of the grayness came the first fiery rays of dawn, a slash of color across the sky so bright and unexpected that for a moment Bumblebee paid attention to nothing else.
In fairness, there wasn't a lot else to pay attention to, for all the nocturnal creatures had gone silent, and the diurnal ones had yet to awake. Even the wind seemed to be holding its breath as the night gave up its starry throne to the brightness of the coming day.
There were sunrises on Cybertron, but not that looked like this. The skyline turned a flaming yellow, casting the landscape below into deeper black because the sky made optics adjust to an increase in light even though the ground was still the domain of the shadows. But not for long. As Bumblebee watched, a searing orange fanned out from the center of yellow, which seemed to grow by the moment, the prelude to the rising of the sun. The night in the sky fled before the dawn, momentarily robbing the ceiling of the world of its color, turning it an empty white-gray. The orange glow continued to spread, and cracks and streaks of other colors started to cut across the sky.
And then there was the sun, so bright at the center that Bumblebee's optics couldn't adjust enough to see it without going totally blind to all that surrounded it. The Earth's sun was brighter than anything Bumblebee had ever looked at, even the sun of Cybertron. It was brighter than an explosion, brighter than a star, brighter than a spark. So bright Bumblebee had trouble even believing it was real.
The creatures of the Earth must've let out a collective breath, for suddenly chirps and whistles and cries of all new kinds filled the air, which was moving again. The trees rustled with the life that was in them, and the breath of the new day that was washing over them.
And then a flood of colors came tearing loose, as if the sun itself had held them overnight to protect them from the darkness. The sun blazed up from the horizon as a thousand shades of green and brown came into the organic world surrounding Bumblebee. Flashes of red and blue, so small they were hard to see, suddenly flitted from one patch of green to another. Yellow stood out in the green, blended in the brown. Bits of white glowed from behind the shadows. Purple and pink struck out across the sky before it washed blue with the completion of the sunrise.
Struck dumb with awe, Bumblebee wondered if sunrise on Cybertron had ever been like that. He couldn't see how his kind had ever found the time for war if Cybertron had been this way. It was so vibrantly alive, everywhere you looked, it was hard to believe death even existed at all.
Yet Bumblebee knew it did. He had recorded such the night before. Small creatures catching other small creatures, killing and consuming them in the manner of scraplets. It had chilled him to watch. Beneath the beauty, Earth was a violent place. He must not forget that.
But in the afterglow of the alien sunrise, for a moment he found that he felt at peace, and he couldn't find it in himself to believe it. To him, peace was as foreign as the Earth itself.