Bumblebee's explorations had taken him quickly south, as his initial location proved unfeasibly cold when night came. Cybertronians were slow to be affected by cold, and it took extreme below freezing temperatures over long periods of time to bring them down, but the nights had been getting steadily colder for the short time Bumblebee had remained in the area, and he had quickly recalled the minimal intel on the planet, which told him that to the south lay the equator, where it would be warmer.
He'd initially been dropped in the vicinity of the Northern pole, just off it enough that there were trees. Bumblebee didn't yet know them as trees, but he had come up with a designation for them, and for several other things he'd seen. He didn't know it, but his chosen labels were rapidly changed to "more fitting terms" by those receiving his reports. In the long run it wouldn't matter, because it would eventually be that the Autobots and Decepticons would both adopt the vernacular common to humans. Bumblebee didn't know that either. In fact, so far he had not seen any humans at all.
Recently, the sky had begun to seem to hang low. Bumblebee was bewildered by the clouds of Earth. There were other planets aside from Cybertron out there, and Cybertronians had visited their share of them. But Bumblebee was neither scientist nor historian, and so the sight of the clouds was mysterious to him, and he did not know what to do with the drop in temperature and the change in air pressure. It bothered him that he no longer saw the stars at night, nor the moon or even the bright sun. The wind seemed alternately to blow frantically and grow deathly still for lengthy periods. Leeched of color, the world turned an ashen gray. Bumblebee didn't like that either.
After a rapid journey to the south where the nights weren't cold enough to cause him any trouble, Bumblebee had begun to travel in something like large, almost lazy circles. There was a method to his madness. He was building a map in his head in the most efficient way he knew how. It was a necessarily slow process because he had to not only log everything of consequence he saw, but also sometimes had to spend hours or days trying to figure out what it was that he was seeing, at least to a sufficient degree that he could make a satisfactory report on it.
In some ways, his reports were breathtakingly without detail from a human's point of view. For him, trees were trees. Rocks were rocks, unless they contained some sort of mineral he could recognize and knew the use of, which they mostly didn't. Birds were birds, though really any flighted thing was thrust into a singular category, meaning he at present classified bats and moths as being the same thing... more or less. He made no distinction between herbivores and carnivores; all were eaters of organic matter to his way of thinking. To him, only humans would be distinct, and even then only because he had been explicitly warned about them, for they were determined to have language and build tools and other things which could be recognized from remote recon as "intelligent and even sentient" behaviors.
By Cybertronian standards, Bumblebee was an excellent Scout, meaning his reports were as detailed as necessary without sacrificing brevity. The reason he made no distinction between one tree and another wasn't because he couldn't see any difference, but because he could see no reason to care about that difference. To him, the difference made no difference and so wasn't worth remarking on.
It was also quickly evident to him that most things lived so briefly that making note of them as individuals was a waste of time. Better to merely identify the kind of thing that inhabited certain areas. Flying things, ground dwelling things, things that moved and things that didn't. Size was of great importance, some things averaged larger in some areas than in others. But of utmost relevance was the stone of the Earth. Cliffs, mountains, caverns. These were the things that might withstand the eons, and which might have the most tactical relevance to the Autobots.
Perhaps because of the time of year, or the location, or sheer dumb luck, Bumblebee had not yet stumbled across any bodies of water of any great size. Puddles and streams were crossed over with his hardly even noticing them. But he was about to have his first encounter with water from the sky.
Later, Bumblebee would understand that there were warning signs. A thousand signs or more, in fact. But the first time the sky cracked open with lightning and thunder and unleashed a torrent of rust-inducing fluids that came down from like an escaping and endless flood, it hit Bumblebee like a shock.
He let out an unaccustomed buzz of alarm and careened off to the left involuntarily as the reflex to flee kicked in and took over. Bumblebee had no concept at first of what was falling from the sky, or if it was dangerous or how to avoid it. Having been in vehicle mode, struggling with the utter lack of anything resembling a road on Earth, Bumblebee almost immediately slammed muffler first into a tree, fortunately without enough force to do more than dent his pride.
Ripples of terror shuddered through him as he realized what was falling on him.
Incomprehension filled every corner of his mind at what had up until this moment seemed a blatant impossibility to him: water was falling from the sky. It was raining a hideous chemical formula of hydrogen and oxygen which was practically tailor-made to interact with the metals of Bumblebee's body and armor to produce rust. Wet, cold, slow Death was raining from the sky; the solid dirt under him was being turned to a churning, sucking mud that seemed determined to establish a spark-draining grip on his wheels, a lethal trap from which he would be unable to escape.
Near-panic stricken, Bumblebee transformed and bolted, looking for a way out, for shelter. Something, anything. He'd never been drenched with water before, he'd only heard horror stories with regards to rusting from the inside out, and that was what made it all the more terrifying. Flight, trying to outrun the menace from the clouds, was the only thing he could think of.
As a Scout, Bumblebee was used to being out in the field alone, but this was a level of isolation beyond anything he had ever experienced. Not only was he alone, beyond help or helping, he had no directive to override his fear. He had no direction he was sent in, no command to carry out, nothing to take from here to there. With only the vague instruction to Scout and report back, there was nothing to tell him where he must go or what he must do. There was no one to protect, no one who could protect him. There was nothing but an all-consuming terror that welled up unchecked until it overflowed.
But there was nowhere to go.
He didn't realize it, but though Bumblebee had launched off in a straight line, he was heading into the storm instead of out of it. Panic can't be sustained long, and Bumblebee calmed down long before he found the edge of the storm. It came to him that he was not actually being hurt, but he could wind up hurting himself by a headlong flight through unfamiliar territory. He had to slow down, to settle, to get a grip on himself, to figure out what was really happening.
Finally he got a collar on his fear while crouching under the cover of some pines that kept the worst of the rain off him. From his rather soggy shelter, he watched the rain fall in blinding curtains. He heard the roar of thunder in the sky, saw the flash of lightning slashing across the swollen clouds above. The wind kicked up, tossing the rain to the side roughly as it cut across the landscape. Because of the unusual way Bumblebee's optics processed light, for a time it was darker than night to him. The clouds hung so low they seemed like they were almost touching the ground. The rain seemed to rip through the air in its determination to reach the ground, falling with sufficient force to inflict damage on the trees; damage made all the worse by the rising force of the wind.
Throughout the storm, Bumblebee sat beneath the trees and trembled.
Despite the meager shelter of the trees, Bumblebee felt the water seeping under his armor, getting into every joint, seeking to reach deeper still. But it couldn't get through to his spark, or the energon flowing through his veins. Not yet anyway. But Bumblebee knew the dangers of corrosion, and he knew he was in trouble if he didn't get dried out. He also knew that he had encountered the first urgent red flag to send back:
Danger - Water falls unexpectedly.
Not being any kind of a scientist, he nonetheless suspected that some sort of protection against rust could be developed, if it didn't exist already. Any and all Autobots who came to Earth would require it. Even if there were ways to stay out of the falling water, inevitably there would come a time when exposure to it could not be avoided. There would come a battle with the Decepticons, or something of equal importance, and there would be no option but to leave shelter and take on the threat even in the rain. Bumblebee had no illusions that the Autobots would confine themselves to a water-free portion of the planet. He knew the Autobot and Decepticon war, and he knew that if it came here it would engulf the world. That was the eventuality that he had to anticipate, even though he hoped it wouldn't come to that. Bumblebee had to assume at every step that one day the war would come to Earth.
Before long, he would realize how much water was all over Earth, and how often the rain fell on most of it. At that point, he would understand that avoidance was impossible even barring the possibility of war. Water was a fact of existence on Earth. In fact, it was essential to all forms of life on the planet. But just now, he couldn't even begin to imagine that possibility, and he wondered how the lifeforms on this planet could survive such a damaging chemical falling from the sky.
When the storm eventually cleared, Bumblebee was surprised to hear the song of the flying creatures. Chirps, whistles, caws, wails, and caterwauls filled the air around him. He heard in them the sort of buzzing that came from him when his emotions became too wild for him to form even basic speech, when he was just making wordless sounds to express himself. The birds sounded anything but distressed about the storm they had just weathered. In fact, it sounded surprisingly gleeful, as if the birds were celebrating, beginning life anew.
Still crouched in the trees, he was able to see as the birds, large and small, began to shake off their feathers and preen, and he watched in astonishment as some of them flitted from branch to branch, seeming to chase each other around, some with hostility and others looking as if they were only seeking to play. With all the noise and activity, Bumblebee was left with the impression that the rain had somehow generated more of these spritely lifeforms than had existed before, though he couldn't fathom how it was possible.
In the coming days, he received a deeper shock, as the formerly dominantly brown landscape of the area flushed bright green. He observed as the plants not only turned color, but began to expand at almost terrifying speed. Plants got taller, and spread themselves in all directions. And then suddenly there were more colors, a million little points of color, which seemed to endlessly attract bright flying creatures. Flowers and nectar eaters burst into action. Grazers plowed through the grasses, foraging on blades and leaves without apparent discrimination. Predators hunted everywhere, both day and night. Inexplicably, the rain seemed to have taken the pulse of life on Earth up, and suddenly it was actively everywhere, in a vibrant and seemingly endless array of designs.
This wasn't just the Earth.
This was life.