Chapter 4

Agony.

That was all Sari had known since she had awoken in a sea of white flames that licked and devoured whatever was left of her body. She had screamed in the beginning only for the flames to enter her throat and burn out her lungs. Her mouth was now open in a soundless scream as it had remained for hours. Years? Decades? Centuries?

She had lost time in the sea of pain.

She stared for a second at her skeletal, fleshless hands and sobbed. Sari Sumdac was gone.

Only The Machine remained.

But even that was burned away. Her metallic skeleton was melted into slag before the fire vaporized it, searing the pain further into her memory, into her spark.

Then, as sudden as the fire had arrived, it vanished alongside the pain. The tone of the area in which she'd been floating in cooled to a soft blue that offered little comfort to her charred and broken body. She would have cried if she had the eyes to do so. Or the head. Or the body.

She knew not her name. She knew not her race. She knew not her age.

All she knew was blue.

Offline. Lifeless. Grey. Those words kept looping in Bumblebee's processor. Echoing like virulent code. Lickety-Split sat to his right, holding his numb servo.

It had already been too late when he arrived. Sari's pale yellow armor had already faded to a monochromatic grey when he had made it to the hospital. Prime and the others were probably on their way to give him the chewing out of his lifecycle. Not that he didn't deserve it.

He felt numb. Barring bodily harm or starvation, cybertronians are practically immortal, and thus are not used to experiencing loss. Having lost two great friends and teammates in a few solar-cycles, the short mech felt like his spark was tearing itself apart.

Lickety-Split, for her part, had no idea what to do. She had only experienced loss once when her creator passed on during an industrial accident, and even then she'd only been active for a few solar-cycles. She had no idea as to why Lightbright had chosen to keep her. As a sibling unit, she didn't have the same obligations as her creator. She had every right and reason to let her be reformatted and integrated into the main stock to be adopted. It certainly hadn't made her life easier to have a second tank to fuel, even if Lickety had done her best to help.

This was completely different. She could not truly miss her creator since she had never truly known her. Bumblebee had known the small technorganic. Laughed with her. Grieved with her.

The only thing she could think of doing, and the only thing she could really do in the end, was to hold the mech's servo as he slouched limply on the metal chair. That simple action helped more than she would ever know.

It took about an hour for the rest of his team to arrive alongside Perceptor, Ultra Magnus, and Wheeljack. Perceptor left for the morgue almost immediately, his undying curiosity drew him to the odd creature in the rust-proof containers.

Ultra Magnus stayed behind to keep an optic on Optimus, offering small words of comfort. Wheeljack simply stood awkwardly to the side, he was more experienced with death being a war veteran but had little idea as to how to deal with the death of the endearingly short half-breed.

Arcee was visibly saddened by the loss of the femmeling that had saved her from a lifecycle of stasis. The smallest member of the team had grown on her in the few days they had known each other. She had even offered to help her find an Earth vehicle mode when they returned to her home.

Ratchet simply stood to the side for a few cycles, before a doctor by the name of Red Alert requested his assistance with a nasty case of cosmic rust. He promptly excused himself and left to perform his duty. This would not be the first time he cured a stranger after losing a friend, and he feared it would not be the last.

Jazz was outraged. He had demanded to speak to the doctor in charge only to be informed that the yellow femme had been offline since her arrival.

Bulkhead took it harder than most. He had simply zoned out on the corner. Immobile to the point that, had he not been standing fully colored before them, they would have assumed that a second slab in the morgue was necessary.

And through it all, Bumblebee was only aware of the servo intertwined with his own.

Elsewhere a tall, golden mech was far too frustrated to feel any sort of grief for the newest scratch in his paint. The celebrations had resulted in a massive traffic jam that had added an entire megacycle in the commute from home to work. He grudgingly dumped his briefcase out of his trunk and transformed to pick it up.

From a first sight it was obvious that this was an unusual mech. Not only did he have a ridiculously outdated vehicle mode that was actually featured in his own museum, but the mech's transformation had revealed that he had four stabilizing servos with one of his wheels on the tip of each. Each limb was vaguely reminiscent of an insect, with the rear servos resembling that of a grasshopper.

He knelt to pick up his briefcase just in time for whoever was next in line to honk at him, to remind him that he was not the only one in need of the transformation lot. Vector Prime grumbled under his breath as he fused his front and rear legs into a single set of digitigrade limbs that gave him a gait vaguely reminiscent of that of a bipedal goat's, before walking into his office. It was not his fault his transformation sequence was twice as long as that of a modern cybertronian.

"Vector Prime, sir!" came a high pitched voice from his right.

"At ease, Glyph," he rumbled as he set his briefcase down, "status report."

"All temporal displacement systems are unchanged," replied the aquamarine femme, "though the Great War exhibit has received a boost in visitors since the celebrations started."

"Bah! The uncultured fools hadn't even heard of Megatron before, never-mind Megazarak!" he spat while Glyph merely stood with a smile, the ancient mech tended to rant on a fairly regular basis, "Spoiled younglings wouldn't know a true Prime if he came up and bit them in the aft!"

"Actually, sir, you might want to take a look at this," said the femme while she turned on the vidscreen, "see anything familiar?"

Vector, for his part, merely squinted at the screen.

"Sir, your visors," pointed out his apprentice.

"Oh, right," he said before reaching into a storage chamber in his chest, pulling out a set of square visors which he placed on his optics, "I see that old friend of yours, Bulkhead was it?"

"Not him, look at the red mech."

"Ah, yes. The famous Optimus Prime!" he chuckled humorlessly, "Could barely stand in-!"

Glyph was treated to a rare sight. The face that her mentor made when he was surprised was as rare as it was comical. His optics grew wide and his mouth was left ajar to the point that half of her expected it to fall off. The half that wasn't laughing anyways.

"Is that- is that the Matrix!?" he shouted, "if this is some sort of joke, Glyph, I'll-!"

"How in the Pit am Ah' supposed to fake somethin' like that?" replied the femme, accidentally slipping back to her Moon Base 1 accent, before clearing her throat and regaining her composure, "But that's not all."

She then panned into the small femme on the screen.

"A Minicon!" she cried out in glee, "can you believe it!? I thought they were extinct! She might actually be the last of her kind! Do you know what this could mean Vector? A living fossil right in front of us! The last relic of the Golden-! Vector? Vector are listening to me? Er, sir?"

Glyh had finally noticed that her Mentor was not sharing her excitement. He was merely staring at the tiny femme in silent musing. Or rather, he was staring at her chest.

"Um, sir? Isn't she a little short for you?" she asked, shaking him out of his stupor, "I mean, she's definitely too young-."

"Pack up Glyph, we have to trace this… thing stat!"