Chapter 9
Sari awoke to Ratchet's face and the sound of her own roaring engine before her sound dampeners kicked in.
The medic's mouth was moving, but she couldn't quite hear him. She could feel Optimus and the others approaching. Many people that she knew and others she didn't.
Ratchet dismantled part of her head, tweaked with it, and suddenly she could hear all too well.
She tried to curl up into a ball as a barrage of sounds and frequencies assaulted her mind.
"DON'T MOVE KIDDO," said Ratchet's thunderous whisper as he restrained her with his magnets, "JUST A… There!"
The assault stopped.
Sari tried once more to sit up, only to be rushed away by Ratchet and a medibot she didn't know.
"Wait, Sari!" cried Bumblebee as they charged past with her.
"Get out of the way!" said Ratchet as they rushed up a flight of stairs, "First Aid! Status report!"
"All scans normal," replied the new femme as she hit her with a blue beam, "minor scratching on her t-cog casing, spark is gaining strength but she seems to be in the middle of her pulse cycle."
"She was dismantled! There's no slagging way that's possible!" snapped the older medic as he deposited his charge onto a larger scanner in a new room, "Don't move!"
The technorganic complied as she had no desire of bearing the wrath of her self-appointed doctor.
"Huh, well what do you know? Guess I owe you an- hold it!"
Ratchet moved the scanner to focus on the base of her helm.
"Something's loose here," he muttered, "looks like an electronic paint chip."
"That explains things," said Vector as he came into the room, "she'd normally keep some of her color settings while she traverses the Well. She'd still be pretty grey, but her blue panels would let others know she was coming back."
"How did it get loose?" asked Sari, "And can I stand yet?"
"NO!" snapped Ratchet, "Not until I discharge you!"
"It was probably when the Magnus Hammer threw her against the wall," said Bulkhead at the door, "or during the explosion in Wheeljack's lab."
"SARI!" cried Bumblebee, "Bulk, would you get your wide load out of the way!?"
"Oh, sorry."
"That's my name, don't wear it." Giggled Sari.
"You seem fine for an offline bot," said Optimus as he too made an appearance, "now will somebot please tell me what's going on?"
By the time Vector Prime's and Alpha Trion's explanation was over, Optimus Prime could feel his jaw unhinging. He wasn't the only one, if the way that the rest of his team was massaging their faces was anything to go by.
The group had moved to an unused conference hall that was built for the medical school that the hospital was attached to.
"So Sari can die whenever she wants?" asked Bulkhead, "Like a terracon?"
"Of course not!" snapped Vector, "terracons are dead come back to life! The Keeper of the Well has the ability to go back and forth. Though it's not something we can do often."
"We?" asked Arcee.
"Yes "we". I was the Keeper of the First Key. Though I failed at my mission and it was destroyed in battle during the Great Purge."
"How did you know Sari was a Keeper?" asked Ultra Magnus.
"Isn't it obvious?" he snapped while he pointed at the symbol on his chest.
The group raised an optic ridge in confusion.
"This doesn't remind you of anything?" he asked slowly as he pointed at Sari's chest, who blushed under her mask and moved to the side with a scowl.
More confused looks.
"Oh, for Prima's sake!" he snapped and took the Matrix of Leadership out of the storage compartment on his belly, "SEE!?"
He put it on the table and pointed at his and Sari's chests.
The group looked back and forth between the three while Wheeljack tried to keep his servo from slapping against his face (he failed) due their failure to identify the obvious. Oddly enough, Bumblebee was the first one to figure it out.
"The Matrix!" he said, "Sari has the Matrix on her chest!"
The rest of the group blinked in surprise. He was right.
"Finally!" scoffed Vector, "Yes, all Keepers can be identified by the symbol of the Matrix on their chests."
"Why the Matrix?" asked Sari.
"Because we have two duties," he replied, "the first is to guard the Keys to Vector Sigma and to the Well of All Sparks. The thing is, being the Keeper of the Second Key means carrying it inside your body by merging with it. The Keeper of the Second Key is for all intents and purposes the key itself."
"How come?" asked Bulkhead.
"The First Key is physical," he explained, "but the second one is made of living energy. Once it is absorbed, it can only be released when the current Keeper dies, is crippled, or proves to be unworthy of the duty. However, this union also gives the Keeper the ability to travel to the Well of All Sparks, which brings us to her final duty."
He picked up the Matrix and laid it down in front of Sari, lining up the internal crystal with the jewel in her chest. In response, the jewel glowed for a second before shooting out a blue beam into the artifact. The Matrix itself began glowing and broke apart much like Sari's key used to, shifting as it shrank down until it was slightly smaller than the symbol on her chest.
"The Matrix chooses the Prime by listening to the voices of the sparks of all cybertronians, figuring out the leader that they need and finding him or her," he explained, "the best way to do this, is by staying in close proximity of the one that guards the gate of the Well."
Sari looked up sharply. "You don't mean…"
"Sari Sumdac is it?"
She nodded as the Matrix floated upwards. The orb on Sari's chest slid upwards while the trapezoid shaped slabs next to it slid sideways to reveal the chamber that would receive it.
"It is now your duty as the Key to the Well of All Sparks, to find the Guardian of Cybertron."
The Matrix entered, and Sari's chest snapped shut.
"You know," said Bumblebee, "thinking back on it, the Magnus Hammer reacted to Sari, not to you Optimus."
"Yeah, I was just thinking about that," he responded.
The group had left the hospital by request of Red Alert, leaving Ratchet and Arcee behind. Ratchet was needed to help dig Rodimus Prime out of the massive rust statue he'd become and Arcee had become oddly attached to Ratchet, refusing to leave his side if she could help it.
Optimus suspected that she simply needed to see somebody from her old days, even if she didn't know him all that well.
Sari was of the opinion that they were sitting in a tree, K-I-S… S? How'd that song go again? Where'd they even find a tree on Cybertron?
Anyhow, they had departed to Vector's place because his was the biggest one and wasn't too far away. Bumblebee wasn't even sure Bulkhead would fit through the door of his apartment. Ultra Magnus, Perceptor, and Alpha Trion had chosen not to join them, favoring instead to return to the Autobot Council to report Sari's new status as a High Priority individual.
It was a confidential meeting that Sentinel Prime would not be invited to.
"She was pretty quiet the whole way here," said Bumblebee out of the blue, "I mean, she doesn't look it, but I'm pretty sure her processor is frying over this whole mess."
The smallest member of the group appeared to be dealing fairly well with her new responsibility and was currently answering the questions of Vector's gushing assistant, Glyph, while the aforementioned femme amicably chatted with Bulkhead as they were apparently old friends.
"Look," he said, "wait for it."
Bulkhead and Glyph turned away from Sari for a second. She kept smiling but she eventually looked down at her chest plates and drummed her fingers over the transparent orb.
"See, what'd I tell you?"
"I'm impressed," admitted Optimus, "you learned how to read her pretty well."
"Sari usually wears her spark on her gauntlets," he admitted, "but when she wants to hide something, good luck getting it out."
"Should I be jealous?" asked Lickety-Split as she strolled over with a tray with three glasses of coolant, her waitress coding having kicked in, "You seem pretty chummy with her. Ex-femmefriend?"
"Sari? Nah. She's like a sister to me," replied Bumblebee as he took a sip of coolant, "besides, we're not even the same species. How would that even work?"
"You told her?" asked Optimus.
"Sari transforms when she's in recharge," he explained before turning back to his (cute) new friend whose aft he did not stare at, not at all, "anyways, there´s too much difference between us. She's practically a newborn, fits in the palm of my servo, and I've known her since she was little… well, little-er. It'd be weird."
"Plus, if you two tried to frag she'd probably fall into your spark chamber and kill you both," noted Lick, causing Optimus to spit out his coolant in shock, "it'd be like bonding with an insecticon."
"Are you always this… blunt?" asked Optimus.
"Yep!" she cheerfully replied.
"Hey, where'd Sari go?" noted Bumblebee.
"She said she needed to change her oil," replied Glyph, "do minicons use a different type of oil filtration system? I always figured their filters burned their oil after it wore out like ours do."
"Sari produces her own oil through her organic half," replied Optimus, "but she can drink regular oil too."
Glyphs' mouth fell open.
"Um, boss bot?" said Bumblebee, "Splits was the only one who knew."
Optimus Prime rubbed his temples as Glyph launched into yet another questions tirade.
Vector Prime was having a hard time closing his vocal processor. The small femme had so far done three things to shock him in the same solar-cycle. The first was to show up as a new Key Keeper, the second was to ask him for a private moment and reveal herself as a technorganic, and now this…
"Where did you get this?" he asked, awed by the presence of the object she showed him.
"The Allspark gave it to me," she explained as she handed him her key, "it used to hold the energy that upgraded me to my current form."
"I never thought I'd see it again," he whispered.
"It's the key to Vector Sigma, isn't it?"
"Maybe," he replied with some hesitation, "but if it is, it seems that I can no longer power it."
"No one can," said Sari, "I drained it when I upgraded myself."
"You can't drain it," said Vector, "the Key held the power that was always meant to be yours, but it seems that you must also guard the Key to the Vector Sigma module for the time being… I think."
"You think?"
"The Allspark has a thing for keys," he explained, "it looks like the Vector Sigma key, but it could be something else. All I can tell you is that it's important."
"I got a lot on my plate all of a sudden," she moaned.
"Yes, I suppose you do. We should actually go to the museum later. There is someone there you should meet."
"Can we go in 24 megacycles or so?" asked Sari with a yawn, "I got a major case of jet lag."
"Certainly, I wouldn't want to keep you from enjoying your time here."
The two began to walk back from the study to the lobby with Sari on his shoulder in her organic mode.
"Any touristy things I should see?"
"Apart from the museum?" he asked with a chuckle, "well, there are always the Crystal Gardens at Praxus and Iacon and the Rust Sea Memorial."
"There are seas here?"
"Explain yourself, Perceptor," ordered Ultra Magnus, "we were told that the prototypes had been destroyed."
"They were," stated the red mech to the small portion of the council, "the technorganic is not registered as one of the original protoforms."
"What is this …Project Pretender about?" asked Wheeljack after skimming over the datapad.
"An attempt to create a transformer with the ability to take the form of anything he came across by the formation of external shells," responded Alpha Trion, "even organics or inanimate objects if need be."
"The project was scrapped after it was found that even though the advanced processor was able to store many different scans it was impossible to incorporate all of them," said Perceptor, "the amount of energy necessary to generate the shells, dubbed holoforms, was prohibitive. Which brings me to my primary point."
A display of the scans he'd gotten from Sari's equipment was displayed next to design specs of every cybertronian that had been known to have interacted with her and a full body in-depth scan.
"When I examined Sari Sumdac's body, I noticed that several of her parts appeared to be Minicon technology that was not included in my original design."
"Well, we already know the kid's powerful," said Wheeljack.
"This is the design of a cybertronian optic," he stated as the screen above him displayed a metal sphere covered by a transparent plate, ignoring Wheeljack's comment. The sphere had a hole in the middle of it with a white light emanating from within.
"Her internal optics," he stated as the sphere became superimposed, "are able to process a broader spectrum of visible light than any human or even most cybertronians and include the passive scanner in my designs as well as a high velocity processing speed. Her optical shells are also vastly different from that of an Autobot's. "
"How exactly?" asked Alpha Trion.
"This is a detail of an Autobot's optic shell with a magnification of 500 compared to that of a Decepticon seeker's at the same magnification," he stated as the screen displayed a pattern made up of several small hexagons next to a second hexagonal pattern made up of polygons that were approximately half the original's size, "and this is a detail of Miss Sumdac's optic shell at the same magnification," the display now showed a pattern made up of thousands of diminutive triangles stacked neatly against each other, "Seekers are well known for their highly detailed optic shells and a high speed optical focus, but as you can see, the detail of her optics is far superior to those of most seekers. This would give her a higher optical definition and possibly a broader secondary field of vision."
"She was upgraded by the Allspark," noted Alpha Trion, "who knows what it could have done to her?"
"There is also the issue of what I found in her memory files," continued Perceptor, "Miss Sumdac's unusual processor contains detailed files on the personal modifications of all Autobots and Decepticons that she has encountered so far."
The screen above him lit up with designs for Optimus' ax and grappling hooks, Bumblebee's stingers and jets, Bulkhead's upper-body servo-mechanics and processor, Ratchet's medical equipment, Prowl's hacking mod, Blurr's legs and wheels, Sentinel's shield and lance, Ultra Magnus's hammer and shoulder missiles, Wheeljack's barrage cannon, Lugnut's P.O.K.E. and machine guns, Blitzwing's t-cog and cannons, Lockdown's adaptive armor, Swindle's force field and transwarp storage compartment, Blackarachnia's climbing claws and web shooters, and even Megatron's fusion cannon and flexible swords.
"Furthermore, I have concluded that her upgraded weapons are a combination of several modifications," continued the red mech as her weapon schematics appeared on the screen, "her blades, for example, are a combination of Optimus Prime's axe, Ratchet's electromagnets, and Bumblebee's stingers."
"Wait, how would that even work?" asked Alpha Trion as the blades broke apart to display the components of each scanned tool.
"Well, the only things separating that axe from those blades is a strong electromagnetic flux field and a high voltage power source," pointed out Wheeljack, "we tried something similar a while back but we couldn't get the thing to work properly without frying our circuits."
"Most of her upgrades appear to use this technology," continued Perceptor as the shields and skates were highlighted, "once the blades were installed, she needed only to modify the flux field to widen the blade and obtain the ion skates," the skates were superimposed as their components where broken down with arrows highlighting the direction of the ions, they then where replaced by a set of shields made up of three blades and an energon field, "her shields are equally intriguing. A similar concept to her blades, but based on Sentinel Prime's shield rather that Optimus Prime's ax."
"So, you're saying that she has the ability to download personal modifications?" asked Ultra Magnus, recalling Elita-1's power.
"No," stated Perceptor, "she does not have the ability to replicate them, but she has been scanning every cybertronian that she encounters."
The group stared as a holographic diagram of her body emerged from the floor and parts of her components where outlined.
"She has been watching us."
Her arms and legs where outlined and compared to Bulkhead's arms and Blurr's legs.
"Assessing our weaknesses."
Holographic Bulkhead's wrecking ball was removed and the whole design was streamlined to fit the holographic Sari's arms, the same thing then happened to Blurr's legs, replacing the wheels for the skates.
"And, with the help of the Allspark, making improvements as she saw fit. When the technorganic upgraded herself with the Allspark's energy, she allowed it to access the information she had gathered to upgrade her own body. In truth, she was designed with a single weapon."
"Her orbs," recalled Wheeljack, "Optimus said that was the first weapon she ever used."
"Precisely," he confirmed, "she has been merely scanning and analyzing each cybertronian that she has come across instinctively."
"But why would she need such an ability?" pondered Botanica.
"That is part of the Pretender Project that we could not solve" stated Perceptor, "ordinarily, the installation of such an ability would be ill advised as this would use up memory space a short period of time, which is what happened with the prototypes. However, her processor is possibly the most impressive piece of machinery that I have ever come across," the screen then proceeded to blink out to display a rounded processor, a smaller display showed a detail of her neural network, "as you can see, when she imprinted off Isaac Sumdac, her processor took the shape of a human's brain. Each nano-chip mimicked the appearance and function of a neuron with several hybrid materials, functioning as millions of processors working in perfect synchronicity. The superior materials from our processors combined with the efficient organic designs resulted in her superior processor. This design also enables her to run on very little energon and offers the option of organic fuel since the end result is still partially organic. It is for this same reason that any imbalance between organic fuel and energon will result in a drastic reduction of her intelligence."
"How did you come to this conclusion?" asked Botanica.
"I cross-referenced the designs of Sari Sumdac's processor with the terabytes of human anatomical information that she brought with her," he stated as he brought out dozens of diamond hard drives, "The information has been very useful."
"You used an In-Depth Scanner?" asked Botanica with a warning in her voice that promised unpleasant things if he had not.
Perceptor nodded before continuing.
"There is one more benefit to the ability to scan machines passively. To identify which points would incapacitate," the screen blinked back to life as several schematics of the earth-bound cybertronians popped up, now surrounded with ways to destroy Bumblebee's stingers to Optimus' axe, and even Megatron's cannon, "or kill," the image was replaced with one that displayed the weak spots in their armor, concentrating on the chest and head.
"Furthermore, no other cybertronian has weapons built directly into the protoform," he stated, "most have to be attached to the protective armor."
"What are you getting at?" asked Alpha Trion with narrowed optics.
"I believe that Sari Sumdac was designed to be an assassin, although she is incomplete," he concluded, "most likely built by the leading scientist in protoform experimentation."
"You don't mean…" started Botanica.
"The technorganic was most likely built by my predecessor," continued Perceptor, "the Decepticon scientist Scalpel."