Chapter 14
"Well you can go straight to the Pit for all I care you slagging, glitch-headed malfunction!"
Arcee couldn't help but hide behind Ratchet at Chromia's fury, even if it wasn't directed at her. Her sister had a temper, she knew, but this was a completely unheard of level of rage.
Not that she blamed her. She'd be mad too if she'd been told her sister had died, only to find out she'd been left to rust in a hospital room.
"Well, now that we have THAT out of the way," said Chromia with a sigh once she'd hung up, "I suppose apologies are in order. Sorry about the arm."
"Meh, its fine," scoffed Ratchet before Optimus could respond, "you're good at taking things apart, I didn't find so much as a scratch."
"Well I am a salvage team captain," she replied with no small amount of pride, "the best if I do say so myself."
"Sis," cut in Arcee, "I really am sorry for-."
"Nope," she cut her off, raising her hand in finality, "while it would have been nice to know what you were up to at the time, apologies help no one at this point. Unless it's for what I'll do to Perceptor after I find him."
"Thank you for-."
"However!" snapped the shorter femme, "Do NOT think you're off the hook. I'll put you through the wringer for not telling us about your new day job."
Arcee shuddered at the thought of what her sister might have planned.
"It's gonna take a while to get used to having you around again."
The whisper was barely audible, but the pink femme caught it just the same. She might as well have tossed a wrench into her spark chamber. Ratchet motioned to Optimus to head into the next room to leave them alone.
"I really am sorry," she whispered, "I should have told you what was going on."
"Yeah, you should have," replied Chromia, "but you know what? It doesn't matter anymore. You're back and that's what matters."
Arcee couldn't hold herself back anymore and wrapped her arms around her sister, ignoring the way the younger femme's armor dug into her own.
"When did you get so wise?"
"Loss will do that to you," she muttered, "there's also the fact that in active years, I'm the older one now."
Arcee blinked and held her sister at arms' length, "it has been a long time."
"Yep," she quipped, "now, what say you we find the mechs before they wind up lobbing with my potted crystals?"
The pink femme giggled in reply and made to follow her, noticing a picture as they stepped into the kitchen.
"Say, who's this?" she asked, unaware of the way her sister's back stiffened, "Is she yours?"
"Not exactly," said Chromia, "her name's Ariel. Moonracer adopted another femmeling a couple thousand stellar cycles ago."
"Oh," uttered Arcee awkwardly, "where is she?"
"She, uh, she joined the military around a thousand stellar cycles ago."
"Hey! Just like Prime here!" noted Ratchet.
"So she's living at the military quarters?" asked Arcee.
"No, she's, umm, missing."
"What?" gasped the older sister, "What do you mean she's missing?"
"She went off on an unauthorized trip and hasn't been seen since," replied the younger femme stiffly as she grabbed four empty energon cubes prom the projector and made her way to her minibar, "she never even made it out of training."
She pressed a cube against the transparent metal to let the high-grade permeate into the smaller container. As soon as the first one was filled, she handed it to Ratchet and went to fill the rest.
"Maybe we can do some digging… what was her military designation?" asked Arcee as she passed a cube to Optimus and received her own.
"Elita-1."
Optimus' glass hit the ground.
"You okay kid?"
"Huh?"
"You've been awfully quiet," clarified Vector.
"Ah, yeah," replied Sari, "just thinking."
Sari wasn't fine, but she wasn't NOT fine either. Rather she was pensive. She'd never really thought about having kids of her own what with being ten and all, but it was an odd feeling to have the option wrenched away like that. It wasn't entirely unexpected, but it was still a shock.
At the moment, she was alone with Vector Prime in the basement of the Metroplex Museum of Cybertronian History. She didn't really know what he intended to show her, but he'd been rummaging through several shelves and trays of artifacts older than her star system for the better part of the last megacycle.
"Well, pay attention," he grumbled, "bots in our position have a habit of getting caught up in damn-near every major conflict that graces this galaxy. You have to learn how to pick sides."
"I thought I already did that?"
"What the Autobots?" he asked with a scoff, "Please! If the Autobots were the "good guys", the war would've died on the first solar-cycle."
He pulled out an old data drive, grumbling as he figured out how to use the adaptor and transmit to the screen.
"What's that?"
"Some illegal war footage," he replied as he struggled to attach the adaptor, "if Magnus found out copies of this data still existed, I'd spend the next Billion stellar cycles in the stockade."
"Why did you even save that?"
Vector paused, trying to formulate how to describe the sheer savagery he'd witnessed.
In the end, he activated a defective hologram from an exhibit that was being repaired, giving her something to watch while he tried to figure out the drive.
"Cybertron was once the center of a peaceful empire," recited a deep voice from the speakers as the RGB display failed to align, "peaceful and just, it was led by the Autobots, who fought for freedom and peace throughout the galaxy, and guarded by the Destrons, our ancient military faction. Until their leader, Megazarak, corrupted them and set forth the beginnings of the war 70 million stellar-cycles ago. In his greed, Megazarak sought to take the Allspark from its rightful place with the Autobots and use it to transform Cybertron itself into a weapon of mass destruction the likes of which had never been conceived before. The late Powered Convoy Magnus knew that this hypothetical monstrosity, dubbed Primus after an ancient god that our less enlightened ancestors worshipped, could not be allowed to exist."
"Primus?" asked Sari as the hologram moved on to play music and a montage of a massive, four-armed mech debating a shorter red and white mech with the Elite Guard symbol on his chest.
"An old legend," he answered, dismissing it as such with his tone, "fortunately, it was only that in this universe. Most others aren't so lucky."
"Er, what?"
"I'll tell you later," he replied before pointing to the hologram that had started the next part.
"Megazarak's right-servo bot, however, felt that their progress was not what it should be. Megatron broke away from his former master and banished him to an unknown location in the Orion Arm."
"Wait, Megatron didn't-!?"
"Shush!"
"With the ancient military class, now dubbed the Decepticons, reformed, the newly seated Ultra Magnus proposed the Decepticon Registration Act in an attempt to soothe tension between Autobots and Decepticons. The malicious Megatron however, spat in the face of peace and rejected Ultra Magnus' reasonable offer. The localized skirmishes escalated to a full-scale war thanks to Megatron's rethoric, and his insistence that the Autobots relinquish their rightful place as the guardians of the Allspark."
He stopped the feed.
"What did you see?" asked the ancient Prime.
"Um, a museum exhibit with a glitchy projector?" she touched the side and closed her eyes as her hands glowed, "the prime lens is misaligned 3 nanometers to the left. I can fix it if you want."
"You're a technician now?"
"I'm a jack of all trades, master of none kinda gal," she quipped as she pried open a panel and began tinkering with the lenses, "I mean, there's one skill I'll have to master if I'm gonna take over Sumdac Systems, but everything else is more of a hobby, ya know?"
She shut the panel and turned the hologram back on, displaying the corrected image.
"That'll be useful in the field," he admitted, "but that's not what I meant. What did you see in that file?"
"I dunno, a museum exhibit?"
"I saw pile of slagging propaganda," snorted the elder mech in disgust, "nothing but half-truths and omissions, all to keep gullible bots from seeing the world as it truly is."
"It can't be that bad."
"Oh no, it's worse," affirmed Vector with a snort of disgust, "quite a few of the planets we've colonized and cyberformed hosted life at some point. One of them even held the beginnings of a civilization."
"What happened to them?" she asked.
"What do you think happens to organics when their planet suddenly turns into a waterless, metal desert covered with organophobic giants?" was his rhetorical question, "Which brings me to the next point."
He finally clipped the drive in.
"There's no such thing as good guys," was his defeated sigh, "or bad guys, or good and evil, or even an universal right and wrong. In war there's the team that lost and the team that lost a little less, and the "good guys"? The "good guys" will turn into the most sadistic sons of glitches you'll ever come across if they fight for the "right" cause."
"But the Autobots-."
"Often attacked Decepticon hospitals during the Great War."
The footage started.
It was shaky, blurry at times and slightly corrupted, but the footage of Autotroopers attacking and off-lining wounded Decepticon soldiers and helpless medics would be forever saved into Sari's drives.
"It's easier to take down an enemy when he's already wounded," was the cold explanation, "put a lot of them in a small area like a field hospital, and you have a guaranteed massacre."
"Why are you showing me this?" she asked, staring at the morbid video of an Autotrooper decapitating an unarmed medic.
"War does things to you," was Vector's reply, suddenly looking even older than his already unfathomable age, "you go in to fight the monsters, kill a few, and eventually you figure out they're fighting monsters too."
He turned to her.
"You can't afford that," he told her, "you can't afford to kill monsters. You can't even afford to fight monsters. You must remember that everyone you fight, mutilate, and kill is also a person. A person with a family and friends, who feels fear and anguish, who wants to live through the battle and go home, just like you."
He sighed and looked back at the footage, now showing a black and orange mech with four arms giving a speech, Megatron standing behind him.
"I'd never think of people like that." Said the young girl in self-defense.
"That's what everyone thinks," he grunted, "then you need a way to make it easier to take a life."
"I'd never do that!"
"You most certainly will," he snapped back, "it's just a matter of time. We are biologically immortal, child! I have lived for over eight billion stellar-cycles, and so long as I continue to get regular maintenance, I will live until the Universe dies. As will you."
She looked down at her feet, incapable of conceptualizing such longevity.
"Besides," he continued, "those in our positions don't live peaceful lives."
She looked back up at him.
"You'll know pain, kid," he said apologetically, "and love, and suffering, and grief, and joy, and spark-break. Peace though? You won't know peace until you're dead."
"Didn't you say we're immortal?"
"We can still be killed."
She looked down at her feet, pondering the future, before she looked back to the footage, now showing Megatron announcing the exile of his predecessor, Megazarak.
"Scaring the new Keeper before she's started her duties, Vector?" asked a new voice startling her out of her thoughts.
Sari turned to see this new stranger, and was left gaping at his odd appearance.
A head. That's all this newcomer was. A gigantic, five-faced head with tentacles trailing out what might've been the neck.
"Pont! Glad you could make it," commented the curator, "Sari, this is Pentius. He's a quintesson scientist and an old friend of mine."
"It's a pleasure," commented Pentius with a white and yellow face that somewhat reminded her of those weird towers in Moscow, extending a tentacle for Sari to shake, "I wasn't expecting to see a Nebul so far from home."
"A what?"
"Nebul are taller Pont," pointed out Vector, "she could probably pass for a Kryptonian though."
"What's a kryptonian?" asked Sari.
"A humanoid species that closely resembles your transcan," replied Pentius, "they are extinct now, but I believe a Kryptonian troop landed here some time ago."
"Yes, General Zod," confirmed Vector as he directed them to an unfinished exhibit displaying several skeletons that would've passed for human to an untrained eye, "it's a pity really. Their technology was advanced, but there was nothing they could do for their allergy to Energon."
"Did you ever find any more of them?" asked the stunned technorganic.
"A few," admitted the curator, "mostly corpses mind you. Wheeljack has the remains of child named Kal-El in his laboratory. He is fascinated by their radiophagic tissues, so similar to what we found on Tamaran before it was cyberformed."
"His research in radiophagic organics could be useful to you," pointed out Pentius, "well, if you ever plan making more like you."
"Huh?"
"Well, it'd be a shame if you die as the last of your kind," he continued, "you might want to think about a long-term plan for your new species."
"I can't exactly… reproduce."
"Your species would be far from the first to rely on technology for reproduction," scoffed Vector, "just look at us!"
"It's just a suggestion," pointed out Pentius, "technorganic species are rare. Most organic species take the full leap into mechanical organisms like we quintessons did."
"And the ones that don't?"
"They go extinct," shrugged the Prime, "it's a part of life. No species lasts forever, but mechanical species last as long as they have maintenance."
"Then what's the point of technorganics?"
"A perfect technorganic has only been theoretical at best," pointed out the Quintesson, "even the few that exist have maintenance problems. However, if perfected, they should require less maintenance, possess limited regenerative abilities, benefit from replaceable parts, and biological immortality. Essentially, the best of both cybernetic and organic species."
"Yeah well, if what Percy and Jackie told me is true, I'm more or less the opposite," she grumbled, before flinching as a blue laser scanned her.
"Yes, well, your body is far from perfect," noticed Pentius, "if your energon tank is ever breached, you'll die from poisoning to your organic tissues. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. And don't even get me started on what will happen if you lose your T-Cog."
"Is privacy a foreign concept on Quintesson!?" she snapped, "honestly, at least give me a warning!"
"If you are to reproduce, you'll have to perfect your designs first," he stated, ignoring her protests, "if you ever need help, contact me. I have some experience in the field."
He handed her a com frequency chip, which her antennae scanned automatically.
"Not much room up here," she pointed out, "but my dad and I are working on a project you might be interested in."
"Oh? What kind of project are we talking about?" he inquired.
She checked the time on her HUB, "Actually, I need to make a phone call. We can explain everything at the holodeck."
"We?"
Elsewhere, Lickety Split, Bumblebee, Glyph, and Bulkhead were leaving the movie theater.
"Is the Warrior Code really so compulsive?" asked Lickety Split as she sipped her coolant.
"Oh yeah," admitted Bumblebee, "a warrior class hear the word "slave" and the slaver's dead on his feet. I've never seen it happen though."
"Hmm, do humans keep slaves?"
Bumblebee stopped, "I don't know," he admitted, "I don't think so. I'm pretty sure the country we lived in didn't, but I don't know about the others."
"What's a country?" asked Glyph.
"Humans don't live under a single Magnus," explained Bulkhead, "from what I gathered, all the different countries do their own thing like individual species."
"That is weird," said the archeologist, "can you imagine having different governments for different cybertronians? What happens if a human from one country breaks the law in a different one?"
"I… don't know," admitted the bulkier scientist, "I never paid attention to that stuff."
"Oooh I have to go there!" said Glyph excitedly, "it just sounds so interesting!"
"Mm! Back to the coding subject," called Lickety Split, "why do warriors have that kind of coding? I mean, I'm a waitress, so I have a type of servant coding, but I don't just start serving drinks to anyone I come across."
"Weren't you making cocktails at Vector's place?" asked Glyph.
"Ok, so I gave in one time," she conceded, "There was a tray, there were drinks, and an obviously loaded mech. What was I supposed to do?"
"You could've let Sari do it," said 'Bee pensively, "she makes some surprisingly good cocktails."
"Ooh! Like that oilnog!"
"Ahh yeah. That was good," said the smaller mech with a hungry look, "oh! And remember that coolant mix she came up with!"
"Yeah, it's a good thing she can drink them now," said the green mech, "it's hard to believe she came up with some of those before she could taste them."
"You know, if she ever needs money, Mac's been thinking of hiring another bartender," said the skater, "he'd probably pay good money for the recipes if she has other plans."
"Oh, she has other plans," snorted Bumblebee, "I heard Jazz wanted to make her a cyberninja."
"Really?" asked Bulkhead skeptically, "I thought Wheeljack wanted her as an assistant?"
"Well, yeah she could join the egghead corps," snorted 'Bee, "but I know her! She might have some good diagnostics hardware, but if she has the chance to kick skid plates, she'll take it."
"Sari doesn't have "good" diagnostics hardware," scoffed Bulkhead, making air quotes, "she has the single best diagnostics system I've ever seen. She'd be a great cyber ninja, but she has other plans, trust me."
"Oh? So you know something Bulky?"
"She and the Professor have plans," he replied, "I honestly doubt that Perceptor and Wheeljack told her anything they didn't already know."
"Easy… eeeeaaassyyy."
Wheeljack was in the middle of a very delicate operation. Handling any amount of anti-matter was generally a delicate job, more so when handling 50 grams in what was essentially the bastard child of an orbital cannon and a graviton hammer. Most bots would've turned off their communicator for such an operation.
Wheeljack was not most bots.
"Yo, Wheeljack here," he said as he lowered the antiproton rod into the negatron conduits, "Oh, hey kiddo! Watcha need?... Holodeck? Sure, I'll be a bit late though… Gotcha. See you there."
With that, he hung up and finished his work, sealing the machine with a satisfying click.
For once in his lifecycle, nothing had gone wrong. No blown fuses, no crossed wires, no eldritch abominations. Which was too bad, considering Nyarlathotep still owed him a cube.
It was perfect.
It exploded anyways.
Little Superman cameo. Not important, but amusing.