The Thing in the Valley
Chapter 2: Assembly Required
Disclaimer: If it's in this story, I don't own it.
NOTES TO BE SAFE: I just realized that Doc Greene doesn't have a first name in the show. I'm going to call him Emmet, to fill out the reference to Doctor Emmet Brown from back to the future. I'll try to keep it from coming up too much, so it doesn't get confusing.
Doctor Emmet Brown had days where he looked back on his life and thought, "I have it great." He had an intelligent daughter. He lived in a small, tight-knit community. He had all the technology he could ask for, both to experiment with and use daily. He had consistent access to the beach! He had a good friend in Charlie Burns, who understood what it was like to have a child to raise, a full time job, and no wife to share the burden. Charlie even knew that pain four-hold, and still, he stayed happy and active and together with his remaining family.
Now, Charlie had given him a great gift; salvaged parts from the Rescue Bots. They were gorgeous, pristine, so advanced in their designs they looked almost alien. Charlie had told him that the fabricators of the parts had given him permission to study them, for science, because they were too "severely damaged" to use with the current Rescue Bot team. For the life of him, he couldn't find a thing wrong with them! Every now and then there was a minute scratch in the otherwise perfect finish, but they were fine!
(Doctor Greene had no idea that Graham had asked that same question. Doctor Greene didn't know that, to the Cybertronians, it was the equivalent of being given a scarred stomach or a heart a size too small.)
He had a real opportunity here, a chance to revolutionize macrorobots like he had done when he was a young man. He had begun to reassemble the pieces.
(Doctor Greene did not know that Graham had wondered about that too. He wasn't told by the four Rescue Bots how their internals were not quite incompatible with each other. He was not given the analogy of animal organ substitution that Graham figured out. He was probably lucky, because he did not hear Charlie overhearing and loudly proclaiming his sudden craving for sausage, nor the Burns family all collectively retching in disgust.)
He ran across a few problems, naturally. Charlie hadn't given him the pieces to build a face and head, so he had to craft that from scratch. He hadn't given him the software needed to run the parts, so he had to borrow a few programs from his other robotic creations. Charlie also hadn't told him how the Rescue Bots transformed into vehicles, but now that he thought about it, it was probably a proprietary technique. He could live without it. He wasn't out to make a giant transforming thing... yet.
The hardest part was figuring out what the thing ran on. The best he could figure with the parts he was given, the Rescue Bots components ran on some strange... liquid energy.
(He had never seen the energon the Rescue Bots drank, like the Burns had. Never knew that it all came through a ground bridge from Nevada, where the Autobots kept their energon production a desperate secret from those who would use it for evil.)
Which is what led him to get out his personal submarine, launch it below the island, and scour the sea bed for his emergency power supply. It was off the grid, fed by a geothermal vent. He kept it safely away from the city's power source, mostly because he knew that whatever he hooked up to it, it was going to be big and energy draining.
He found its location easily, but found something else there. The geothermal vent was leaking a strange liquid which had reached and corroded his generator. It churned as if it wanted to spray upwards, but it was too heavy to escape its own surface tension. It was simply a big, purple, glowing wound in the rocky floor of the sea. He sent out the submarine's robotic arms to collect a sample.
The computer's analysis came back bugged, the readout confused by a sample it had never processed before. Doctor Emmet Greene gasped as his mind filled in the blanks.
He had found liquid energy.
He just knew Charlie would be so proud of him for discovering it! He couldn't wait to show off his new creation.
(He didn't know Charlie had not thought to tell him about energon and the Rescue Bots being sentient. He figured he could trust his friend not to do something entirely stupid... on purpose.)