Intermission 1
Use Somebody
"I've been roaming around, always looking down and all I see"
The first few months on this little blue marble called Earth were strange.
She had landed in a desert with Sunstreaker. A bad place to land, as she found out when she had to spend joors- hours, humans called them hours- listening to him bitch and moan about sand in his joints and scratches in his paint. He was more of a femme than she was sometimes.
By some miracle, they landed near Las Vegas during a car show. She chose a black Dodge Charger to scan. It was the newest model, a 2009, and had a single white stripe on it. Sunstreaker, the vain glitch, chose a brilliant yellow 2009 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder. The brightest, flashiest, most expensive car he could find. And he wonders why he was never sent out on reconnaissance missions.
They traveled together for a while. She wasn't sure how long because the days began to blur and run together. They parted ways near L.A. She loved the mech but she just couldn't spend long periods of time with him. The both of them were way too hot-headed for that. How they ever got to be the best of friends, she would never know.
After he left, she started to make her way across the state of California. Her com systems were shot to the pit during landing and had already been on the fritz since the battle on the Ark, or else she would have contacted Prime and his team. He had said they were on Earth in his message, just not where. She could understand the need for secrecy, there were still Decepticons about, but slag, he couldn't have given a hint?
She turned her processor toward understanding the planet and its creatures in order to keep from cursing Prime and his vagueness all day. It hadn't taken too long for her to figure out how to tweak her holo projection so that it produced a solid, corporeal human form and after that, it was just a matter of deciding just what this new form of hers would look like. She finally settled on a slightly tall, brown-skinned female with black hair bound up in braids and eyes the same bright blue as her optics. There were other things, defaults to her holo program. There were scars littering her body, most old and healed enough that you had to know to look for them, while others were deep and darker than the skin around them. A few glyphs also lined her left arm. There weren't many, just the ones for her rank in the crease of her elbow, the Autobot creed circling her wrist and her name on her shoulder.
When she had decided the holo was acceptable, she'd ventured into some of the more populated parts of San Francisco, the city she had been in at the time, to test it, finding out just how far she could venture from her real form and how long she could keep it up. She even eventually found that human food could be used and converted into energy to use to keep the holo running.
Through all this though, she was still looking for any hint of her comrades. When she heard about the Mission City 'incident' that had happened just two years before, she knew it had something to do with her kind. And that was before she heard the rumors of giant alien robots that had emerged from it. That didn't mean she knew where to look for them, of course. If she knew her adoptive family, and she did, they cleared out of that area as soon as they could. But she also knew her Prime, and he would want to stay near the city he had nearly destroyed to make sure it stayed protected. It was with that thought that she began looking for strange occurrences involving cars in and around Colorado.
That was partly how she had found herself in this boring little small town called Tranquility. She had been on her way through it, did a routine check of police records, not really expecting to find anything, and had been surprised to find several incidents involving a yellow Camaro. Once she had looked the car up she couldn't help but think, now doesn't that look like somebody that I used to know?
The possibility was what made her stay longer than the time it took to drive straight through the town. It was the kid at the library that convinced her to stay more than a day. It had been over a month now, the longest she had ever stayed in a human town. She shouldn't call him a kid, she supposed. On this world he was a full grown man, but she couldn't quite understand the concept of aging so quickly.
She still wasn't quite sure why she had chosen to linger so long in this town. The boy, man, Gabriel, had something to do with it, as did the prospect of seeing her old friend and almost brother. The amount of excitement she garnered from that possibility and having a human friend to guide her, even if he didn't know her secret, was the reason she couldn't (of course, Ratchet would say that she just choose not to) keep up the patch jobs she had running on her various downed systems. With her spark detection system down, half her scanners glitching, and her EM field dampener on the fritz, she was a sitting duck, as the humans say.
That was the excuse she used to explain the disaster that was Gabriel's party.