Bumblebee had never been a strong and angry hand to hand fighter in battle. He most certainly could punch and kick if he had to, and more than once he had managed to inflict a decent bit of damage that way. But still, he had always relied mostly on his skill with a blaster and the speed of his vehicle mode on the battlefield. Arcee was therefore taken aback, when she wandered into the training gym early in the evening, to find him beating on a hanging punching bag with a kind of clear furry that would almost have rivaled Bulkhead's style and skill.
"Are you trying to put the wreckers to shame, 'Bee?" Arcee questioned with a laugh, as she crossed the room and approached him perhaps a little too slowly. Watching him while he kept right on going, she had to admit to herself that he was much better than she had thought to notice before. Then again, he'd always been stealth and speed and quick thinking, and no bot, it seemed had ever truly thought to encourage his training in heavy hand to hand combat.
"I'd suggest you challenge Bulk' to a training match," Arcee said after she'd watched him for another long moment. "But I'd be worried today about him getting hurt!" She laughed a little again, but all the same, she was almost serious.
"I'm just… blowing off a little steam," 'Bee mumbled. And finally, he stopped the swinging punching bag with one hand, before he turned toward his teammate. He smiled slightly in her direction, but the expression was far from genuine, and his optics showed little more than stress and something close to despair.
"I'm not doing much if you wanna talk to me," Arcee said. She stepped backward toward a bench along the side wall and let herself flop back onto it in a seated position. "Knockout has Cybershock. If I know him, there's no way I'm getting her back from him now, if I wanted to, barring some catastrophe of course." She laughed a little and shook her head, amused. But quickly her face-plate turned serious again and she gestured with her optics toward the bench she was already sitting on.
"Starscream," 'Bee mumbled quietly and staring almost at the floor as he did. It looked for a second like he was going to say something more. But he didn't. And Arcee's optics opened wide while her hands clenched against her will into fists, at the mention of an enemy's name.
"Did he say something, 'Bee?" Arcee growled in suddenly frustration, trying her best to look her teammate in the optics and to make him look back. "Did he hurt anyone? I swear to Primus, if that bot's done anything, I'll scrap him, and I don't care how close he is to dying..."
Arcee," 'Bee said, his tone strangely firm and dragging her at once from her angry thoughts. Only then did she realize just how badly she had been ranting. "Starscream didn't say anything or hurt anyone." His optics met Arcee's again. His bright optics were opened wider by then and she could see the kid was strangely horrified. "He couldn't hurt anyone if he wanted to. He barely knows who we are most of the time. I don't think he always knows who he is. Ratchet said this morning he's already well into the third stage now. And his condition is progressing so fast. I… I thought once that Knockout's crash was the worst thing I'd ever see." The young bot looked up again, his optics finally meeting Arcee's, before he punched the bag hard enough to get it rocking back and forth again roughly. And when he spoke again, his voice was shaky. "A bot dying from PCRDS…. That's so much worse than even that. One system after another is failing, never to fully work again. And every time the next thing goes, there's a new intervention. But he's been so entirely not with it the last couple of days and hates the machines…. Screams at nothing sometimes for an hour at a time, before he just smiles a genuine sleepy grin… like a youngling Cybershock's age or something. Sometimes he's babbling almost entirely nonsense. Today his intake system started to fail, he was shrieking and screaming like he thought we were going to kill him as soon as a spark monitor went off. Finally, his cooling system glitched and his frame overheated… a line somewhere burst from processor pressure and we found energon pouring everywhere..."
Bumblebee's words died in the air, and he abruptly punched the still lightly swinging punching bag several times almost harder than he had before. Arcee, shocked and startled, got up slowly from the bench. And cautiously she wandered much closer to her teammate again. For a second or two, she almost spoke at least a couple of times. But each time she quickly gave up, when she realized she had no idea what it was she wanted to say about any of it. Eventually, she settled for silently getting in a few good hits to the bag herself, before she steadied it to stop its wild swinging when 'Bee stopped and took a few idle steps backward.
"I've thought more than once I was going to lose my morning fuel at times in training. But this was the first time I finally did. I barely made it out the door and to a waste disposal… and of course, I felt like such an idiot for that…" the youngest of the Autobots mumbled. He stared at the floor now. "I went to the showers and I caught myself thinking about how much I hope Starscream is offline soon. And not because he's the dreaded enemy we all want to be rid of. It's impossible to think that's even the case anymore."
"I don't think anyone holds anything against you," Arcee said, hopelessly guessing that that might just be at least the slightest bit useful a thing to say.
"I know that," Bumblebee answered. He looked up again and smiled slightly, however uncertain of a smile it may have been, and he nodded a little. "But still I doubt myself, and maybe too much at times. There's so much to remember. Did you know there are at least thirty-four tiny parts to the average Cybertronain hand? Fourteen joints in most feet? There are so many viruses and their common systems to keep straight. I try to cram all that information into my processor and every day I think I'm getting it. But then Ratchet quizzes me on anything everything every day when I report for duty in the medbay, and I realize I've forgotten half of what I just learned..." He sighed once and stood quietly for a moment before he lowered his head again to look back down at the floor, while he mumbled under his intakes. "I'm not sure I'm designed for this..."
"It will get better," Arcee smiled her assurance. "Life usually does."
She would have found her own simple advice both ridiculous and entirely useless, not so long ago. But life itself had managed somehow more than once in recent times, to prove her cynicism wrong.
"More than once, Starscream's mumbled something or other about some bot called Skywarp," bumblebee mused, changing the subject and looking as though he clearly figured it may have been important information. But he shrugged slightly at the same time and looked confused. "Does that name mean anything to you?"
"Skywarp fight for the 'cons once, probably before you were even enlisted," Arcee answered, thinking a second. "Oooh, that bot was impossible to deal with. Made our lives the living pit. That's for sure. Until you've tried to fight a teleporter in battle with no clue which direction to be looking in at any second..." She paused a moment, thinking before she continued on slower and with far more compassion. "No one was ever sure exactly. But most of us were pretty sure Skywarp was Starscream's brother..."
Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break
Late on the day following Starscream's capture, a small group of Autobots had managed with no trouble at all, to recapture the Nemesis; which had been located, landed and nearly empty of troops, high in the mountains near Cybertron's southern pole. Of the four vehicon troopers found aboard – the last remaining bots of a crew that had once numbered into the hundreds – all four had willingly defected with only minutes of convincing. And these four troopers, along with Quickshot – who had played a large part in locating the warship in the first place- had been more than helpful to the Autobots in stripping the ship of anything and everything that might possibly have been useful.
And now a couple of days later, Soundwave had been busy much of the morning, working in a once mostly unused and empty room at the end of a hallway on the lower level of the base, with a salvaged computer mainframe that he'd taken on the job of reprogramming and installing. He knew already of Ratchet's plans to convert the base into a soon to be well functioning medical center. And the old medibot had been clearly surprised and impressed when Soundwave had suggested that the warship's navigation computer could be converted, with a few modifications, into a working solution for storage of at least a few thousand separate patient files in their digital formats. Ratchet had made no secret of even greater surprise when Soundwave had volunteered his time and skill to the job of setting up the system.
He had been on the floor for long enough to have lost any track of time, with endlessness lengths of wiring wrapped neatly around his arm while he nearly rewired the system from beneath it. And though the position he was working in was certainly an awkward one, and made worse by a need to hold the coiled wire and therefore work mostly one-handed with tools that he'd been forced to leave barely in his reach, he did not find the work itself to be at all unenjoyable. Working that way, in awkward positions under and behind a huge computer, was hardly new to him. And with Laserbeak, working close by, her small body wedged easily into the tight space above him, well out of reach of his hands, and diligently transmitting visual maps to the circuit board to him, he found himself back within the familiarity of a life he knew well.
Once, he made his way carefully out from underneath the computer, so that he could stand up and power up the system with a few simple button pushes on a keyboard tossed onto the worktable. He entered a few fast and simple commands before he shut it down again, and promptly made his way back into his place on the floor, to resume the work with the wiring again. And quickly he was once again caught up in his work, with time passing happily without his noticing it.
It was a strangely quiet and steady tapping sound, that finally pulled his attention away from his work sometime later. And he realized he'd been hearing the sound for a while already before it registered consciously in his processor and he understood that he was hearing it at all. And with a feeling of strange unease brought on by centuries on near constant high alert for anything out of place, he quickly made his way back out from underneath the computer again.
Soundwave had no idea at all what it was he might have expected to find nearby, and making that sound. But a small human, dressed in simple blue jeans and a clearly far too big hooded sweatshirt, and with crossed legs on the floor and fingers tapping on the keys of a red laptop, was certainly the last thing he would have expected.
"Uh… hi," the young human – the youngest of the three young 'friends of the Autobots' - said, with something that may well have been some degree of hesitation. The human stared for a moment right at the bot before he looked around the room, clearly growing anxious by then. But he did not get up from the floor, and after a moment he spoke again. "I hope I'm not bothering you."
"Ratchet says you've been down here most of the morning working on that project of yours," the human nodded toward the computer and to a decent amount of wire that lay on the floor in a tidy coil beside it. "Medical file storage… for the hospital. It's pretty cool of you to do that."
Soundwave moved slightly, ready to move back into his cramped yet somehow comfortably position under the huge computer system so that he could simply resume his work and ignore the boy. But then he stopped again and stayed where he was, kneeling on the floor of the nearly empty room. The human intrigued him somehow and he paused, curious to see if he would say any anything else.
The boy didn't speak again though and instead his attention seemed to go right back to the laptop he balanced on his bent knees. Soundwave felt then like surely he should either get back to the work he'd put off a moment too long by then or get to his feet and walk away from it entirely for a while, leaving the human to whatever it was he was doing. The base was after all probably just as much the humans' as it was the Autobots', and he himself still felt very much like simply a guest there. But he never could manage to ignore his passion for anything relating in any way to computer technology, and the small human's little computer, however primitive it may have been by his standards had caught his interest. It was in fact, he understood quickly, perhaps the very fact that it was indeed so entirely primitive a machine, that had him so interested in the first place. And still, on his knees, he leaned over, so that he could get closer and inspect the human's machine carefully.
"This isn't the best computer in the world," the boy said, explaining. "I've upgraded everything I could on it. Still it's quite underpowered, and even a little glitchy. But one of my little sisters dropped my old one, my good one, last month and of course, she broke it. This one's good enough for now."
Soundwave, as usual, opted to say not a word. But still, in his place on the and leaning to the side, he studied the tiny screen of the laptop. And he stared with confusion through his face-shield, at a flat square made up of many smaller squares in alternating black and white, and at a series of assorted icons which the computer had seemingly placed in some logical order on top of the squares. He watched the boy, as he used the touchpad below the computer's keyboard, and seemingly he moved an icon on the screen that way.
"It's a digital chess program," the boy explained, quickly answering the question that Soundwave, in his silence had had no way of asking. The small human gave a motion of shrugging his shoulder once and then he muttered quickly. There are better ones these days. Three dimensional and far better graphics. But I like this one. Ha, I guess I just like retro."
Soundwave certainly did not play games. And watching the boy play, as he quickly understood it, against his own computer itself, he understood that it was indeed simply a game he was playing and probably for the simple enjoyment of it. On board the warship, during hours of 'down time' many of his crew-mates, anywhere from vehicon troopers to many far higher up in the ranks, were well known to enjoy a casual game of some kind or other. It was never exactly against the rules, as long as they were indeed off duty, and Soundwave had never bothered anyone about it. But he had never partaken in the activity either. It simply held no interest to him. Watching the young human play though, he began to quickly understand the basics of the game. He saw the need for some degree of skill and logic, some need for at least a decent degree of intelligence and possibly even foresight.
"I… I could probably teach you to play..." the boy offered however hesitantly.
A gesture of friendship was the very last thing he would expect from anyone, and this tiny human least of all still. It left him baffled and uneasy. And quickly he backed away from the little human he realized only then that he had moved far to close to, and just as quickly moved back underneath the computer. Instantly he set to work again, snatching up the coil of wire he had set down, and a couple of his tools with it. Quickly he was once again absorbed in his work. But just as quickly Laserbeak, still perched in the network of component cables above him, pulled his focus to her with a telepathic plea for his attention.
'Something is bothering you,' Laserbeak said over the telepathic link. It was not a question. But it didn't need to be because she knew him more than well enough to be sure without guessing.
'Assumption – negative,' Soundwave answered at once, denying.
'You lie, Boss. I see through your denial. Dare I ask what it is that bothers you out of seemingly nowhere.'
'Laserbeak. We will resume our work at once.'
'It's that Earth being. That human youngling. I'm certain of it, Boss. The interaction left you confused...'
'Laserbeak!' Soundwave exclaimed in firm telepathic warning, in a tone that he only hoped would tell her once and for all that the discussion was over. But the bird was not a slave to him, as much as so many bots would have perhaps liked to have assumed that to be true. And she had her own mind and a will just as strong as his own much of the time. Laserbeak would not be silenced when she did not wish to be, and he could never find it in his own spark to be truly angry with her for it.
Soundwave, questioning both his own judgment and his very sanity, as he had begun to more and more frequently since his defection, set down his tools again and made his way back out from underneath the computer. And this time, Laserbeak followed him, wiggling out of the wiring, and flying out behind him, before she made for the ceiling seeking a perch as soon as she was clear of the machine.
The young human sat exactly where he'd left him, cross-legged on the floor nearby and once again busy with the game he was playing against his laptop. The bot, leaned over once again, taking one more fast glance at the checkerboard pattern and the collection of digital icons on the boy's screen, and with a silent laugh the boy would never hear, he gestured once with a quick nod of his head for the tiny human to reset his game.
"We'll need to play on a much bigger computer eventually," The little human said, laughing after a while. And Soundwave actually laughed again inwardly and silent, at realizing just how ridiculous he clearly seemed, trying to interact with the tiny human-sized laptop computer.
He could not use the device himself. It was simply far too small. A single fingertip would have crushed the thing, and therefore use of the keyboard was out entirely. As was any hope of navigating around the screen with the touchpad. But watching the boy for less than a moment, listening as he explained once, Soundwave had learned an entire set of somewhat complicated game rules regarding the movements of every separate game piece on the tiny screen. And he had managed to roughly duplicate each one in his processor so that he could project them as needed, as well as a rough copy of the board itself, onto the screen of his face-shield, in order to show the boy where he wished to move his own pieces.
"Maybe Ratchet will let us play with the one upstairs," the boy suggested with a chuckle of laughter a moment later. He stared at his laptop screen, suddenly frowning, and Soundwave wondered if maybe he felt just a little too pleased with himself for having obviously trapping his tiny opponent in a position where he would lose one important game piece or other no matter what move he chose next.
"It's not used for monitoring and ground bridge work so much anymore," the boy went on. He frowned again, clearly considering which piece was best to give up, and not hurt his chances of a win later. "Not with the war finally over. Last night Knockout and Smokescreen were busy playing 'Call of Duty' on it."
Soundwave did not get the reference to the title the boy had named, though he did reason that it must have been some other game. But the very idea of such equipment used for simple entertainment when it was so recently required for war, made a positive emotion he'd not felt in long enough to almost forget he was capable of it, rise slightly in his spark. Laserbeak had made for the ceiling and the overhead beams as soon as she'd cleared the computer, and looking up now to watch her a moment, he saw her hope across the narrowest of beams in sidestepping motions designed only to be silly. And he remembered that she'd once loved to play all the time, long before he'd trained her to be serious and focused, and before he'd given her weapons and he'd taught her to shoot on command. He made her a warrior and a spy, and one day he'd stopped asking her altogether if he'd pushed her too far. Above him, high on the beam, she sidestepped again and her head rocked back and forth in time to her silly stepping and he knew that once again she'd seen his thoughts. And instead of anger toward him, she tried only to make him laugh. He remembered that she used to try exactly that all the time and she'd usually fail. He wondered now if she had ever really stopped trying, even after he'd become all but incapable of noticing entirely. He feeling rising up in his spark rose higher and finally, he put a name to the feeling. Hope.
"Soundwave..." A voice cut into his thoughts and he remembered the boy. Indeed the tiny human being was staring up at him from his position seated on the floor with the laptop when he finally looked at him again. "You okay? It… it's still your move."
'Laserbeak,' Soundwave said, transmitting direction communication to her over their telepathic link. And though he still did not laugh out loud, he certainly let her hear the silent laughter they so seldom shared anymore. 'Instruction. Calculate next logical move.'
'Negative.' Laserbeak's answer was firm, and yet the humor behind her silent voice was more than clear now. 'This is your game, boss. I may play against the Human youngling myself once he beats you.'
Soundwave had not smiled in so many years that he could not recall the last time he had. And his near-destroyed face-plate, hidden entirely from the world, was barely able to smile at all. But still, on a sudden impulse to do so, he tried his best to do so anyway.
Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break Scene Break
"Arcee," Speedbreaker commented. She shifted her weight slightly on the bench she was sitting on, in the middle of the crowded midday market, so that she could look her friend in the optics. "You look tired..."
"Well maybe a little," Arcee answered. Cybershock half sat up, facing toward her in the little simple stroller that she so rarely seemed to use for her as much as she'd figured she would. And the bright red and light blue youngling, preferring much more to ride around, carried on her creator's lap while he drove a mobility cart, fussed a little, still clearly undecided as to how she felt about this alternate transportation. Arcee, after digging around a moment in the sack stuffed underneath the stroller, handed her a toy made of links of copper chain. And the youngling, grinning then, promptly stuffed the thing as far as she could into her mouth.
"Little one kept you up last night?" Speedy questioned, quite logically, and right as Cybershock as if on cue, gave a huge yawn of a baby so obviously ready for some unplanned recharge.
"No," Arcee shook her head and glanced from her friend to her now sleepy youngling and back again. "Cybershock has always recharged all night long almost every single night." She paused to quickly grab and hand back the toy, as her little one dropped it and before it could land on the market floor. "It was that mate of mine, last night."
"Is he alright?"
"Of course. Just another bad night is all. Well okay, maybe a terrible night. A nightmare. Then a panic attack. And right on into another nightmare. I tried to talk to him about it early in the morning, well before sunrise, and before he could say anything sensible, he went into reboot… twice." But Arcee smiled then, despite her not so great news, and she chuckled a little under her intakes. "He was still determined as ever to do rehabilitation this morning. So we did of course. Yeah, that worked out…. Not so well. He's gone back to recharge and off I went shopping without him because he insisted I go on anyway."
Arcee smiled down at the younging for a moment, as she gently shifted her, in her seat, so that she lay flatter now in order to comfortably nap in the stroller. Cybershock yawned again, and Arcee chuckled as she looked from her back to her friend.
"'Bee said once that things were getting better," Speedbreaker's tone was however doubtful.
"Oh, they are," Arcee only surprised her by smiling again, as she gave a confident answer. "It might not seem like it some days, but it's still getting better all the time."
Speedbreaker watched Arcee pull the little pink sack out from under the stroller and dig through it a moment reorganizing it quickly. She pulled out at least three small assorted toys, two bottles of premixed energon formula, a blanket, a wash rag…. Finally, she stuffed the now tidier bag back into its place under the stroller, in such a way that room was left for her shopping bag she'd set down by her feet. And promptly she put that under there too. A second larger bag of shopping, one that contained yet another toy, and a second set of miniature bedding for the youngling, hung perfectly from a handlebar. Cybershock, drifting quickly into recharge, suddenly startled at a sudden loud noise somewhere behind them, as younglings tended to so often do. And Arcee instantly grabbed the stroller by one handlebar, and for a moment she rocked it gently back and forth until the youngling quickly dozed off.
A pair of bots, a blue and white one and his green and silver mate, passed close by, arm in arm with a small youngling of their own, a giggling blue and green one, riding in his own little stroller. The little one, older than Cybershock perhaps but clearly not by much, wiggled and reached from one side to the other trying so clearly hard to grab at anything he could as he was pushed slowly through the market. When the pair stopped moving a moment to talk quietly to one another, the youngling, sitting close by, watched Cybershock as she recharged in her own stroller, and he giggled at her slightly before his family moved on again. And Arcee smiled at the little on as they did so, smiling brighter then he waved one little white hand at her.
"Ratchet very recently suggested that soon we may just need to consider building an early education center to serve the needs of a city in a baby boom, nearly overrun with little bots..." Arcee mused, and tired though she may have been, she was fully energized by her growing excitement. "And he's right, I see lately. There were younglings born on those returning ships, and many are only now still first frames… Ratchet says he's seen two expecting carriers already wanting advice and checkups..."
When another bot hurried by, his arms loaded up with what was obviously a yet-to-be-assembled youngling recharging basket and a stack of tiny bed covers, and a too familiar kind of grin on his face-plate, Arcee chuckled again in Speedbreaker's direction.
"You see?" she said laughing happily. "The Allspark, it seems, is making up for lost time now that it's back on Cybertron where it belongs..."
"It would seem so," Speedbreaker said. But her tone, mumbled while she looked suddenly down to her knees, was instantly concerning.
"Speedy?" Arcee questioned cautiously. Then she stopped, waiting for her young friend to speak again, and hoping that indeed she would.
"I… I'm carrying too," Speedbreaker said after a moment.
"Oh!" Arcee's optics opened slightly wider and she quickly hid her surprise. And not a second after that she wondered why it was that she should have been surprised at all, to begin with, when she'd known full well just how likely something exactly like that was to happen.
"It's not like this is a bad thing," Speedy said after another moment's pause. "'Bee and I both knew we wanted a youngling of our own. But we wanted one someday. We wanted to time it better… get this right… get on the list for a much bigger apartment, where we could raise three, maybe four eventually. 'Bee has just started medical training. I still work in my carrier's sweet shop..."
"My situation is no more ideal," Arcee answered, reminding her of the obvious. But still she smiled as she spoke. "Severely disabled bond-mate, who if I'm honest is almost as much work to care for as the youngling is. We are still raising a child on a military base. We need housing and I know that. But I have yet to work out how that's going to work. Still, Cybershock is loved and cared for. She's usually smiling. We do that best we can and we need to believe that's more than good enough. Primus knows she's become Knockout's biggest motivation to keep on trying and trying for the next tiny bit of progress..."
"Don't tell anyone else yet and let this spread around the base. Because we both know of course it certainly would and fast. You're the first to know so far."
"It's hardly my place to go saying a thing..."
"Well you're the first to know aside from Knockout. I asked him if he'd mind seeing me the other day, since all I needed was a quick consultation and a medical scan. I told him I understand he's perfectly capable of that, when he questioned why I didn't go to Ratchet, who was obviously already triple booked and busy. 'Bee still has no idea… I was going to tell him yesterday. But he worked late, come home so tired and still insisted he needed time to study..."
"I'll tell Ratchet he had better give him the morning off tomorrow," Arcee said, her decision made at once. "You'll have plenty of time to break the good news."
"Thank you," Speedy said. Surprised but grateful for the favor. The two of them got up from the bench and made their way slowly toward a stall filled with bedding and curtains and table covers of every description, and most of it well made by hand.
"Hey, not a problem," Arcee nodded, just as happily, as she gently rocked her child's stroller back and forth while her friend browsed through a rack of various brightly colored heavy curtain panels. Indeed it was the least she could do, she reflected to herself, for the bot who might as well have been her brother, and the good friend who had enough compassion and smarts, and lacked enough ignorant judgment that she would approach Knockout as his patient without the slightest thought that there was any risk at all in doing so.
"You really think we can possibly make it?" Speedbreaker questioned, anxious again. She stepped toward the rack of heavy curtains – something she still badly needed for a tiny apartment still not half way to being decorated and furnished – and carefully she lifted a light green panel from the rack on its hanger so that she could inspect it in the light overhead.
"I know you can make it. If me and Knockout can possibly make life work and still manage to be the decent parents I finally believe we are, you and 'Bee surely have little to worry about." Arcee spoke excitedly, offering assurance while she continued to gently rock the stroller and her recharging little one. And when Speedy's optics wandered first once and then a couple more times, in the direction of a nearby market stall filled with brightly colored decor designed for tiny youngling's rooms, while she paid for the curtains she had decided to purchase, Arcee gently grabbed her by the arm and pulled her toward the stall, laughing.
"I can only hope my own youngling is as perfect as Cybershock when it comes to its personality and disposition," Speedbreaker mused. Her optics moved from her friend's calm and recharging youngling, to a stack of colorfully patterned bedding at the front of the stall they had hurried over to.
"Impossible," came the quick and laughing reply. "There will never be a child on Cybertron as perfect as mine."
"Says you!"
Arcee was about to reply with humor to that, but her commlink beeped loudly before she could even open her mouth again. And instantly considering several reasons at once why someone might call her while off duty, and none of them good, she connected the call at once.
"Arcee," Ratchet's voice saidquickly over the commlink. And his hurried tone told her it was urgent. "I'm sorry to interrupt you during your off time. But you need to return to base at once."
"Did something happen to Knockout?" she questioned just as quickly. And already she had turned the youngling stroller around ready to hurry toward the marketplace doors. He'd been tired when she'd left him, but he'd told her to go ahead and meet her friend while he simply napped awhile. With her fuel tank dropping in her frame, she wondered if perhaps he'd been unwell and hadn't known or at least not admitted to it again. Whatever it was, if Ratchet was calling her to hurry back, it had to be serious… Her tank dropped further and flipped with dread.
"He's perfectly fine," came fast assurance from the old medic. But before she had even a second to feel relieved, he continued on speaking, quickly as ever. "It's Starscream."
"What about him? On second thought, Ratchet… do I wanna know?"
"Get back to base as quickly as you can. I'll explain when you get here."