Sari Sumdac idly twirled her security pass as Tutorbot droned about fractals, one was it fractions? Either way, she had gotten bored with the lesson and was hoping for it to end already.
She didn't notice that her dog Sparkplug had come out of sleep mode and was watching the twirling tag.
She did notice when Sparkplug grabbed the tag and took off, and ignored the tutorbot yelling for her to come back as she gave chase.
Sari ended up chasing Sparkplug all over the tower, through RD where a programmer had to roll his wheelchair out of the way.
She even ran through one of her dad's guided tours- though the kids weren't that interesting, at least compared to getting her security card back.
The chase lasted near forever, but she finally caught Sparkplug outside.
Only for cars to start talking to her and a monster to grab her.
The thing that snapped her out of her panic was the sight of robots where the talking cars had been.
Something inside of her said she knew them, but she didn't know how. The female looking gold and red one threw two hatchets to cut the tentacle holding Sari, who landed in the arms of the yellow robot. (Sari had no idea, but that robot was going to be her best friend and partner in crime for life.)
"I'm Bumblebee. What's your name?" He asked her.
"I'm Sari."
"Don't be, I like my name." Bumblebee smiled at her, and Sari giggled.
"No that's my name. S-A-R-I. It just sounds like the apology. Where are you from?"
"Cybertron. I'm an Autobot."
"I'm a human and we call our planet Earth." She sat up, and he very gently moved his hands to accommodate her. "Why are you on our planet?"
"We crash landed in that body of water a while back. We just woke up- are these friends of yours?" He asked, noticing the police drones hovering around them.
"Not really."
"Well, I've got to get back to the others. You'll be safe in here, right?" He didn't wait for her to answer, just gently set her down before electrocuting the drones.
Sari's eyes were wide in awe. "He's so cool!" She ran to get a better view of the fight.
By the time she got to the roof, it was to watch Bumblebee jumping into the creature's teeth lined mouth.
"Bumblebee!" Sari yelled in shock.
Below her, the blue robot that looked like a girl looked up at her yell.
Which was right when the monster exploded into goo and Sari had to race back down the stairs to check on Bumblebee.
Aliens were cooler than math any day of the week. Especially when she was able to check out their space ship.
Though Bumblebee lost a few points by tossing her down a chute.
She didn't mean to activate the weird box and reveal the shiny thing inside.
Images flashed before her eyes, a metal the ship she was on, the bots on the crew, a few bots that definitely weren't and then she suddenly felt sad as she saw a bot with a blue helmet whose colors darkened and optics turned purple and then there were scarier bots.
It made her think of her planet, her dad and his robotics, and the lessons she had been learning.
"Wait, are we talking?" Sari asked the shiny ball.
In answer, a beam of light hit her I.D. tag and changed it into a key, before going back to being inert.
"What the- whoa!" Sari was picked up by the bot Bumblebee had said was his boss, Elita Prime.
"I'm guessing you're the reason why Bumblebee is acting odd?"
"Can I keep it?" Bumblebee asked.
"I'm a 'she' not an it!" Sari huffed- although she guessed Giant robots might have a different idea of gender. "I'm Sari!"
"Sorry for what?" Elita Prime looked at her oddly. "I think our language codes might be at odds."
"Actually her name just sounds like the apology." Bumblebee took her back from Elita.
The rest of the conversation got derailed before it could continue, with Elita and Bumblebee reacting to something and returning to the room where the unconscious bot was.
It didn't look good, and Sari didn't mean to yelp when the key started to glow and pull her to the table the bot was laying on.
Apparently, her key could fix robots, which was cool.
"I suppose proper introductions are in order. I'm Elita Prime, you've met Bumblebee. You're standing on Prowl, that's Chromia," Elita pointed to the blue female looking robot, who waved. "Bulkhead," the big green bot also waved, "and Ratchet." The ambulance bot grunted.
"I'm Sari Sumdac! S-A-R-I, not S-O-R-R-Y. Thanks for saving me earlier!" Sari glanced up Prowl, who was quietly studying her. "I'm glad you're okay."
Prowl might have smiled at her, but she wasn't sure. He didn't seem to mind her standing on him, at least.
"Where did you get that key?" Ratchet asked.
"The weird box with the glowy thing inside did it, This was my security card for my dad's building." Sari shrugged. "It was weird, it showed me a bunch of pictures and I think it read my mind, and then it made this key."
"The Allspark made it?"
"That's weird, right? Why would it talk to an organic?" Chromia asked.
"More importantly, we should consider how to get Sari back to her kind- last I heard, organics don't like it when their younglings go missing." Elita gingerly picked up Sari. "They might attack us to get her back."
"I can introduce you to my dad! It'll be okay!" Sari assured her. "I won't tell him about the shiny thing!"
Of course, the grumpy police captain wasn't happy, but he was always grumpy when he had to talk to her dad.
Elita had never planned to be command track. Her focus had always been science.
Diplomacy had been part of Optimus and Sentinel's training, not hers.
Think like Optimus. Optimus treated everyone with the same polite manner. He made one feel like he was listening to only them, and that they were important.
"Thank you for seeing me, Mayor, Professor Sumdac, Captain Fanzone. I have some questions about the rules and regulations you operate by. We seem to have had some ... misunderstandings." Elita was relieved that, other than a brief grumble, Captain Fanzone explained how the 'rules of the road' worked.
"Now, we'll dismiss the tickets that have been written, and give you all a week to take driving tests. After that, should you get a ticket, we expect you to pay the fine." The Captain scowled at her.
"Of course, which leads me to the next question- how? I don't think our credits are very good here."
"Get a job." Was the Captain's unhelpful answer.
"I will pay the fines, should any occur." Professor Sumdac offered.
"If I may offer a counter offer- while we are happy to continue to help with rescue work, myself and Bulkhead are trained technicians. Perhaps we can do some work for you in exchange? Your daughter has offered one of your old factories as a base for us, and I don't want to rely too heavily on your charity." Elita hoped that came out right.
"Of course!" Professor Sumdac agreed. "I have an unused factory?" He blinked.
Fanzone smacked himself in the face. "And you wonder why I worry." The Captain said to the Mayor, who merely frowned at him. "Sorry Sir."
"Well, if you need a place to stay, it's yours." Professor Sumdac assured her. "You'll need the address for the liscenses ... or should we be getting you visas?"
"We do have cybertronian identification."
The meeting lasted for a while, including calls to other authorities to clear her team to stay on planet.
She ended up with a lot of reading material to go over and forms to fill out.
"This place is amazing!" Chromia crowed. Elita was startled out of her reading as the blue pick-up pulled in. "The styles, the mods ... why were we told to stay away from Organics?"
"From what I've learned, something happened to cause the ban. We used to have contact with organic planets, including trade agreements. It just, all ends right before the war ended." Elita leaned back. "I can't find anything about why, though."
"Don't look at me, I never left Cybertron." Ratchet finished moving a barrel. "What are you working on, Prime?"
"Going over road laws and getting us drivers licenses. I don't want to cause too much trouble with Captain Fanzone. Especially after that no parking issue." Elita watched as Ratchet scoffed and looked away. "I've also got Bulkhead and myself jobs at Sumdac Tower, so we'll have money for any fines we do occur."
"Bulkhead? Why him?"
"Because he's the foremost authority on Spacebridges, and maybe he can scale them down to just groundbridges for the humans."
That got everyone's attention, even Prowl's.
"What?"
Bulkhead looked embarrassed by the sudden scrutiny.
"His job was to check over the programming for the spacebridges we repaired." Elita explained. Optimus would have been thorough in reading about his crew, and while Prowl and Ratchet had blank spots in their files from censors, Bumblebee and Bulkhead had the shortest files to read, but Bulkhead was the most interesting.
(Optimus was right, you really couldn't judge someone on their first impression.)
"Oh yeah, you mentioned something like that." Bumblebee muttered. "Try not to fry your circuits like Prowl, too much thinking isn't good for you."
"Neither is too little." Prowl sniped at Bumblebee before disappearing.
All in all, the team was settling in. Bumblebee and Sari were usually off together, Chromia was constantly exploring the city and had oddly enough started taking Sparkplug, Sari's robotic dog, with her on these outings. (Sari didn't mind, though when the four of them explored the zoo it caused a little trouble.) Ratchet worked to get a second medbay together in their new home, Bulkhead was struggling to adapt to how fragile everything was, but he was enjoying talking to the humans at Sumdac tower, particularly one who was in a wheelchair.
Helping the city out during fires and foiling a few robberies had earned them quite a bit of good will as well.
Though Elita wouldn't go so far as calling them heroes, they were just helping, and she was pretending to be like Optimus.
He would have loved this.
Of course, just as she was starting to enjoy the air show, one broke off and attacked them.
Starscream was very amused. These Autobots were clearly softsparked, caring for these organic lifeforms.
Though they were pretty clever. Not clever enough for him to spare them, but enough that their deaths would be merely agonizing instead of excruciating.
The femme that lead them was just to stubborn to quit, attacking him with hatchets and even her plain servoes.
"You want to be a hero? Protector of the Allspark?!" He sneered.
"I won't let you use the Allspark for a weapon!" She glared back.
"I'll start by taking your spark!"
The Allspark glowed, reacting to their tug of war. It would be a battle of wills for who would survive.
To his horror, Starscream felt his spark flicker. The Allspark blasting him away in response to his lapse in concentration.
Elita wasn't built for heavy lifting, neither was the lone energon hatchet digging into the floating advertising board. As she fell, Elita tried to launch the grappler and to her horror it missed.
For a split second, she flashed back to the moment her grapple had disappeared on Arachna 7. Optimus's voice yelling her name. (He wasn't there to catch her this time.)
As she fell, a dozen thoughts flashed through her mind. Repairing her ship, hoping none of her team were in danger of Starscream's retaliation, anger that Sentinel had to be the aft head that Optimus had initially said he was... when she impacted into the ground, her thoughts focused on Optimus, had this been what he'd gone through?
Her body was broken, something had ruptured... but she was still conscious. (Had Optimus been conscious when he hit?) She heard engines pulling up.
"Elita!" Sari, Chromia and Bee called her, she tried to move.
"Ratchet!" Chromia yelled.
"Kid, you ..." Ratchet was there, but she already knew what was wrong.
"It's okay ..." Elita managed, then everything went dark.
There was a flash of light, and Elita was almost disappointed to see that she was back. (A part of her wished she had been able to see Optimus.)
Almost, because Sari was in tears and Bumblebee and Chromia were equally distressed by her death and resurrection, and she felt bad for putting them through that.
"Welcome back, Prime." Ratchet and Prowl helped her stand up.
The normally stoic Ninja echoed the sentiment.
"How long was I out?" She didn't feel hurt at all, but a part of her still felt like she should be more hurt than she was.
"Not that long."
"Alright, let's get back to the base and the Allspark back to the ship. Bulkhead, you're transport for the Allspark. Prowl, Chromia need you to go with him and keep an optic out in case Starscream tries to come back, Ratchet and I will talk to Captain Fanzone. Sari, Bumblebee will get you back to your father."
"Kid ..." Ratchet started, then stopped.
"I'm okay, Ratchet." Elita assured him, and smiled. "You wouldn't last a week without me."
"Hmph." Ratchet followed her lead, a world of things left unsaid.
"So, that was scarier than Megatron attacking." Chromia spoke up as they drove to the ship. "I never thought Elita could get hurt, let alone..." she trailed off.
"Yeah, me neither." Bulkhead agreed.
"Leaders are usually the ones that face the most danger, especially those that protect their team." Prowl wondered what Yoketron would have thought of Sari bringing back Prime. Selfishly, he was glad that she had returned. They needed a leader, none of them were qualified.
"Do you think Ratchet will give me an upgrade? I don't have any mods at all." Chromia admitted. "And if Starscream or other decepticons comeback for the Allspark... all I can do is drive and some servo to servo."
"... I can show you all some things." Prowl wasn't going to be able to take any of them as students, but if it was to keep them safe, perhaps Yoketron would forgive him sharing some things.
"Thanks Prowl. We need to get better so we don't let Elita offline again." Chromia was not going through that again.
A few light years away, a small ship tracked the Allspark energy surge.
"Well, Nemesis, we've found the Allspark- let's go get it and see what I can create with its power." Tarantulas cackled.
"I bet I can get it easier than you can." Flamewar made her presence known.
"You're still here? I thought I had Nemesis throw you out of the ship."
"You did." Flamewar glared at him.
Nemesis ignored them both as he piloted the ship.