It was gone.
His red energon.
His sweet, delicious crystal.
Blurr wasn't surprised, but he allowed himself to be disappointed.
Things always moved and shuffled around the tunnels; he knew better than anyone else the logistics of getting around.
The sparklings never stopped moving.
Never stopped their mewling.
Their screaming.
Their begging.
Their starvation-filled mouths.
But his memory wasn't what it used to be.
If what little he recalled was in fact, correct.
These weren't the same tunnels he'd been trapped in, with sparklings pawing for scraps.
There wasn't a pack of sparklings gnawing at his heels, begging for energon, begging him to run - to find them some.
Blurr was dead, a ghost.
Starscream thought he didn't understand, that he was dead - crushed into a cube.
But he knew, all-to-well, unfortunately.
THE PAIN.
How it felt, to be cubed!
True, Blurr hadn't understood at first.
He'd been unable to grasp the horrible reality of his injury.
He'd only remembered bits ...understood pieces ...trapped outside of space-time.
Only after.
Reading Starscream's thoughts.
Did Blurr really remember that he was dead.
Starscream's processor was rich - loaded to the brim with thinking - always worried - always frustrated - always whirring - Starscream always projected outwards his convoluted ideas, some brand-new smattering of words - each collection more amusing than the last - Starscream's schemes and constant machinations.
'Starscream is certainly a bold creative-genius, in many respects.' Blurr huffed, sarcastically.
As for Blurr's mind-reading, it was an involuntary action - a skill which took a ghost no practice - thoughts- word-forms -ideas- there-were-simply-so-many which latched naturally onto the essence of the ethereal-plane, as easily as words upon the living wind.
"Starscream?" he asked, only to find himself completely alone, in an empty room.
His room.
Blurr was alone in it.
And that was a problem.
"Fine! IgnoreMeThen!" Blurr snarled, letting loose some untethered frustration. His emotions were surprisingly more raw and tender in his undead incorporeal-form, then any feelings he'd ever felt, swirling around within his living-processor.
'The Universe has a sense of humor.' Blurr concluded.
There wasn't much else to do as a ghost but to think, stuck in his own thoughts, his past, his floating path to nowhere.
Yet, now Blurr could see his future.
He had one.
And that was something to celebrate - no matter how gruesome - the method to obtain it was.
"This-is-disgusting!" he snarled, his voice echoed.
He placed a ghostly servo against the chlorine-blue glass of his gestation chamber.
Floating inside was his cubed-prism - a compounded pinpoint of scattered proto-form had enveloped his spark - an orange gel of nanobots were slowly rebuilding his form, peeling metal from the cube like a saltlick - nanoclick by nanoclick - particle by particle - the puzzle came together.
His spark was rebuilding himself, just for him.
How morbid.
How taboo.
It wasn't a womb by any respects.
It was purely a scientific abomination he refused to dwell upon.
But Blurr wasn't known for sitting around, being useless.
He could see his future now, running around - as if being cubed had never happened.
It was a surreal thought.
It was an intriguing vision, consuming his undead-processor quickly with an all-consuming hope of living again.
'I-can-speed-this-along-I-just-know-I-can-I-know-I-know-it-it's-SO-simple-really-just-look-look-LOOK-at-it.' Blurr placed another servo against the glass, this one quivering, charged with some sort of supernatural power which caused his false-metal to tap rapidly against the chamber.
"Come-on-grow-faster." Blurr muttered to himself. "Just-a-little-bit-quicker."
He could fix that.
Blurr plunged his servo into the chamber. Oddly, there was no noise nor feeling as he caressed his own torso, but it gave Blurr the information he'd needed. He now knew his body was suspended in an inadequate concentration of growth-liquid.
The light of his spark dimmed in and out, like a heartbeat.
It was too weak.
'It-will-take-too-long-at-this-rate-what-do-I-do?' A memory came to Blurr, but from where, he couldn't say.
"Obviously-I-need-to-speed-things-up-WITH-TIME-extra-time-and-and-time-feels-like-time-that-feels-like- speed -yes-more- speed -please." He took a deep vent, muttering to himself as his servo engulfed his protoform-laced spark.
There.
Intuitively, he knew what to do.
His supernatural power intensified - the glow of his servo boiled green and stretched outwards, engulfing the whole chamber with a neon-slime tinted bubble. The protoform around his spark, shifted from orange to green like some unhealthy infection.
Raw.
Unfiltered.
Blurr felt amazing. He'd fed his spark his excess-energy, and he already felt as if he was running free within his own frame.
For a handful of seconds he'd felt alive again, and Blurr held onto that golden feeling so terribly, so fiercely, that when it flickered away - he nearly panicked, letting out a mournful hiss as he retracted his servo - energy spent.
He'd have to get more, somehow.
'Tox-En. That's-what-I- need -to-speed-this-along.' Blurr knew that Tox-En was considered a dangerous energon-variant to cybertronians, but curiously, not to organic beings; and Blurr had figured out in his wanderings that the green crystal enriched him rather well as a ghost.
Again Blurr placed a servo against his torso, caressing lower to feel his spark-energies; despite the now-sickly appearance, he felt healthy and the experience just that moment ago made Blurr realize he could recall his memories vividly, when gripping his spark.
Again he could remember.
The feeling.
He was running with neither care nor worry, nor with a destination in mind - a rare, liberating feeling for Blurr. Before the war he'd been a courier, a messager, a sort of package delivery bot - and during the war he'd been the very same, albeit delivering out more murders and assassinations than was typically in demand. He wondered briefly, if he would still have access to his energy-chainsaw and other bladed weapons when he received his new body, but he didn't see anything familiar lining the laboratory walls.
It was unlikely Shockwave or Starscream would permit him to keep weapons.
'I'll-ask-the-sparklings-later. If-they'd-seen-my-weapons-I-NEED-them. If-NOT-perhaps-I-can-cash-in-a-favor.' Blurr thought.
Such thoughts kept him focused for once - the idea that he'd have to conspire against Shockwave and Starscream to get what he wanted out of life wasn't a novel-experience. During the war on Cybertron, they'd been allies, each a double-agent to their respective factions - delivering information which would keep the other alive.
But after dying, he doubted he'd get any respect from either Shockwave or Starscream - already they treated him like a lab-rat, some mere curiosity to decorate a corner.
He wasn't stupid enough to believe it would be different, once he was walking around in a frame again.
"AlrightBlurrFocus! No-one-else-will-do-it-for-you!" Blurr snapped at himself. He focused hard on his energies and felt his peds land onto the floor below.
He took another step.
And then another.
Each step was more focused than the last, and Blurr's peds did not carelessly sink into the floor. To allow the floor to engulf him would expose him to new thoughts and tangents, and his current goal of obtaining weapons and Tox-En was too precious towards his future to lose.
"INeedTox-En!" He reminded himself. "I-need-I-need-I-need-" Continually he muttered to himself, so direly afraid he would forget. He walked through the lab doors, proud that he'd been taking steps across the ground instead of floating as was expected of a ghost.
"Tap-tap-tap-" He muttered, finding the words ideal to keep his steps normal and perfect. The hallway extended downwards into the depths, or curved slightly upwards like a racetrack tarmac, and naturally Blurr took the path that was most familiar.
He was giddy with excitement as he walked upwards, throughout the tunnels, just happy he'd figured out how to walk again. Blurr was hoping to bump into a bot he knew in the hallway, to ask for assistance in obtaining Tox-En and weapons.
'As-long-as-I-don't-bump-into-Shockwave-or-Starscream. I-ought-to-be-okay.' Blurr had no way of knowing if he'd ever had the goals of "obtaining Tox-En and weapons" before, but he knew, that if Shockwave or Starscream found out about his ideas, they'd find a way to make him forget, and would perhaps chase him back into "his room."
He couldn't allow that.
There was also the matter of Shockwave terrifying him. A ghost's own-murderer was expected to elicit negative feelings within a ghost and Blurr was no different. If Blurr disappeared from sight, or fled into the walls from fear - there was a chance he'd forget his goals entirely.
It's not as if he possessed a solid processor anymore, to keep his thoughts rooted and consistent.
'What-if-I-find-Starscream?' Blurr could manage Starscream. He wasn't the least bit afraid of him, but the seeker could be terribly distracting and it was the type of chatty energy he couldn't afford to entertain - least he forget his goals.
"INeedTox-En." He muttered, for perhaps the one-hundredth time. He passed by closed office doors and respective hab-units. He could detect the sparks of a mech he knew, and sparklings he'd been familiar with.
But none stuck out to him as ones he'd been particularly close to.
His sparklings weren't sparkeaters.
No typically.
No.
Sergeant Kup had made sure any surviving sparklings of Blurr's grew up to be an Autobot, and had tutored each in the war-academies on Cybertron. If Blurr was to find any, any sparkling that would do Blurr a favor, it would have to be one-of-his.
But he doubted any came to Earth.
It's why Blurr was particularly hopeful he would find Kup within the tunnels. The mech was the only bot he could recall any sort of positive feelings towards, and that was important for a ghost, when asking for a favor.
Suddenly Blurr stopped walking, afraid he would lose focus enough to sink beneath the floor.
'Tox-En-First. I'll-find-that-on-my-own.' Blurr had an epiphany. He'd leave his goal of "asking for weapons" for later, when he could ask a bot he knew and not-just-an-untrustworthy-sparkeater, who would just tell everything to Shockwave - ruining everything for Blurr.
"Now-who-would-have-Tox-En?" Blurr asked himself. He was in a base littered with labs, but he knew from previous explorations most rooms were kept empty of resources and specimens - instead, anything of interest was contained on the lower-levels of the tunnels.
Blurr looked behind himself, and concluded turning around and walking back the way he'd come was a luxury his attention-span couldn't afford. He couldn't turn back and continue walking - not if he expected to remember that he needed "Tox-En."
Blurr racked his memory for the bot most likely, stationed-on-Earth, to have his coveted Tox-En. He wanted more than ever to have his spark nearby him, so he could remember said details more readily...
Eventually.
"Jetstorm." He said, out loud. "He-collects-rocks-all-the-rocks. He'd-have-Tox-En." Blurr was delighted to make some ground in his scavenger hunt. As quickly as he could step, without falling through the floor, he came to Jetstorm's hab-unit.
He phased inside easily enough, though Blurr was startled by the mess which greeted him.
"What-by-the- one -happened-here?" Jetstorm's precious rock-collection had been smashed to smithereens and Blurr could only stare dejectedly on behalf of the bot - his collection was thoroughly destroyed.
"He-must've-been-so-sad-Jetstorm- Storm -" Blurr corrected. "What-did-you- do -to-deserve-this?" Blurr didn't trust any bot down in the tunnels, except perhaps, Jetstorm. The mechling was always so kind and proper when speaking to Blurr, the ideal representative of any Autobot-soldier.
"Where-is-he?" Blurr asked haplessly. He picked through the broken specimens, with only a handful left intact upon their shelves. He'd held the slightest hope of obtaining an elusive sliver of Tox-En, but not even an avid collector like Storm would be careless enough to leave such a deadly specimen laying about in the open.
"I'd-have-to-ask-him." Blurr bitterly concluded. There was no sign of the mechling returning any-time-soon, but he could sense the spiritual-residue left by Storm's very-own-sparkeater's-spark. The mechling had been in the room recently enough, and so Blurr latched onto the energy trail, focusing more than ever on following the path, moving hunched over with his optics low to the ground like a turbofox after a petrorabbit.
"Oh! He's-the-one-who-took-my-red-energon." Blurr had come to an abandoned area of the tunnels, surprised to find Storm's mech-prints all over the earthy ground. Being incorporeal allowed Blurr the luxury of mining without tools or digging. All he had to do was to sink a servo into the earth and to pull out the coveted specimens of generic-blue energon.
And sometimes he found red ones, crystals he needed to survive if he was going to be running around in his living-frame, once again. Blurr, unlike most Cybertronians, demanded expensive-tastes.
He wasn't about to drink blue, low-grade energon.
Not if he could help it.
And so it was with a bit of anger, that Blurr kicked the box he'd tucked beneath a drill, now devoid of his treasure.
He was determined to find Storm more than ever now.
"Give-me-BACK-my-red-energon!" he screamed, and it was that righteous anger which kept Blurr going - he started walking faster after Jetstorm's spark. Blurr eventually came to outside the tunnels, and so startled he was by the revelation, that Blurr almost forget his goal of obtaining "Tox-En" altogether.
"This-place-this-planet-it's-beautiful!" Blurr took in the sights and sounds of nature with the very-same-excitement typically expected of a freshly-forged newspark. "Dirt-something?" Blurr couldn't recall the name of the planet. He would ask the very first living-person he saw, though as he walked along a growth of pine trees, each shorter-than-himself, Blurr quickly forget his simple question. Besides the trees ran a stream of crystal-clear water, which nurtured their roots and neighborly, fresh grass.
Blurr was thoroughly enamored with his surroundings.
There was so much color to be found, compared to the dusty tunnels and the empty platitudes of space.
He saw a type of bobbing creature against a pond's surface, and when he waved a servo to get its attention to ask about "Tox-En," it simply flapped away from the water on strange, delicate-green wings.
"Come-on-I-just-wanted-to-talk." Complained Blurr; but he was used to the sting of being ignored. Most bots didn't give Blurr the time of day, dead or alive.
"Come-on-anyone-else-out-here?" Blurr poked uselessly against the water, sinking a servo through the surface. His curiosity called to him, and so Blurr dipped his head underwater, only seeing muddy filth fill his optics and strange-thin, useless swimming creatures.
"Blurr?" That wasn't his voice.
Blurr was startled, his steps began to sink beneath the ground, as if he'd been standing in mud. He'd been looking for attention, but perhaps he wasn't ready for it.
"Blurr?" The voice repeated. Blurr looked around for a source but he couldn't find it.
"I'm here. It's me, Blurr."
Looking down, he saw it.
"Do-I-know-you?"
A little shadow was by his ghostly blue ped-wheel.
"It's good to see you."
Blurr huffed at the ridiculously tiny creature.
"What-are-you?"
"A beaver."