The base camp Blade Runner put together using the cave wasn't the prettiest, but after a week of living out of it and organizing things to her liking, it was starting to feel reasonably homey. Comfy even. She'd found an energon scanner in a small survival kit aboard the ship's wreckage and was relieved to discover the presence of energon on the planet. Of course there had to be since Decepticons were roaming around; they'd investigated the crash site almost immediately after she abandoned it, as she knew they would. Relatively nearby there were merely small pockets here and there, but thankfully just enough for a bot to survive.
She discovered the planet's name was "Earth" and that its dominant species were organic bipeds called "Humans". Blade Runner was in the process of studying them — as any competent spy or infiltrator would do — and took the form of one of their vehicles to properly maintain camouflage. According to her research, they were a primitive species that had yet to make contact with otherworldly civilizations, which meant neither the Decepticons nor Autobots had made contact with them as a whole. She deemed it best not to be the first to do so. Besides that, she'd learned a great deal about their cultures and their rules in the brief period she'd spent looking into the planet.
All things considered, she was rather pleased with what she'd managed to accomplish.
Blade Runner stepped outside and looked up at the clouds that now covered the late afternoon sky. Tiny droplets of water began to fall, very few at first, but they gradually became more frequent. She was glad she'd read about Earth's rain or she might've reflexively ran for cover at first sight of it; Cybertron's rain consisted of acid strong enough to disintegrate anybot unlucky enough to find themselves caught outside in it. She rather enjoyed the rain here; it felt cool and refreshing against her metal skin, and it reminded her of her home planet before eons of war and pollution had poisoned its atmosphere.
Blade Runner glanced back inside the cave at her current energon reserves. It would probably be a good idea to look for more, and sooner was usually better than later. Besides, it was nice out.
Grabbing the energon scanner, the fembot transformed into her new purple Stingray vehicle mode and drove off toward the nearest ping.
She transformed again upon reaching a forest, the trees becoming too close together and the ground too uneven to drive through it. After a few minutes of walking, she paused to give the scanner a puzzled stare. It was strange; the signal appeared to be slowly moving — almost aimlessly — across the small screen. It wasn't her imagination and she was sure the scanner wasn't malfunctioning. Could it be another transformer?
She hesitated, optics moving up from the device to examine her surroundings. She could barely see more than fifteen meters in front of her due to the brush and increasingly heavy rain. Whoever it was, they were closer to her base camp than she would like. Blade Runner hummed indecisively as she returned her gaze to the scanner. According to the readings, there appeared to only be one. She could take one measly bot if it came down to it. However, killing them could reveal her presence to anyone tracking their position, and that was the last thing she wanted. After some brief inner deliberation, she finally decided to investigate. Cautiously.
The sticks and leaves littering the forest floor made it difficult to sneak around, but Blade Runner did her best as she moved closer to the signal. She froze when she heard brush crackling slightly northwest of her position, but calmed down when she saw a deer bound out of the bushes and run past her. She made to go slightly the other way but gasped and jumped back when she was suddenly met with a bright pink fembot.
Blade Runner was extremely surprised that she had heard the deer, but not another Cybertronian walking around so close to her. A high-pitched yelp escaped the fembot's vocalizer and almost immediately she transformed her arm into a blaster and shot three rounds at Blade Runner's head. Blade Runner reacted on instinct and leapt to the side, then kicked her leg up and knocked the stranger's arm away, causing her to stumble back and momentarily lose balance. She moved to take that opportunity to knock her opponent onto her back, but the pink fembot quickly regained her footing and dodged the attempted blows. The fembot responded in kind, throwing her own punches and kicks.
Blade Runner blocked them easily; it appeared she knew how to fight, but the execution of her movements was beyond amateurish compared to her many millennia of experience. She decided there was no point in dragging this out; it didn't seem like anyone else was around and she wasn't detecting any Decepticon or Autobot signals.
Blade Runner came in close and brought her knee up hard into the fembot's abdomen, then brought it down to hook behind her opponent's leg and sweep it out from under her before shoving her forcefully onto her backside. A blink later and she had her foot over the other's neck, a long blade ejecting from her calf that reached down past her heel, ready to end the fight with a quick slice to the throat.
But she hesitated. Blade Runner briefly examined the fembot's body; there didn't seem to be any sign of an insignia anywhere. It was unlikely she was a neutral with the whole fragging Nemesis flying around, and if she were a renegade there'd be at least some sort of imprint or remnant from her previous faction somewhere. She narrowed her optics at the stranger and was about to open her mouth to interrogate her, but the pink fembot beat her to it.
"Let me go! I'm not going back!" She shouted and struggled beneath the foot at her throat.
Blade Runner raised an optic ridge. "Back?"
The visor that had been covering the fembot's face suddenly retracted, revealing a pair of large, bright blue optics. Her gaze moved directly to Blade Runner's Decepticon insignia, filled with both fear and disgust. "Back with them!"
Blade Runner scoffed. "You an Autobot?"
"I don't know what that is! I don't want to kill anyone!" She grasped at her captor's leg and began to struggle more desperately.
How was that even possible? Her disdain for Decepticons was apparent from her expression, though she didn't appear to have a word for them. How could a Cybertronian not know what an Autobot or Decepticon was? It didn't make any sense. For a moment, Blade Runner considered that the fembot might be lying, but she quickly dismissed the idea. She was usually very good at being able to tell if a bot was lying or not, and until this very moment, she'd never encountered a person so... genuine sounding.
"Who are you?"
The fembot paused before replying, "My name is Glitch."
Blade Runner tried to maintain her seriousness, but after hearing that, she couldn't help but snort out a laugh. "You're joking, right?"
"No?" Glitch's optic brows furrowed. "Why are you laughing?"
"Never mind that, kid," Blade Runner said as she regained her composure. This young bot was no threat to her. "I'm not one of them, you don't need to worry. But you shouldn't sneak up on people like that, you startled me. I'm gonna move my foot now, alright?" Glitch nodded slowly and she carefully lifted her foot away, retracting the blade as it made contact with the dirt again. She offered a hand to help the other off the ground, which was taken hesitantly. The pink fembot was a good head shorter than her at her full height. "You lost?"
Glitch momentarily glanced back in the direction she came. "Kind of... I didn't really have a destination in mind."
"So you're a rogue? You ran away from these guys?" Blade Runner pointed to her insignia and received a nod in response. She noticed a small tremble in the other's appendages, suggesting overexertion. "How long have you been out here?"
Another pause. "I dunno. A couple days."
"Strange, that's not long at all. Your hands are shaking. Are you hurt anywhere?" She inquired, even though she saw no signs of leakage. Glitch shook her head.
Blade Runner put a hand on her chin as she mulled over her next course of action. She thought about taking Glitch with her and weighed the risks in doing so. It didn't seem like she was being tracked, but then again, looks could be deceiving. But the young bot seemed innocent enough, and by the looks of her, she clearly needed help. Perhaps she could spare her a little energon, then send her on her way.
"Well... why don't you come with me for a bit? I've got shelter, you can get yourself sorted there." Blade Runner began to walk back towards base camp but looked back when she didn't hear any footsteps behind her. Glitch stood right where she had left her, distress clear in her eyes. "You coming?"
The rain poured over her face when she glanced up, brows furrowed gravely. "You won't lie, will you?" She said finally, her voice quiet and filled with uncertainty. Blade Runner frowned. What had the Decepticons done to this poor kid?
"I won't lie. You're safe, Glitch."
Glitch hesitated as she appeared to be searching Blade Runner's optics for any hint of sincerity. She nodded finally, then took slow, wobbly steps as she began to follow. "What's your name?" She asked after a moment.
"Blade Runner."
Glitch looked around Blade Runner's little camp with fascination, as it wasn't anything like her birthplace. The cave was quaint and cozy, and each item it contained was stashed neatly in a row at the back wall. She went inside to get out of the rain, as well as sit down; having no built-up stamina, she had to stop to rest frequently during her vagabondage and was presently exhausted. As the clouded sky slowly began to dim, Blade Runner lit a fire in a dug-out pit near the entrance.
"For light. I don't want to waste energon," the purple bot explained. Glitch was mesmerized by the warm yellow flickers. She'd never seen anything like it. Inching closer to it, she put her hands close enough to touch the flames. The heat felt good, and it dried the water that dripped from her appendages.
Blade Runner gave her temporary houseguest a cursory glance, before fixing her gaze on her strange optics. They were suspiciously familiar. "Do you have any Autobot relatives?" She inquired finally as she sat across from her.
Glitch looked up. "I don't know."
"You look like someone I know," she continued. "Where'd you come from?"
"I..." Glitch began and then paused briefly. She wasn't sure what to say at first but articulated the best description she could think of. "I came online in a dark place. Big, with lots of hallways and rooms," she said, gesturing size with her hands.
"The Nemesis?"
She shrugged before continuing, "Knockout was there, with Breakdown and Steve. They said they were my friends, but they let a creepy skinny guy named Starscream take me with more Steves through a big swirly light," another wide hand gesture.
Blade Runner tilted her head, a befuddled look on her face at Glitch's choice of words. "You mean a ground bridge?"
Glitch shrugged again. "And then we got attacked by some people and everyone died except me. So I ran away." Her optics turned down to the stone floor of the cave. "Starscream wanted me to hurt people. I don't want to hurt people."
Blade Runner shook her head, having trouble understanding. "What about before all that? Like back on Cybertron?"
"There is no before. That's it," she responded matter-of-factly. "Knockout kept calling me 243. I'm not sure why."
The things Glitch was saying had rather unpleasant implications. Only experiments and clones had numerical designations; bot-created abominations, things considered lesser beings. The Decepticons hadn't done anything that involved tampering with Cybertronian biology for megacycles, what could've possessed them to start again? And what exactly had Glitch been built for?
Blade Runner inwardly scowled. In all likelihood, Starscream merely found something new to abuse. If what he assigned her to do was actually the thing she was meant for, she probably wouldn't have failed as miserably as she did and deserted. She hated the whole idea of living bots forged as a result of experimentation. They were almost always mistreated, then squeezed for all they were worth before being thrown away when deemed no longer useful. It reminded her of the way people were treated back when the caste system was in place on Cybertron, worse even. Over time, the Decepticons had become exactly what they vowed to fight against: tyrants. The thought sickened her.
"I see..." Blade Runner said. She reached for a container holding a portion of the energon she had gathered and refined using the ship's onboard survival kit, then handed it to Glitch. "Drink that. You seem pretty low on energy."
Glitch stared at the glowing blue liquid for a moment, giving it and then Blade Runner a short eyebrow raise. Had she really not been given any fuel since her activation? After a moment, she began to sip at it. A sigh of relief followed and her sips quickly turned into gulps. Glitch sent her companion a cheerful smile for the first time since meeting her. "Thank you. I feel a lot better now," she said gratefully.
Blade Runner nodded and turned her attention to the fire. She felt sorry for the poor kid, there was really nowhere she could go that wouldn't get her sucked into the war. Unless she was secretly a spacer, there was no way for her to get off this rock. And even if she was, where would she go then? Glitch was as ignorant as a sparkling. She supposed that in a way, she was one.
Blade Runner considered allowing her to stay. Perhaps she could use a companion if she was going to remain on the planet long term, and you never know when you might need a helping hand. There was, however, the matter of her limited energon supply. She didn't have enough. If Glitch were to help with collecting, it would cut her work in half and yield more in less time. However, that only meant that the small pockets nearby would run dry quicker, and she wanted to avoid having to infiltrate an active Decepticon mine. In addition, there was no telling how long her travel-sized energon refiner would last with the amount of usage it needed to endure. She supposed she knew that it was only a short-term solution to begin with, but Glitch's presence would cut the time she had to devise a new survival plan down by half.
If it really became an inconvenience, she figured she could get rid of her any time. But for once the thought didn't quite sit well with her. She decided not to worry about that for now. She'd lived through much worse, and starvation wasn't exactly a new experience for her. She could figure this out.
"Listen, kid," Blade Runner began again after a long while, "you can stay here if you don't have anywhere else to go. I won't stop you from leaving any time you want to, but your situation right now is less than ideal."
Glitch looked outside. It was dark now, but the rain still poured over the mouth of the cave. "I don't know," she said quietly. She wasn't sure of anything at this point. All she knew was that she had a lot of learning to do, and continuously running away was not going to get her anywhere fast. Not in the way she wanted. Maybe Blade Runner would be willing to help teach her, help her "wise up" so to speak. After a minute or two, she turned back to the other fembot. "Could you teach me about the things I don't know?"
"What else is there to teach?" Blade Runner chuckled. Glitch's brows furrowed at her wisecrack. "Yeah, I'll do my best."
Glitch nodded, satisfied. "Okay. I'll stay if you don't mind." She received a small smile in return.
"Rest up then."