Transformers: Steel Reign

[Cynical Cat]

Deathstrike put a quick burst into Cascade's body to ensure his destruction and then burned thrusters to the shuttle. The Decepticon attack strongly suggested that the pilot was an Autobot as he claimed. "This is Deathstrike, acting for the Autobot base at the Ark. I'm here to help you. Can you respond?"

As he got closer he got a good view of the damage. Whatever else you could say about Cascade, his missile storms were murder on small spacecraft. Deathstrike transformed and entered through one of the gaps in the hull. He was a big, strong 'bot with good armour. He could take most 'bots in close quarter. Unless they were really strong like Soundwave or were armed with say an energy axe.

Okay, so that odds weren't that good.

[rhoenix]

Much more surprised than what showed on Blindside's demeanor, he uncurled quickly from the pilot's chair, still in his dire wolf form, as it would deal with impact marginally better than his others. Moving warily but quickly toward the voice, he saw the Transformer who had entered, and studied him carefully.

The one who had entered the ship had now seen him as a golden-eyed dire wolf, and Blindside shifted back into robot form almost liquidly, still meeting his gaze. His voice was calm, despite the situation. "I am the one who sent the distress call. I am relieved that it was heard."

He bowed, with his left fist covered with his right open palm. "I am Blindside."

[Cynical Cat]

"Anyone else with you?" asked Deathstrike. "This crate isn't going to last much longer."

[rhoenix]

Blindside shook his head once. "No. I am alone on this ship, and all I have with me is what you see: nothing besides myself."

[Cynical Cat]

Deathstrike decided to quote human entertainment media. "Come with me if you want to live." He grabbed Blindside and flew out a hole in the shuttle's disintegrating hull. His thrusters fired full power to break their rentry. "This is going to get hot."

[rhoenix]

Resisting the impulse to extend the claws atop his hands and feet, Blindside hung on grimly and silently, watching the shuttle fall away faster below them as they descended. He spoke again, in the same calm voice. "I am grateful, Deathstrike. Without your help I assuredly would have gone into stasis lock again with the crash, or worse."

[Cynical Cat]

A grateful Autobot. Would wonders never cease? "You're welcome," said Deathstrike.

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack bit back an exclamation at that one. Settling for a mere "Dear Primus..." between clenched speakers. Hornet was not weeping, merely sniffling back the occasional tear as he recalled, again and again, the expression on the face of the human he had impaled.

"I'd heard that the Decepticons were using humans as slaves, but reformating them..." Wheeljack looked like he wanted to spit. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised.

"Couldn't... couldn't we have... maybe captured them?" said Hornet weakly, his optic still full of tears. "And tried to fix them or something?"

Wheeljack shook his head. To be frank he had no idea IF such a thing were possible, but he knew it was important for Hornet to believe that there had been no other way. "No," he said. "There's no recovery from a reformat like that, not for organic life forms. I'm sorry Hornet, I'm sorry that you had to be the one there, but there was nothing else you could have done. Nothing at all."

Wheeljack looked up at Crimson, with a rather direct stare, and spoke with just a shade too much emphasis on the words.

"Isn't that right, Crimson?"

[LadyTevar]

Crimson, who had seen Robosmashed Autobots, answered extremely bluntly. "We'd have to take them apart just to find out what was done. We'd have to dissect dozens of the drones, if not hundreds, before we learned how to safely return them to normal." Her optics dimmed, thinking of absent friends. "Primus knows we never managed to reformat a RoboSmashed Autobots without them self-destructing, and we have full knowledge of our systems. What horrors would we be inflicting on the drones as we're trying to puzzle it out?"

[General Havoc]

Hornet's tears slowly dried up, and Wheeljack put him back down on the workbench, but the little Autobot did not look overly consoled at what Crimson and Wheeljack had said. He shook his still-incomplete head slowly.

"There had to be some other..." he said in fits and starts. "There's gotta be something else we can do for them... we can't just kill all the humans that get reformatted, can we?"

He asked in the manner of one who was afraid he already knew the answer to the question.

"I mean... if... if I got robosmashed, does that mean... you'd... you'd kill..."

The meaning of his question was obvious.

[LadyTevar]

Crimson had a glitch at that moment. There was no other way to put it, as her processor hiccuped or stalled or -something- at the thought of Hornet Robosmashed.

"Illioutkh..........."

[frigidmagi]

I transform and bend down to get a closer look at Overload. It is... Odd. I wonder for a second if prehaps Overload is playing some sort of joke with a puppet or other form of simulation. But the odds of it are low (14.77%).

I restrain the urge to poke him and finially ask.

"What... How did you end up like that?" Is really the best I can do.

[SirNitram]

Overload saluted. "No protoforms left. Teletraan rebuilt my Cybertronian form. I keep forgetting, I had been dispatched to the outer reaches before you were built."

The tiny Autobot saluted. "My trailer's being finished. It'll help me in combat. But, well. You're the war 'bot. I'm just a logistics goon. Tell me where I need to pull the ammunition, you two. And let's go pay them back for all those humans they killed."

[Charon]

"Interesting to see you like this again Overload. It's been a very long time. I was thinking of going back to an old form myself." Shellshock grinned. "Namely it's time to bring out the big guns again."

It was an old form for Shellshock, one of his first upon being brought back into action by Optimus Prime. A siege tank, meant to take down some of the most heavily defended fortifications ever made by their kind.

[rhoenix]

Deathstrike and Blindside descended, more slowly now due to Deathstrike's powerful jets. Spying some metal pieces below them, Blindside looked more closely, refocusing his vision to see more clearly. They were less than half a kilometer from the ground at this point.

"I don't see anything out of the ordinary, though I do see some of the wreckage from the shuttle," Blindside said with his usual calm voice. "I know you can't fly us both back to this Ark you call your base, but I can follow you from the ground, if you don't mind being a guide."

At this, he dropped to the ground, barely making a sound as he landed. Because the terrain was rough and rocky, he fluidly shifted into his dire wolf form, looking up at the still-descending Deathstrike.

[Cynical Cat]

"Wreckage will be scattered for hundreds of kilometers, if not more," said Deathstrike as he transformed into fighter mode and grabbed some altitude. "Transmitting planetary map to you now." There was a brief squeal and a compressed burst of data to Blindside.

[rhoenix]

Blindside was momentarily fascinated by the data in the highly detailed map Deathstrike sent, and was silent for a few seconds as he became familiar with the data.

His voice in his current wolf form was deeper, and had more than a hint of the bestial. "Thank you, Deathstrike. I'll head out to the Ark now, then. Again, you have my gratitude for your help, and I hope to see you there so we may speak further."

With that, he darted straight through the forest on a direct path to the nearest highway. Once he reached it, he looked around for observers before emerging from the brush - seeing none, he leapt into the air, transforming into his powerful Reventon form as he landed on the asphalt, quickly accelerating in his route toward the Ark.

[General Havoc]

Hornet didn't notice Crimson glitching at what he had said, for he wasn't looking up, his optic fixed on the floor as he sat on the edge of the table, swinging his feet lazily over the edge.

Wheeljack summarily picked up a spanner and stepped forward to continue his repairs. "You're not going to get killed or robosmashed, Hornet," he said, "so stop worrying about it. And I know you feel like there had to have been some other way to help those humans, but if you're going to think about it, then think it through. Crimson said you were defending the mechanics and non-combatants in the repair bay. What do you think would have happened to them if you hadn't been there to defeat those drones?"

Hornet's glanced up at Wheeljack, and his face told everyone that he knew full well what the answer was to that question.

"Now then, lay back on the table so that I can shut you down and finish fixing you up, or I'll send you back into active duty without a wing. This brought a soft smile to Hornet's face, and he scooted back onto the table and lay down. Wheeljack's musical key took only a few seconds to put him to sleep.

With Hornet fast asleep, Wheeljack sighed as he slowly undid Hornet's helmet preparatory to installing the new optic.

"So are you going to give me a lecture about how foolish it was to build him as is now, or wait until another time?" he asked Crimson.

[LadyTevar]

"So are you going to give me a lecture about how foolish it was to build him as is now, or wait until another time?" he asked Crimson.

"A couple of the Convoy worry that he needs more armor," Crimson said quietly. "Otherwise, we're just wondering how soon you'll have the teenybot repaired and back with us. I'm willing to bet Deathstrike was going to say about the same thing, if Teletran hadn't summoned him."

With Us. Not bugging us, not annoying us. With Us. They even gave him a nickname that wasn't that demeaning (and better than HotRod's nicknames.)

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack didn't reply instantly, being rather consumed with trying to attach the connectors inside Hornet's head properly, but his frame seemed to relax a bit as Crimson spoke.

"I'm... very glad that he's not made himself too intolerable of a nuisance. I know how he can get sometimes. But I wager Deathstrike was going to say a bit more than that. No doubt he was going to take me to task for having built him so small."

He paused for a second. "You understand... I simply could not build him any larger. Not yet. It would completely ruin the project he was built to test. Much as I worry, there just was no other way. Human children live in and interact with a world designed for beings larger than themselves. Hornet had to do the same. It was absolutely crucial."

He set down the tools for a moment and picked up a small piece of metal on the side of the bench. "I built Hornet out of a Polyminium alloy," he said, "for weight reasons mostly. I can't simply layer more armor onto his frame without rendering him totally unable to move, which would be even more dangerous than his present lack of armor. Recently however, I've been trying to solve the problem of his fragility, and I've come up with this."

He tossed the piece of metal to Crimson. "It's an enhanced polyminium compound inserted microscopically at high pressures into a specially-prepared ceramoplastic overlay. It's ridiculously difficult to manufacture, and it's still not as strong as regular durasteel, but it's about three times stronger than regular polyminium with barely any additional weight. I've... been considering replacing his frame and chasis with one constructed from this new material. He'll still be highly fragile certainly, but a bit less prone to simply being vaporized at the first shot of a Decepticon weapon... at least that's the theory. I call it Cerasteel."

Wheeljack chuckled. "Of course this stuff is also less conductive, which means he'll be better protected from lightning strikes. You'd think I wouldn't need to worry about those, but he seems to enjoy flying through thunderstorms... I suspect he does it to drive me crazy."

Wheeljack gestured to a piece of fuselage obviously removed from Hornet that was charred black by repeated lightning strikes. "He's come back covered in those things before."

"At any rate," said Wheeljack, turning back to Hornet. "I'm... very grateful to you and to the others in the convoy for keeping an eye on him, and I hope he behaves himself, or that you all make him behave himself. Tell them all that he'll be up and running within a few more hours."

"And..." said the Autobot engineer, hesitating a bit as he said it, "I... know this isn't something you can guarantee, and that it's not any of your responsibilities anyhow, but... if at all possible... please try to make sure he makes it back. I don't know... if something happened to him I don't know that... that I could countenance trying again..."

Wheeljack sighed and lowered his voice. "I'm getting the sense that I got luckier than I thought I had gotten with Hornet."

[LadyTevar]

Crimson followed enough of the tech-talk to see what WheelJack was talking about, examining the piece of metal as she would a fragment of ore, glancing up occassionally as WheelJack explained. The lightning-scorched metal made her chuckle, as she could see Hornet flying that high just to see if he -wouldn't- get hit that time.

The request to try to see Hornet home safely, as well as the admittance of WheelJack's fears, caused her to walk over and lay her hand on the larger bot's arm. "Yes, I'll keep watching over him," she promised. "He's a handful, but he also did more up in Canada to get the Humans and Autobots working together than anyone else up there."

She backed up, leaning against a counter, and related how Hornet and the human pilots came up to her and begged to be allowed to go play, even those pilots who'd been staring at the Autobots uneasily as they'd landed. "I almost wish you had been there ... I overheard one of the pilots ask the other if I was Hornet's maternal parent," she finished with a grin, still playing with the Cerasteel.

The sample held up rather well... she'd only just managed to crease it, possible due to the small size of the sample. It was noticeably better than the polyminium, although she wondered how a larger piece would react. "I know ores more than alloys, but if you can manufacture this, I would get started as soon as possible," she said as she handed the sample back to WheelJack. "If you have enough now, I'd replace whatever you can on Hornet. I'd not be surprised to find the Convoy's next mission already in the planning stages."

[General Havoc]

Wheeljack nodded slowly at Crimson's explanation. "Hornet likes humans in a way I don't think any of us do. It's hard to describe. In the end, we're all a thousand times more powerful than any individual human, but Hornet is small and fragile and used to taking orders, and even if he's not as small and fragile as a human is, I think he relates to them much easier than the rest of us do. Plus, humans have biological programming to cherish and protect youngsters, and I think they can recognize Hornet as such. I'm not at all surprised that they have an easier time working with him than with, say me. And well... you know how hard it is to stay angry at Hornet for any length of time. This little bot could get away with anything, and frequently does, I'm ashamed to say."

He laughed heartily at Crimson's description of the mistake that the humans had made. "I suppose I can understand their confusion," he said. "The humans are too used to thinking of things in biological terms. I hope you didn't feel the need to step on too many of them for that one."

As Crimson mentioned the alloy, Wheeljack merely shook his head. "Cerasteel is very hard to produce, and I've only just locked the formula. It doesn't bond well with other metals, so patching him with the stuff wouldn't likely work. I'm afraid I'm going to need more time to generate a full chasis and plating setup for him, so I'm afraid that if there's another mission being planned right now, he's going to have to make do with polyminium. I thought about other solutions, a forcefield maybe, or some kind of point defense system, but given his size... this was really the only thing I could conceivably make work."

He patted Hornet gently. "I haven't actually told him yet though. I was considering making it a surprise, or a reward of some kind for having done so well up in Canada. What do you think?"

[LadyTevar]

"Well, Hornet either didn't hear, or didn't understand what a 'mother' is," Crimson answered. "I have that knowledge, but I found it easier just to pretend I didn't hear the question. Either way, he had the grown pilots enjoying themselves and everyone working together as a unit far faster than merely ordering integration. Had the attack not started, I think he would have had us grounders joining in somehow."

"As for the new body? Make it a reward for him," Crimson suggested. "You may want to warn him, since he takes the idea of being reformatted so seriously. After all, you don't want him hiding because he thinks he's going to be a lamp," she teased. "But I'm keeping you from repairing him, so I'll head down and check on the rest of the Convoy. Please page me when you're about to wake Hornet?"

With a smile and a wave, Crimson left WheelJack's lab and walked down the corridor. "Teletran-1? Which Repair bay is ShellShock in?" It was a good guess that Shellshock would be with Overload and possibly others. Teletran told her, and she made her way there.

Once in, she found BreakOut and Shellshock easily, talking to that odd smaller bot she'd seen earlier. "Good news, Shellshock! WheelJack said that Hornet should be repaired within three Earth hours!" she informed the older 'bots happily. "Where's Overload, so I can tell him?"

[SirNitram]

"Youngins..." Overload laughed, looking at Crimson. Now they stood more or less level, though Overload was incredibly bulky by comparison. "Meet the original me. Some would say real me. The one who left Cybertron when you were a wee protoform, still going through your creche-initiatilization."

[LadyTevar]

Code: Select all

Analyzing vocal signature.... 99.3% match.

It was the only way that Crimson could break out of the second glitch, caused by trying to reconcile Overload with his new/old form. It was really him, despite being not even a meter taller than her own relatively diminuative height. "It ... it really is you ..." she finally managed to say.

"Hornet is going to blow a gasket."