robothell | [ INTRO LOG ]

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You don't know how you got here. One minute you were walking, sleeping, maybe dead -- then you're here, your feet suddenly carrying you down an empty street. Where's here?

Any Cybertronian would recognize this as their home planet, Cybertron, but it's not a Cybertron they've ever known. It has all the familiar hallmarks, but none of the specifics -- the city isn't one anyone here could identify, and even at a glance it's obvious that no one's set foot on the planet's surface in hundreds of years. The city and its surrounding areas all bear the marks of devastating war, of dust and rust collected over centuries. With no one in sight -- right at first, anyway -- there's plenty to explore. In fact, if you start walking, you'll find that your feet may just carry you in one particular direction.

A) The crater.
On one edge of the city is a massive crater left by some wartime weapon that seems to have taken out a large chunk of the surrounding metropolitan area. At the center of the crater it's broken through the surface of the terrain to reveal what looks like it might be a promising energon deposit. There is some strange but native vegetation growing around the edges, too, that no Cybertronian would be able to identify -- small, metallic, brittle-looking sprouts that bear a curiously organic-looking fruit of some kind that doesn't look like it's intended for consumption by any natives of the planet. In one rocky nook of the crater, light catches on the surface of a pool of water, which seems strangely out of place on Cybertron. On closer inspection, it seems that somehow an underground water source has formed a spring in the crater.

B) The center of the city.
If you follow where your feet seem to want to carry you, you'll find yourself in the middle of the ruined city. It seems that the center of the city was once home to a massive forum, and some of the pillars and structures still stand. At the very center of the forum is a massive, elaborately constructed fountain, although it has now long since run dry of whatever used to fill it. One of the low, inner walls of the forum has a terminal embedded in its surface, although it looks curiously ancient, out of place with the rest of the city, and unlike the rest of the technology still left around, there doesn't seem to be any way to power it on or operate it. There are a few scattered pools of water and a few of the strange metallic plants in the city, too, but they're not quite as plentiful as in the crater.

The planet was obviously once home to a massive network of communication relays, but those have all been long since destroyed. However, with the bits and pieces left behind and a few determined minds, it wouldn't be too hard to build a working, if rudimentary, one...

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Other 'bots might be hesitant to a approach a guy carrying fourteen swords and standing dramatically on a (small, admittedly) cliff. Not Nautica. She jogged right up to the base of Drift's rock to say hello, wrench in one hand and Brainstorm's briefcase in the other.

"Drift, isn't it?" It seemed rude to point out he was dead.

Hey, he's got company. Drift turns to glance at the other mech and greet him in turn, except...it's not anyone he's ever met before. Drift cycles through a few possibilities in his mind for a second there but he's pretty sure he's never met this person before. He blinks in surprise before offering a friendly smile and a hand, half-shrugging.

"Yeah, that'd be me. I don't think we've met before, ah..." Drift glances down and sees the briefcase, and he frowns slightly in thought. "Funny, someone I know has that exact same briefcase."

"I'm a friend of Rodimus. And Brainstorm." Nautica held up the briefcase to illustrate. He wouldn't let just anyone carry that--never mind that she found it abandoned with the locks forced on the floor of a derelict Lost Light. Details could wait.

She tucked the wrench under her briefcase arm to free up a hand and accept Drift's. "My name's Nautica."

Wait, a friend of Rodimus's? Drift thought he'd have heard of the guy, but the name's totally foreign to him. He accepts Nautica's hand with a friendly half-smile all the same, though, even as his optics narrow in slight confusion, glancing back down at the briefcase.

"Oh! Nice to meet you, then, N -- I'm sorry, that's Brainstorm's briefcase? I thought he never took that off."

"Swerve makes him leave it outside the bar, but I think he locks it in some kind of exploding safe in his lab." You know, as one does. "Anyway, I found it in the lift right before I got here. Things have been...well, 'crazy' is not an exaggeration."

She looked at the empty planet around them. It wasn't an exception to that rule, but at least nothing was disappearing, exploding, or yelling.

"Yeah, Swerve does tend to be a little -- wait, are you -- are you on the Lost Light?"

Drift's looking just a tiny bit alarmed that he didn't know this already, and terribly, terribly confused. Take pity on him, Nautica. It's been a very long day for Drift.

"Yes, I--" Wow, he looked lost. "Um. I joined the crew after you left. I think there's some time travel happening."

Fortunately, she won't be able to ruin his day any further with details, because apparently Nautica managed to be on the Lost Light for months without finding out much of anything about the first leg of its trip.

After he left. Right. Drift knows about that, sort of, although he most certainly doesn't know the whole truth. He looks a little lost for a moment, before he tries to brighten up with a smile.

"Yeah, so I've heard," he says, rubbing at the back of his helm. "Sorry, this is all -- really disorienting. It is nice to meet you, though, Nautica, even if isn't under the most, uh..." Hm. "...well, it could be under better circumstances."

"It could also be worse. Nobody's tried to kill us yet." From almost anyone else, that would have been a joke, but Nautica was completely serious. She'd nearly been killed in the last year or so of her life more often than in all the millions that had preceded it.

"Yet," Drift agrees, half-smiling, but Nautica isn't laughing -- and honestly, neither is he. Yet is definitely the operative word in that sentence. He puts a hand on the hilt of one of his swords and glances around, for good measure. The gesture is a little dramatic, let's be real.

"Still, it's not ideal. We're stranded here, as far as I know -- and I think we've all come to the consensus that this isn't the Cybertron we know. That leaves a lot of unanswered questions."

Saying that Nautica 'knew' Cybertron would be an overstatement, but this place certainly didn't look like the part she'd spent a few months on, that much was true--not that she should be anyone's go-to person on noticing things that didn't involve machines or academia. Things like Drift's tendency to dramatize, for example.

"I'm not convinced we're stranded," she said, flipping open the panel on her wrench to do more scans, but it's going to take a lot of work to get home, even so."

"Well -- we're a little stranded," Drift says, but he's peering interestedly at her wrench. "I'd hope it's not permanent, but I have a feeling we're all here for a reason. Besides, crossing dimensions -- alternate timelines, maybe -- that's not a simple matter. That's not an ordinary wrench, is it?"

"It used to be, but then Stormy upgraded it," she said, gleeful, questions of Cybertron and fate immediately forgotten. If Nautica had to choose between her wrench and a crewmate, she would not make the correct decision quite as quickly as one might hope.

"Now it does everything." A light next to the screen went on. "...Including showing when I'm exaggerating."

It is becoming increasingly apparent to Drift that he has missed a lot.

"Stormy?" Drift gives her a look that's part skepticism, part pure bafflement. "Brainstorm. Right. I don't think I've ever seen him produce anything that didn't have a gun in it...wait, there aren't guns in it, are there? ...Does he know you call him that?"

"Of course he does," she said with smile. Whether he liked it or not was another question, though given Nautica's cheerful willingness to tell him he was a genius more or less on demand, he was probably at least okay with it. Besides, there was no reason she'd pay any more attention to him grousing about a nickname than she would to him grousing about the universe's ingratitude to him personally. "And there's a weapons menu, but I haven't opened it yet."

Which she now proceeded to do, and scrolled through it, eyes getting wider and wider. "...Oh, goodness, I don't know what half these things even do."

"Did it come with an instruction manual? Because I'd recommend checking that."

Drift doesn't actually believe that Brainstorm would bother with something like an instruction manual, let alone a warning label, but honestly, he just doesn't want Nautica to start playing around with Brainstorm-grade weaponry right here on the spot. She seems rather sensible at a glance, but then again, she's also friends with Brainstorm, so you never know.

She also seems pretty cheerful and pleasant, though, and despite the strangeness of their first meeting Drift finds himself rather liking her. "So you work with Brainstorm and Perceptor on the Lost Light, then?"

"Stormy doesn't write instructions. He just makes ominous pronouncements of certain doom if you don--oh, this one says 'watch your downrange' and has a winky face next to it." Nautica blinked. "Um. Maybe I'll worry about that later."

Nautica snapped the panel closed, somewhat more disturbed about Brainstorm's general Brainstorm-ness than usual. "I'm an engineer, so I spend more time in the engine room than the labs, but we collaborate."

Drift's optics go wide and he's glad that Nautica snaps that panel shut when she does because talk about crisis averted. Nuclear crisis, more like.

"Oh! That'd explain the wrench, then," Drift notes cheerfully. "...Sans ordnance, anyway. Glad to hear the crew's got a dedicated engineer back there now -- it's just too bad you weren't there at launch." He figures Nautica's heard about that fiasco by now. "So how'd you come to join the crew, then?"

She'd heard, but much later than you'd think for the person who'd taken over responsibility for the quantum engines in question. When it came to obliviousness, Nautica did not mess around.

"Brilliant as Brainstorm and Perceptor are, yeah, it sounds like you could have used an engineer. Quantum drives can be tricky." What with the counterintuitive violations of the laws of physics and all.

"I signed on during the trial. Megatron becoming co-Captain was a bit of a surprise, I'll be honest, but he's done quite well." Nautica had no strong opinion on the command structure of the Lost Light. Everything seemed to be working fine. Plus the mandatory study groups had endeared him to her (and no one else.)

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