robothell | [ INTRO LOG ]

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[ INTRO LOG ]

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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All right, color Drift impressed. And...confused. Last he'd heard humans weren't all that advanced, but as far as he's concerned she's speaking Perceptor. Drift files all that away carefully to ask Perceptor or Brainstorm about later, but he decides it's probably not all that relevant right now, anyway.

"It's too bad we're not on the Lost Light, or else I'd take you right to the lab," Drift muses, tilting his head slightly as he considers Val. Well -- Cybertron or Earth, if there are humans around in need of help, he might as well. "I'm Drift, by the way. As far as I can tell none of us have any idea how we go there, so I guess you're in the same boat as the rest of us."

"Valeria Richards." She looked down at Drift's palm, where her feet were reasonably firmly planted. A handshake seemed out of the question. "If you have the tech--and judging by that console, it looks like you do--I can build a teleporter or hyperdrive and get everybody home. Or at least an FTL comms system to call your ship, and then they can come take everybody home."

From context, the Lost Light was obviously a spaceship, and from the swords, Drift was obviously not the brains of whatever outfit he was from, so Val would have to do the thinking. She was okay with that.

Don't worry, Val, Rodimus isn't the brains of their operation either and he's the captain. Drift peers at Val curiously, obviously impressed, but he gives her an apologetic frown and shakes his head.

"That all sounds like a good idea, but I think we've got bigger problems than figuring out how to get off this planet. For starters, no one I've talked to even knows how they got here -- I don't know if my ship is even in this sector. And what's more..." Drift glances around, sighing air through his vents. "This isn't the Cybertron I know. It's Cybertron, it has to be -- but it's a different Cybertron. I think...we all might be here for a reason."

Val's no-nonsense demeanor was replaced with a very unimpressed look, complete with skeptical eyebrow raise, at what sounded distinctly like some hippie crap.

"...Uh-huh." No organic had ever so strongly resembled Ratchet. "Well, I can also build a Bridge--that's a transuniversal portal--so, not really a problem. It'll just take longer."

It's uncanny, how this tiny human girl emanates the exact sort of energy Drift always gets from Ratchet. Honestly, it gives him the chills, and for a split second he looks kind of spooked. He gets over it pretty quickly, though, frowning thoughtfully.

"I'll take your word for it. But you're not curious? About why you were brought here?"

"Assuming it was a conscious agency, I suppose tracking them down to make sure they can never do it again would be a worthwhile idea."

That was an impressively ominous delivery coming from a three foot tall human.

Uh, yeah, actually, it was. This is one uncanny little human. Drift doesn't think he's ever found one so...intimidating before.

But Drift's used to that sort of thing, honestly. Ratchet basically uses him for verbal target practice, so Drift is able to shrug it off, still looking sort of thoughtful.

"I...wasn't really thinking about a conscious agency, no. More like...fate."

"Fate," Val repeated, voice flat and arms crossed as she gave Drift a chance to correct his obvious mistake.

Okay, Drift is getting serious Ratchet vibes from this little girl now. It's starting to give him the creeps. Turn your aura down, kid.

"I, uh -- yeah. Fate."

Stop being a flake, giant space robot.

Val let that sit for a moment in the eerie quiet of the deserted city before abruptly changing the subject to something less likely to give her heartburn. She didn't know what heartburn felt like, but it was supposed to be unpleasant and she'd like to avoid it. "Where do the swords go when you're a car?"

"Oh, uh -- " Well, that sure was a subject change. Drift doesn't think a human has ever made him feel this awkward. He's not sure he likes it. He vents out a sigh.

"...Inside. They go inside my vehicle mode."

Congratulations, Val, you're starting to break him in.

Welcome to the Valeria Richards Experience, Drift. Note the lack of exit signs, because there is no escape.

"Hmm." Her eyes turned glassy as she visualized how his anatomy would have to shift to effect his transformation. Yes, that could leave enough empty space, though it might be tight. "Yeah, okay, I can see it."

Drift just crouches down and slowly lowers Val to the ground with a look of vague consternation on his face.

He has never felt this weirdly uncomfortable with a human in his life.

It was a good thing she'd met other Cybertronians already, or Drift might have given her the wrong idea about the species, jeez.

"You could at least have put me back in the terminal. I was working on that." Still, Val trotted over to the low fountain wall where she'd left her datapad before embarking on her ill-advised gymnastic adventures in ruined giant robot tech. She could at least make some notes.

"Oh! Yeah, sorry."

Drift seems all too happy to crouch down and offer his hand -- he feels a bit bad about plucking her from the ruins all of a sudden. This is the least he can do to make it up to her.

"I don't know how far you'll get with this thing, though. I had a look at the terminal -- it seems like it's been inoperational for centuries."

"I'm not trying to fix it." Gosh, Drift, what would be the point of fixing one public terminal? Val put her datapad back where she'd left it and clambered into his hand. "I'm teaching myself your technology. By the power junction, please. The cylindrical thing with the corroded leads at the top.

" ...Actually, you know what, could you pop the casing open? It's designed for that, see the tabs? I don't have the leverage."

"That makes sense," Drift says reasonable, and he has no problem accommodating her curiosity, reaching to snap the casing open for her. "I don't know how much you can learn from this thing, though. It looks pretty old to me."

Val immediately stuck her head into the exposed circuitry, voice both muffled and amplified in places from echoing around the housing. "Yeah, it's definitely out of place, but it's not like I need to learn the physical principles involved. I'm more interested in your design philosophy as culture, and starting old is good for that. Seeing what you changed later on will tell me a lot."

"Oh, good idea," Drift says, sounding impressed. What a sensible human. She definitely knows what she's about. Drift pauses, looking at her in consideration, optics slightly squinting.

"...You're a lot smarter than most humans at your stage of development, aren't you?"

"I'm a lot smarter than most humans at any stage of development." Val was pretty sure the same held for Cybertronians, but she hadn't met enough to have a representative sample yet, so she kept quiet on that.

"...Lucky for you." What would they have done without a supergenius? Die horribly from whatever the robot equivalent of sticking forks in electric sockets was, probably.

Hey, Val, it's not like you're the only supergenius around. But certainly the cutest, so Drift will give you that.

"Lucky us," Drift agrees sincerely, nodding. "I guess Cybertron thought we needed an alien authority on science, too."

Well, she hasn't met any of the others yet. Also she's sure she's smarter. So there.

Val decided not to have another conversation about Drift's dumb teleological views ~~he's actually right Val dwi~~ and ignored the first part of his sentence.

"Ha. I am the alien, aren't I?" Grinning, she poked her head around the edge of the console. "Don't worry, I'm not here to conquer you."

Yet.

Aww, humans conquering Cybertron? Drift finds the idea so quaint he can't help but laugh a little, but in a good-humored way.

"Well, there's not munch left to conquer here, I'm afraid..." And at that, his expression grows a little heavier, the smile fading somewhat. "I wish I could say the sight is totally unfamiliar, but the Cybertron I knew looked something like this once, too."

He won't find it funny in a decade when Val is getting crowned Empress of Cybertron on her throne made of the corpses of mechs who stood in her way.

"Wrecked it during your war, huh?" She withdrew into the circuitry again, the sounds of a small human climbing among the components accompanying her voice. "Heh, your current flow convention goes the right way."

Hopefully by then Drift has wised up and joined as her personal bodyguard or some shit. But for now he's just going to think it's cute.

But Drift's optics dim a little at the question, and he nods his head, looking grave. "Cybertron itself was an unfortunate casualty in the war," he says heavily, glancing back around the city. "It looked a lot like this, once, a bunch of bombed-out ruins...but my Cybertron was reformatted, reverted back to its primordial state. We've been able to start rebuilding."

Well, the people who stayed on Cybertron have been rebuilding, anyway.

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smarterthandad - 2015-02-03 18:09 (UTC) - Expand

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