robot satan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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robothell2014-12-19 11:20 pm
robotsatan) wrote in robothell2014-12-19 11:20 pm
[ 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...
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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No where near here, unfortunately. The alleyway he'd emerged from looked just monotonously gray as the rest of the dust covered landscape.
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"Hm. Recently?"
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The matter may not have been immediately urgent, but it was bothering the hell out of him, knowing how terribly his cause would be twisted.
"We'll have plenty of time on the way."
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"How far have you come, Megatron of Tarn? What have they driven you to?"
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He rests a hand on a silver shoulder to give it a light nudge, indicating to the older of the two that he needed to alter his course a little bit. That way.
"I was going to meet Clench before I was brought here."
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Ordinarily he'd be hesitant to reply - but if this really was his future self, he'd already partly know the answer anyway.
"I still think about the guard on Croteus 12. Even if.. what happened was necessary at the time."
It was still vividly fresh in his mind - the first Cybertronian he'd killed with his own hands. Even if he'd been a blind, cruel servant for Senator Decimus.
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"... Hold onto that," he says after a moment. "Don't let yourself lose your disgust for slaughter. It was necessary... but remember it should not have been."
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"I'm not going to pretend that overthrowing the Senate won't result in more violence one way or another."
And with it, more death. He'd had this same conversation with Orion. As much as he insisted on reform, his solutions just didn't seem thorough enough.
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"What made you start to regret again?"
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"It couldn't have been easy to reject something you've built up for so long, even if it was as diseased as what you'd unseated in the first place."
It certainly wouldn't be the first time he's adjusted his outlook on things.
"Letting that go is a step in the right direction."
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"How the Senate and the Prime came to be defeated at Kaon. How the planet was finally free for a short time before it was driven into a narcissitic, farcical parody of what I've written. From Functionism to the iron rule of a military gorging on its own toxic propaganda."
"No one seemed to want to mention that we'd come to destroy the planet - but I could gleam it from their reactions to this city," the edge in his voice only seems to sharpen as he remembers the conversations and realizations as they came.
"You let yourself do a lot more than kill, didn't you?"
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It's not like this is anything new. He knows all of this. But hearing it so bluntly from his literal past self, from a Megatron who still believed he could make things better...
He has to look away.
"Yes."
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There wasn't even a look of mild surprise or an attempt at denial from his senior. Part of him was hoping what he'd heard had been some form of exaggeration - that the truth was something a more than his fate as a tyrant.
Instead, there was defeated confirmation. He didn't know what to say. All he could do was quietly let the despair crash through his system and continue to trudge ahead.
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"I'm sorry," he says at last. He lets that sit, for a moment, heavy in the air between them. "...I would like to say that I believed everything I did was necessary, but..." He sighs; shakes his head. "I did at first. But I think I believed that if I was to be the figurehead of a successful revolution I must make no mistakes. And so I could not consider anything I did at the helm of that revolution a mistake. I convinced myself everything was necessary and justified, and every unnecessary, unjustified act of brutality cleared the way for a worse one."
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It's only after another stretch of crushing silence that he finally replies, voice quiet.
"And if you had a chance to do it over again?"
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He shakes his head again, the motion heavy and slow – and then he turns to look at him again, contemplative and almost wistful, as if the answers to that question lie within this younger, untainted version of himself.
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He's sure his senior self would be familiar with the feeling. Hiding in the underbelly of Kaon, a city that managed to be as vicious than any cruel mine, and with nowhere to go but deeper. He went to Clench because he knew how to kickstart an untapped talent for violence. He had access that would get him the resources and followers he needed.
"I was ready to do what I needed to end the Old order, or I thought I was. And perhaps in being so willing to be shaped by something as cruel as my enemy - perhaps that was the true sign of weakness."
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He was far from ready to believe all hope was lost.
Finally, he stops in front of their meeting space. A Maccadam's. Figures that's the building be some sort of weird universal constant. But it was the first familiar landmark in an otherwise strange city. So meeting place it became.