robotsatan: (Default)
robot satan ([personal profile] robotsatan) wrote in [community profile] 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...
quantumechanic: (shh i'm thinkin')

[personal profile] quantumechanic 2014-12-29 01:12 am (UTC)(link)
Please don't tell her about all the gory corpses. Her day has been bad enough already.

"Any paradox you and I could cause would be minuscule compared to what could happen with your pre-War self." Nautica grimaced, realizing how much damage she personally might have done in her conversation with the younger Megatron. "Under the circumstances, I wasn't too inclined to insist on the sanctity of the timeline."

Really, if you'd been her, would you have held out on an angry teenage Megatron while he was grinding your face into the dirt?

"The fact that you and I are still able to have this conversation suggests that we're somehow being insulated from paradoxical effects, at least for the moment. You still remember our first conversation being in a Lost Light crew briefing rather than in a giant crater, right?"
towardspeace: (hmmmmmmm)

[personal profile] towardspeace 2015-01-03 10:53 pm (UTC)(link)
"Hm." Megatron drums his finger against his elbow. "Indeed. But surely it's possible the effects simply haven't... established themselves yet?"
quantumechanic: (jro you magnificent bastard)

[personal profile] quantumechanic 2015-01-04 04:11 am (UTC)(link)
"Possibly." Nautica got a distant look, staring straight through Megatron while she turned the problem over in her mind. "I think it's also possible that we're simply...outside cause and effect."

She held up her wrench, projecting a holographic display of equations was not particularly instructive and seemed to be more to help her gather her thoughts than explain things to Megatron. "What if any timeline changes can't propagate because there's no medium in which to do so? Sound can't travel in a vacuum, electricity can't pass through an insulator. What if we're just...separated from our own spacetime? It doesn't matter how many versions of any of us there are, because reality just doesn't know that anything's happened."