measured_words (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
measured_words) wrote2008-06-22 11:08 pm
measured_words) wrote2008-06-22 11:08 pm
Entry tags:
Ghosts of the Past
I've had Transformers on brain lately for no real particular reason, but they've been invading my creative space something crazy. So this is what you get - I've abandoned the original story I started at the beach last week for now, and will probably work more on it when I get into the field. For now, you can have this.
Transformers: AU G1/Beast Era (early season 3)
Dart + BW peeps, including probably waaay too much Cheetor for any self respecting author. Technically a follow up to the as-yet incomplete Dart origin I'm still working on. Sometime I don't like to do things chronologically, okay? :V
Anyone who has comments on setting or what have you is welcome to chime in. I almost wrote Dinobot in to this before I remembered he was dead by now ;_;
Ghosts of the Past
They’d been boarded - everyone was weapon’s ready, expecting the enemy to turn the corner at any moment. They could hear fighting close by – lasers, yelling, explosions. It hadn’t come to them yet, but that was surely a short matter of time.
“Dart – seal the door. Griffon and I will cover you.” Hornet managed to sound calm, as he pulled himself back to his feet. The last shot from the Nemesis had sent them all flying.
The two larger Autobots loomed in the entryway to the communication array room where Phreak scrambled to return to her action duty – trying to secure sensitive computer data and get out a distress signal.
“I’m going to have to do this the hard way.” The computer wasn’t responding to his commands – the Decepticon’s attack must have knocked it offline. Dart pulled the panel away from the wall and yanked out the guts of the wiring.
“Just get it done – they’re getting closer.”
“Not close enough if you ask me!” Griffon hunched slightly and clenched his fists, his massive bulk a tight fit even for the Ark’s cavernous hallways. Dart barely reached above his knee.
“Be careful what you wish for, big guy,” Hornet pointed his plasma cannon down the hall, “You just might get it!”
Dart risked a quick glance towards his comrades, and redoubled his efforts. He could hear the Decepticons approaching, and the first volleys of fire on both sides. “Phreak?” he queried, getting back to his task at hand.
“Almost got it,” she quipped. And then the world turned upside down.
A massive explosion rocked the ship. Dart clung precariously to the door’s wiring as the floor shifted almost ninety degrees under his feet. They were falling – caught by some gravity source. Metal clanging against metal echoed through his audio receptors as bots all across the injured vessel lost their footing.
“We’re going down!” A distant voice shouted the obvious, and Griffon spilled back through the doorway, stunning the smaller bot as they collided. By the time he’d recovered, there was no time to brace himself for the looming impact, and he clung more tightly to the only lifeline he could find, optics widening with terrible anticipation….
The shockwave overloaded his sensors, and when he came back online, he found himself trapped, unable to even turn his head to see by what. Hornet’s legs sprawled out in front of him, blocking his view of the… hall, or room, he wasn’t sure. The severe damage to his system registered as pain, but he emitted only static when he tried to groan or speak. The ship was silent, save for occasional bursts of sparks. With concerted effort, he could move his left hand, but not the arm – it availed him little. The lights flickered.
He was helpless. His power reserves were at 80 percent, but in this state, there was nothing he could do but suffer while he waited for rescue. Fine then. Waiting was something Dart was good at, though the pain he could do with out. There were ways around it, though. He ran a diagnostic, and started shutting down his damaged systems one by one. It would conserve more power and minimize his misery, but it was still somewhat daunting when he willingly shut down his core consciousness, operating on faith that help would, eventually, come.
----------------------
Cheetor peered ahead in to the gloom of the Ark’s dim lighting, tail twitching. “What are am I looking for down here, Rhinox?”
“The communications hub,” his friend’s voice crackled over his comm. link. “I want to find out why the Autobots never sent a distress call, and besides, there might be some equipment we can use.”
“Right…. But why not send Rattrap? Isn’t this more his sort of thing?”
“Rattrap is investigating the problem from other angles – outside, that is. Care to trade places?”
Cheetor hesitated at an intersection where two giant warriors fell across the path, locked in an eternal grapple. Blank, dead, optics stared him down, and he shivered involuntarily. He imagined Rattrap crawling around on top of the ship, squeezing through dark places only his slight frame could fit, looking for answers. Which was worse was a tough call.
“I’m good,” he declared, overshooting his true confidence level. “There’s just a lot of damage down here – some of it recent.”
“That’ll be from the poundings the Preds have been dishing out lately. Be careful, Cheetor, this area is profoundly geologically unstable.”
“Don’t worry – careful is this cat’s middle name!”
He lept over the fallen combatants, trying not to think about just how long they’d lain there, and how much longer they had to lay. Could a spark get restless, left in stasis lock for so many long eons? Not all of the fallen here were destined to awake in the future, either – this Area of the ark had been damaged heavily during the Decepticon attack that had wound up with the crash landing here on earth.
There had been less fighting this far into the ship, and he was almost surprised when he rounded a corner and found himself facing the remains of a pair of what he guessed must be Decepticons. A little further down the corridor, ancient lettering above an open doorway indicated that he’d found the right place. Another bot, a large flyer, lay sprawled through the entrance, blocking his ingress. Fortunately – for him at least – the bot’s fall had knocked down a large section of wall on the other side of the door way. Fighting off the shivers in his spine, Cheetor lept carefully onto the flier’s frame, padded quickly along his wing, and then slid into the darkness of the communication hub.
“I’m here,” he announced over the com, “but it’s as black as the pit in here. Any chance you can divert some auxiliary power this way for some lights?”
“If it isn’t running down there now, there might not be much I can do. I’ll give it a shot.”
Cheetor’s thruster’s gave off a dim glow, but the shadows they cast were almost worse than the blackness. He could make out the forms of two other bots – one sprawled on the other side of the fallen wall section, and the other collapsed against one of the large computer terminals. He flew up towards the latter, thinking that whichever terminal had been last manned would be the most likely to have answers. He transformed to bot mode, hovering by the black panels, waiting for Rhinox to either make the lights come on or tell him it was a no-go. Curious, he reached out carefully to what he thought was an activation button.
The ship seemed to groan, the lights flickered, and Cheetor started backwards. They flickered again, there was a shower of sparks from the collapsed wall, and all returned to darkness.
“Rhinox?” His voice sounded small, even to him.
“What happened Cheetor? Seemed to be working, but then I registered a drain to the system and it shut down.”
“I don’t know.” He was about to elaborate, when he heard something behind him – a light tapping of metal on metal, followed by a burst of static. “What was that?!”
“That’s just what I was asking you.”
“No, I heard something! I’m sure… there it is again!” The tapping was more insistent, though still faint, the static sounding in short irregular bursts. “I think there’s something down here – something alive!”
“Hmm.” There was a pause, and the hollow, desperate tapping filling in the silence. “I’d say it was just your imagination, Cheetor, but Teletraan-1 is giving off some strange readings. You’d better stay put – I’ll send someone down to back you up.”
“Err, how about I meet them in the hall?”
-------------------------------------
Optimus Primal himself came to the rescue a cycle or so later, navigating his large frame carefully around the fallen forms in the corridors. He’d brought a light - Cheetor nearly sagged in relief.
“Big Bot! Thank the Matrix! I think that sound is going to haunt me to the end of my days.”
“Any luck tracking where it’s coming from?”
Cheetor cast a look back down the hallway, towards the hub. “The wall’s collapsed – I think it’s something underneath.” The static, which seemed to become less regular the quieter the Cat-bot had been, had started back up in force. The tapping had settled in to a regular repeating pattern some time ago, but it was faint at this distance.
Optimus nodded, illuminating the corridor in front of them and the giant flier that sprawled out from the room. The beam flashed across the exposed wing, Autobot allegiance clearly marked in a dusty red. “Now there’s a gas guzzler,” he whistled.
“Any idea who he was?” Maybe they’d be less intimidating if he had names to pt to the faces, Cheetor considered.
“No, but Rhinox has access to all of Teletraan-1’s personnel files. If he’s an Autobot, we can look him up… But let’s see about your mystery noise first. That sounds like a code of some kind.” It was twigging something at the back of his databanks, in any case, but he couldn’t quite make the connection. It would have to be something out of history class, he reasoned, but that wasn’t much help. When he’d gotten the initial report from Rhinox, Primal’d worried that the sound might be some kind of defense system or bobby trap. Now a different, more unsettling, suspicion was taking shape in his mind.
“A code?”
“Yes – here, take this.” They were in to the room itself, and after passing the beam around the room briefly to confirm what Cheetor had reported earlier, he passed the other bot his light. I’ll see if I can lift this up enough that we can get a look underneath.”
“Sure thing, Big Bot.” He clutched the light tightly in both hands, as though its power could ward away all his earlier unease. His sense of caution kicked in, however, and he switched it to his left and drew his blaster. “Ready when you are!”
Primal listened for a moment to another burst of static. The tapping had stopped. Were his instincts right? He reached down to get a grip on the heavy iron structure, and braced himself to lift it. Why take the chance, he decided a moment before he committed his hydraulics to the task. “I’m going to start lifting now,” he repeated more loudly. Cheetor gave him an odd look, but straightened to attention.
There was a fourth bot, not much bigger than either of the Maximals. Dim blue light flickered in his optics as he turned his head to face them. His left hand curled and uncurled, his vocal processors hissing a chatter of static. Cheetor, shocked, leapt back and nearly dropped the light.
“Get him out of there!” Primal gritted his teeth at the strain on his servos – at another time, he might have marveled at the strength of the Ark’s construction.
“Right.” The boss bot’s words snapped him free of the last of his lingering dread, and he dove under the propped up wall, dragging the larger robot back out with him. As soon as they were clear, Primal dropped the wall section. It clanged loudly against the floor, the force causing the bot slumped against the console further inside the room to fall to the ground. The Ark sang with echoes as the Maximals bent over to examine their new charge.
“Rhinox…” Primal opened his com, smiling grimly at the living wreck at his feet. “We’ve got a situation here.”
---------------------------------
“So, lemme get this straight. After all them big speeches and everything we went through to keep tha preds out of here an’ protect the timeline…. You woke one of them up!?”
Primal sighed. “No, Rattrap. He woke up on his own. Do we know who he is yet, Rhinox? And how he’s not shut up in stasis lock like the rest?”
The scientist nodded his head. “His name’s Dart. He’s part of a two bot team who work intelligence, surveillance, and infiltration missions.”
Rattrap rubbed his hands together. “Sounds like my kinda guy!”
“Well, don’t get your hopes up just yet – it’s a bit more complicated than that. Apparently he was built using some obscure alien technology – the records aren’t clear, because it wound up being a dead end. The Autobots were never able to quite figure out how it worked, let alone replicate it. It also means the rest he’s having in our CR chamber isn’t going to get him much more than superficial repairs.”
“So what can we do for him?” Cheetor asked earnestly. He felt bad, guilty and embarrassed, for his earlier reaction down in the dark recesses of the Ark.
“I’ll see if I can’t sort the worst of it the old fashioned way. The bigger question, of course, is what are we going to do with him?”
The question posed, three sets of eyes turned to Optimus Primal for answers. He shook his head.
“I’m half tempted just to put him in to stasis lock and dump him back where we found him. He’s already seen Cheetor and me, which means he’s temporally compromised. We’re going to need to clean that memory from his system, somehow, and judging by what Rhinox just told us, that might be harder than it sounds.
“So, if we’re going to go to the effort, we may as well make it worth while. I think we have a good opportunity here to fill in some gaps in our knowledge, so lets make use of it…. Carefully. We need to shield him as much as possible from what’s really going on here.”
“Right,” Rattrap put in. “Lets just hope the Preds are onboard with the plan.”
Transformers: AU G1/Beast Era (early season 3)
Dart + BW peeps, including probably waaay too much Cheetor for any self respecting author. Technically a follow up to the as-yet incomplete Dart origin I'm still working on. Sometime I don't like to do things chronologically, okay? :V
Anyone who has comments on setting or what have you is welcome to chime in. I almost wrote Dinobot in to this before I remembered he was dead by now ;_;
Ghosts of the Past
They’d been boarded - everyone was weapon’s ready, expecting the enemy to turn the corner at any moment. They could hear fighting close by – lasers, yelling, explosions. It hadn’t come to them yet, but that was surely a short matter of time.
“Dart – seal the door. Griffon and I will cover you.” Hornet managed to sound calm, as he pulled himself back to his feet. The last shot from the Nemesis had sent them all flying.
The two larger Autobots loomed in the entryway to the communication array room where Phreak scrambled to return to her action duty – trying to secure sensitive computer data and get out a distress signal.
“I’m going to have to do this the hard way.” The computer wasn’t responding to his commands – the Decepticon’s attack must have knocked it offline. Dart pulled the panel away from the wall and yanked out the guts of the wiring.
“Just get it done – they’re getting closer.”
“Not close enough if you ask me!” Griffon hunched slightly and clenched his fists, his massive bulk a tight fit even for the Ark’s cavernous hallways. Dart barely reached above his knee.
“Be careful what you wish for, big guy,” Hornet pointed his plasma cannon down the hall, “You just might get it!”
Dart risked a quick glance towards his comrades, and redoubled his efforts. He could hear the Decepticons approaching, and the first volleys of fire on both sides. “Phreak?” he queried, getting back to his task at hand.
“Almost got it,” she quipped. And then the world turned upside down.
A massive explosion rocked the ship. Dart clung precariously to the door’s wiring as the floor shifted almost ninety degrees under his feet. They were falling – caught by some gravity source. Metal clanging against metal echoed through his audio receptors as bots all across the injured vessel lost their footing.
“We’re going down!” A distant voice shouted the obvious, and Griffon spilled back through the doorway, stunning the smaller bot as they collided. By the time he’d recovered, there was no time to brace himself for the looming impact, and he clung more tightly to the only lifeline he could find, optics widening with terrible anticipation….
The shockwave overloaded his sensors, and when he came back online, he found himself trapped, unable to even turn his head to see by what. Hornet’s legs sprawled out in front of him, blocking his view of the… hall, or room, he wasn’t sure. The severe damage to his system registered as pain, but he emitted only static when he tried to groan or speak. The ship was silent, save for occasional bursts of sparks. With concerted effort, he could move his left hand, but not the arm – it availed him little. The lights flickered.
He was helpless. His power reserves were at 80 percent, but in this state, there was nothing he could do but suffer while he waited for rescue. Fine then. Waiting was something Dart was good at, though the pain he could do with out. There were ways around it, though. He ran a diagnostic, and started shutting down his damaged systems one by one. It would conserve more power and minimize his misery, but it was still somewhat daunting when he willingly shut down his core consciousness, operating on faith that help would, eventually, come.
----------------------
Cheetor peered ahead in to the gloom of the Ark’s dim lighting, tail twitching. “What are am I looking for down here, Rhinox?”
“The communications hub,” his friend’s voice crackled over his comm. link. “I want to find out why the Autobots never sent a distress call, and besides, there might be some equipment we can use.”
“Right…. But why not send Rattrap? Isn’t this more his sort of thing?”
“Rattrap is investigating the problem from other angles – outside, that is. Care to trade places?”
Cheetor hesitated at an intersection where two giant warriors fell across the path, locked in an eternal grapple. Blank, dead, optics stared him down, and he shivered involuntarily. He imagined Rattrap crawling around on top of the ship, squeezing through dark places only his slight frame could fit, looking for answers. Which was worse was a tough call.
“I’m good,” he declared, overshooting his true confidence level. “There’s just a lot of damage down here – some of it recent.”
“That’ll be from the poundings the Preds have been dishing out lately. Be careful, Cheetor, this area is profoundly geologically unstable.”
“Don’t worry – careful is this cat’s middle name!”
He lept over the fallen combatants, trying not to think about just how long they’d lain there, and how much longer they had to lay. Could a spark get restless, left in stasis lock for so many long eons? Not all of the fallen here were destined to awake in the future, either – this Area of the ark had been damaged heavily during the Decepticon attack that had wound up with the crash landing here on earth.
There had been less fighting this far into the ship, and he was almost surprised when he rounded a corner and found himself facing the remains of a pair of what he guessed must be Decepticons. A little further down the corridor, ancient lettering above an open doorway indicated that he’d found the right place. Another bot, a large flyer, lay sprawled through the entrance, blocking his ingress. Fortunately – for him at least – the bot’s fall had knocked down a large section of wall on the other side of the door way. Fighting off the shivers in his spine, Cheetor lept carefully onto the flier’s frame, padded quickly along his wing, and then slid into the darkness of the communication hub.
“I’m here,” he announced over the com, “but it’s as black as the pit in here. Any chance you can divert some auxiliary power this way for some lights?”
“If it isn’t running down there now, there might not be much I can do. I’ll give it a shot.”
Cheetor’s thruster’s gave off a dim glow, but the shadows they cast were almost worse than the blackness. He could make out the forms of two other bots – one sprawled on the other side of the fallen wall section, and the other collapsed against one of the large computer terminals. He flew up towards the latter, thinking that whichever terminal had been last manned would be the most likely to have answers. He transformed to bot mode, hovering by the black panels, waiting for Rhinox to either make the lights come on or tell him it was a no-go. Curious, he reached out carefully to what he thought was an activation button.
The ship seemed to groan, the lights flickered, and Cheetor started backwards. They flickered again, there was a shower of sparks from the collapsed wall, and all returned to darkness.
“Rhinox?” His voice sounded small, even to him.
“What happened Cheetor? Seemed to be working, but then I registered a drain to the system and it shut down.”
“I don’t know.” He was about to elaborate, when he heard something behind him – a light tapping of metal on metal, followed by a burst of static. “What was that?!”
“That’s just what I was asking you.”
“No, I heard something! I’m sure… there it is again!” The tapping was more insistent, though still faint, the static sounding in short irregular bursts. “I think there’s something down here – something alive!”
“Hmm.” There was a pause, and the hollow, desperate tapping filling in the silence. “I’d say it was just your imagination, Cheetor, but Teletraan-1 is giving off some strange readings. You’d better stay put – I’ll send someone down to back you up.”
“Err, how about I meet them in the hall?”
-------------------------------------
Optimus Primal himself came to the rescue a cycle or so later, navigating his large frame carefully around the fallen forms in the corridors. He’d brought a light - Cheetor nearly sagged in relief.
“Big Bot! Thank the Matrix! I think that sound is going to haunt me to the end of my days.”
“Any luck tracking where it’s coming from?”
Cheetor cast a look back down the hallway, towards the hub. “The wall’s collapsed – I think it’s something underneath.” The static, which seemed to become less regular the quieter the Cat-bot had been, had started back up in force. The tapping had settled in to a regular repeating pattern some time ago, but it was faint at this distance.
Optimus nodded, illuminating the corridor in front of them and the giant flier that sprawled out from the room. The beam flashed across the exposed wing, Autobot allegiance clearly marked in a dusty red. “Now there’s a gas guzzler,” he whistled.
“Any idea who he was?” Maybe they’d be less intimidating if he had names to pt to the faces, Cheetor considered.
“No, but Rhinox has access to all of Teletraan-1’s personnel files. If he’s an Autobot, we can look him up… But let’s see about your mystery noise first. That sounds like a code of some kind.” It was twigging something at the back of his databanks, in any case, but he couldn’t quite make the connection. It would have to be something out of history class, he reasoned, but that wasn’t much help. When he’d gotten the initial report from Rhinox, Primal’d worried that the sound might be some kind of defense system or bobby trap. Now a different, more unsettling, suspicion was taking shape in his mind.
“A code?”
“Yes – here, take this.” They were in to the room itself, and after passing the beam around the room briefly to confirm what Cheetor had reported earlier, he passed the other bot his light. I’ll see if I can lift this up enough that we can get a look underneath.”
“Sure thing, Big Bot.” He clutched the light tightly in both hands, as though its power could ward away all his earlier unease. His sense of caution kicked in, however, and he switched it to his left and drew his blaster. “Ready when you are!”
Primal listened for a moment to another burst of static. The tapping had stopped. Were his instincts right? He reached down to get a grip on the heavy iron structure, and braced himself to lift it. Why take the chance, he decided a moment before he committed his hydraulics to the task. “I’m going to start lifting now,” he repeated more loudly. Cheetor gave him an odd look, but straightened to attention.
There was a fourth bot, not much bigger than either of the Maximals. Dim blue light flickered in his optics as he turned his head to face them. His left hand curled and uncurled, his vocal processors hissing a chatter of static. Cheetor, shocked, leapt back and nearly dropped the light.
“Get him out of there!” Primal gritted his teeth at the strain on his servos – at another time, he might have marveled at the strength of the Ark’s construction.
“Right.” The boss bot’s words snapped him free of the last of his lingering dread, and he dove under the propped up wall, dragging the larger robot back out with him. As soon as they were clear, Primal dropped the wall section. It clanged loudly against the floor, the force causing the bot slumped against the console further inside the room to fall to the ground. The Ark sang with echoes as the Maximals bent over to examine their new charge.
“Rhinox…” Primal opened his com, smiling grimly at the living wreck at his feet. “We’ve got a situation here.”
---------------------------------
“So, lemme get this straight. After all them big speeches and everything we went through to keep tha preds out of here an’ protect the timeline…. You woke one of them up!?”
Primal sighed. “No, Rattrap. He woke up on his own. Do we know who he is yet, Rhinox? And how he’s not shut up in stasis lock like the rest?”
The scientist nodded his head. “His name’s Dart. He’s part of a two bot team who work intelligence, surveillance, and infiltration missions.”
Rattrap rubbed his hands together. “Sounds like my kinda guy!”
“Well, don’t get your hopes up just yet – it’s a bit more complicated than that. Apparently he was built using some obscure alien technology – the records aren’t clear, because it wound up being a dead end. The Autobots were never able to quite figure out how it worked, let alone replicate it. It also means the rest he’s having in our CR chamber isn’t going to get him much more than superficial repairs.”
“So what can we do for him?” Cheetor asked earnestly. He felt bad, guilty and embarrassed, for his earlier reaction down in the dark recesses of the Ark.
“I’ll see if I can’t sort the worst of it the old fashioned way. The bigger question, of course, is what are we going to do with him?”
The question posed, three sets of eyes turned to Optimus Primal for answers. He shook his head.
“I’m half tempted just to put him in to stasis lock and dump him back where we found him. He’s already seen Cheetor and me, which means he’s temporally compromised. We’re going to need to clean that memory from his system, somehow, and judging by what Rhinox just told us, that might be harder than it sounds.
“So, if we’re going to go to the effort, we may as well make it worth while. I think we have a good opportunity here to fill in some gaps in our knowledge, so lets make use of it…. Carefully. We need to shield him as much as possible from what’s really going on here.”
“Right,” Rattrap put in. “Lets just hope the Preds are onboard with the plan.”
no subject
Minor detail, Dart's head turns towards Cheetor when Primal lifts the panel away, but when the Ark crashes, Dart's head is pinned and totally immobile, behind Hornet's leg. So either Primal is lifting what's on his head, or something shifted between crash and discovery? It's perfectly plausible as-is, but because the two bits contradict and the explanation is unwritten, it took me out of things for a second.
Dart
Re: Dart
Re: Dart
I was thinking generic seeker, but I thought that identification-based-on-alt mode might be confusing on account of Griffon ;p
Re: Dart