Elsewhere in the Swamp

[Spinister]

The last thing Spinister knew, his favourite pupil was presumed dead, and Bludgeon, Octopunch, and Stranglehold were off in search of an honourable death. He was headed back to Cybertron, away from a horribly botched mission. Someone had to show some sense about the whole ordeal.

The planet on which he awakens is neither Cybertron nor Earth. He can tell that it's not Cybertron by the organic muck that's slopping over his body. The things that tell him it isn't Earth are a bit more subtle – the gravity seems a bit weird, and the sky, though cloudy, seems tonally off. Spinister stretches out his mind as he awakens, and he finds Singe and Hairsplitter, their presences reassuring, albeit feeling rather hung-over.

He tsks inwardly as the Nebulans groan when they stir to life, splashing in the muck. Must they be so conspicuous? Spinister makes his disapproval known to them, hot in the back of his mind like a loaded gun. He shifts to a crouch, not moving to wipe the dreck off his frame and confers with Singe and Hairsplitter.

This is not Nebulos, Hairsplitter insists. I know ecology, and this is nothing of ours.

Neither Cybertron, Earth, nor Nebulos. Spinister knows what it is not. What is it, then? How did he get here? It wouldn't be like the Autobots to drop him off here. He knows who he is. The Autobots would just kill him. The Decepticons would not dare strand him here alive, because if they did, Spinister would find a way off and back, even if it meant building a starship by hand with a stone adze and bailing wire. Then he would find who dumped him here, and... it didn't bear saying.

Curiously, Spinister notes that he does not actually remember leaving Earth. Gesturing silently, he bids Singe and Hairsplitter to transform, and he stows them back on his side platforms. Spinister can hear Singe grumbling over the muck, and he chides, Soldiering isn't pretty. Hairsplitter seems far too entranced by the flora and fauna of the swamp. Spinister expects there to be an itemised assessment of the swamp before he sees its edge.

Spinister checks himself over for tracking devices. Then, he scoops up more of the swamp murk and gives himself a good dousing before he slowly, smoothly stands. Spinister isn't about to engage his cloaking system yet, but he does not intend on leaving a clear scent trail or on standing out like a sore thumb. The swamp is especially challenging. Keep to the dyer land, and deep footprints will be left in the soft loam. Keep to the shallow water, and even the softest step with make a splash. Spinister seeks out the tidal areas, the places with will be covered by water soon but not now.

Singe snaps, Why not just radio in?

Is there even anywhere to radio? Hairsplitter wonders.

Likely not. Spinister doesn't bother trying his radio, although he leaves it set to passive receive on broadband. Why give away his position so easily? Whoever placed him here had a reason and likely is tracking him even now, but there are always other enemies.

[Wheelie]

Wheelie lets the rock drop into the murky water and watches as it sinks with a slight plup sound. After a moment, he decides that the water's probably too deep for him to wade through.

It was, in all honesty, just the story of his life. Nothing ever came easy for him. Not since the fateful day his ship had crash-landed on that forsaken world ruled by the Quintessons and their Sharkticon slaves, killing his friends. Life was a daily struggle to survive and to find the resources he needed to live, stealing energon from Quintesson manufacturing plants, outrunning sharkticons in the badlands, having to hastily built shelters when the rains came...

None of which was going to do him any good now.

Swamp aside, this was actually looking like a step up from the Quintesson's world. Based on what he could see, however, it looked like a number of other beings had been through here recently, though the swamp was quickly erasing all the signs.

Quickly, he checks his supplies. He still had some energon--and his fuel levels were reasonably high. His knife had been recently sharpened and his slingshot was in good order, with a plentiful supply of firerocks.

But now, now he had to get moving. If there was one thing he had learned while surviving on his own, it was that for the most part, stopping equaled death. You had to be constantly alert, constantly on the move. Oh, you didn't make any unnecessary movements and sometimes you did have to stop to hide, but when living depended on so many factors, you kept going.

Taking a few steps back, he runs forward, leaping at the last possible second, his small body flying through the air. At the last second, he whips out his knife, jabbing it into the tree. Though it feels for a moment like his arms are going to be pulled from their sockets, he makes no sound, and when his momentum is deleted, grips the tree, pulling out his knife before sliding down.

Whatever was going on, whever he was, he would survive. Just as he always had.

[Spinister]

Hairsplitter is cheerily blathering about the benefits of swamps. Evidently, they clean water and prevent flooding, which is important to organic lifeforms for some reason. He also notes that cleaning out swamplands tends to lead to great troubles later on an it is generally more efficient to just leave them where they are and build elsewhere.

While mildly enlightening, Spinister rather wishes that Hairsplitter would just keep quiet over their link for a while and cuts in with, Cybertron has swamps.

But it's a metal world. How-

They're toxic.

Now Hairsplitter is quiet. Spinister looks for any trace, any track that there might be something or someone. It comes, but not in visual format. He hears, rather clearly, over the radio an unfamiliar voice, but he lacks the context.

Singe almost sounds something more than sullen and demands, There's a Decepticon! So we're getting out of here, right?

Decepticons could be behind us being dumped in the swamp, Spinister notes.

But-

Not yet.

The radio chatter and the bickering the back of his head continues as Spinister makes his way through the swamp. Keeping track of where he has been is difficult, especially as he's trying to leave no trace. He doesn't particularly recognise Dead End - the Stunticons may be ruffians, but they've never caused enough trouble that Spinister learned to identify them by voice alone. Another tract of swampland and another unfamiliar voice, different from the first and the second.

Spinister looks up. Through the tree cover, he picks out something that might be a trio of jets. The planform silhouettes suggest a F-15 and two unmatched craft of some sort. They vanish out of view, and Spinister silently curses the foliage that so fascinates Hairsplitter.

Second voice again and a pair of names - Skystrike and Starfighter.

There are Decepticons here. He doesn't know who they are. This development could be as good as it could be bad.

Spinister pauses, stock still, and stands like this until the local insects are comfortable enough around him to land on his frame. He just watches and listens. There - there's something moving through here. Maybe those Decepticons he hears on radio. Maybe friends of those jets, if the jets are Decepticons at all. Maybe the ones responsible for bringing him here.

Dash it all. He has no idea. Spinister passes judgement over the mark and follows in the direction he deems it to indicate, quiet as ever. It isn't that he doesn't splash when he walks through the shallows. It's that he steps with an irregular stride length and puts down just enough force that he sounds like the splashing of a fish.

[Wheelie]

Tree travel was, Wheelie reflects, not the quietest method of travel. But sometimes, you had to trade quietness for speed. Swamps were not safe places, filled with deep bogs, hidden troubles, and quite possibly sharkticons. His very survival depended upon him getting out of it as soon as possible.

The noise of jet engines makes him pause, clutching tightly to the branch and trying to hide himself in the leaves. Granted, bright orange isn't exactly the best color for hiding, but somehow, it still works.

He strains his hearing, trying to get a baring on what's going on, but all he can hear is the sounds of the swamp. Nothing to get too worked up on. Yet.

It always comes down to yet. He can be doing good, but that doesn't mean he's going to be. It just means nothing's happened.

Mustn't dawdled here, not one day, if I want to get away. Keep moving, keep going, keep out of sight, a swamp's no place for Wheelie at night!

[Spinister]

There is, on the surface, no pattern to when Spinister makes his stops. That’s the way his likes it. A sudden drop in the ambient noise every ten minutes, say, would constitute a repeating pattern. Patterns stand out.

There is an underlying logic to when he stops, however. He stops when the ambient noise is at its loudest and moves in quiet periods. Thus, the noise levels average out. The whole thing would seem smooth and unremarkable, to a listener.

He pauses, considering a tiny gouge in a tree. The cut looks quite extraordinarily clean, and it’s fresh, to judge by the fluid that tree is leaking. Lubricant of some sort, or –

Fuel, Hairsplitter primly informs him. That’s what trees use for fuel.

Spinister looks back, in the opposite direction of the gouge. Whatever sank into the tree had to some from somewhere. There’s a faint skid mark on the opposing sandbar. So something took a running leap, hit the tree, and kept on moving.

It’s a peculiar way of moving. Spinister would almost count on it being unnatural, although this is an alien world, and what seems unnatural to him could be perfectly normal here.

He pokes his head around the tree. In the distance, he can make out a flash of orange, a moving flash of orange. Predators are drawn by movement, and this one considers his ‘claws’ – Singe stands out like a bonfire in the blackness, but there’s a lot of obscuring cover. A wide-angle weapon like Singe will have a better chance of making contact. He takes Singe in his left hand and stealthily begins the trek to hunt down the orange unknown.

Sure, he’s a master of stealth. Sure, he covered himself over in swamp muck.

He’s still bright pink.

[Wheelie]

Wheelie stops again to listen, looking around and even back the way he came. Small blue eyes probe his surroundings, looking for the slightest sign of something off.

Not that he would have a good idea of what off was, given that he'd never seen this place before.


But wait... Was that something? There in the distance? It seemed like a flash of color, but then it was gone.

If he was a suspicious mechanoid--and he was--he would say he was being followed.

What to do, what to do? He could keep moving--he certainly seemed to have the head start for it--or he could try to hide. Certainly both were possibilities, but neither seemed especially satisfying. Perhaps he could try a third option?

Carefully, he pulls out his slingshot and loads a firestone. He aims, not toward where he thought he had spotted pursuit, but off to the left of that position. A carefully shot stone would make noise to suggest travel in that direction, rather than the one he was in.

Taking aim, he lets the stone fly.

[Spinister]

There is the subtle whoosh of a small object travelling fast somewhere to the side of Spinister. He doesn’t automatically throw himself wildly out of the way. That would be a sharp, sudden motion, and movements like those are easy to trace. Instead, he slowly steps back and behind a tree. No shots follow, and when he peeks out from behind the tree, he has lost that bit of orange. Worse, his prey knows that he is out there.

Spinister is undeterred and unperturbed. Following the path of the object, he pulls out Hairsplitter as well. Hairsplitter's accuracy is seldom matched, and accuracy like his takes a fine set of optics. Spinister wants all three of them looking, and harnessed to the task, it doesn't take them too long.

There, gently smoking in a sodden log, is the projectile. Delicately, Spinister extracts and considers it. It's like no munitions that he knows. Small and a bit hot. He pokes a pinkie down the bored hole in the log, considering the trajectory. It wasn't fired from a conventional rifle, to judge by the bore pattern and the arc as it flew through the air, but it wasn't just thrown – too fast for that. Some intermediary weapon.

Backtracking the trajectory, Spinister turns and follows the firerock's path. The unknown has succeeded in delaying and distracting him but has given away a little of his weapons capacity. Soon, Spinister has his mark sighted again, just a wee snatch of orange against olive drab and brackish black. The trees are blasted difficult insofar as providing so much cover.

Spinister sights a log, handily ramped shaped, and charges it. At the very edge of the log, he leaps into the air and snaps into his helicopter form, skirting just above the tree tops. His infrared sensors come online. Most complex things put off some amount of heat, be they organic or machine. There, he has it. Engine heat signatures, bright as day, for all that the swamp is dark. A small machine, not much bigger than a Micromaster. Not going to lose him this time.

The Apache whirrs after the small machine. He's quiet for a helicopter, unnaturally so, but few things about Spinister are natural at all.

[Shortround]

A short distance away from the other two Transformers unlucky enough to be in the same situation as him, Shortround came online. And promptly sunk a bit in... Well, he didn't want to know. Whatever it was, it was slimy, however his massive arms prevented him from sinking too much, guess there was something useful about not having any hands any more.

Groggily, he raised himself up and looked around. Trees, muck, more trees, more muck... Were Shortround actually designed for combat or scouting he might have been able to see a slight glimpse of the other two. Speaking of combat, Shortround quickly leapt up, incase something was going to hurt him, only to find his plasma rifle... Lying in the muck next to him. Curious, he picked it up and gripped it in his claw.

Now properly armed, he looked around again, in an attempt to figure out where he was. He noticed three things about this enviroment: It was squishy, it was dark, and it was not Cybertron.

With these three things considered, Shortround deduced he was on Earth, somewhere that wasn't where he was supposed to be. Shortround hadn't payed much attention to Earth, so the different gravity and sky didn't mean much to him. With this in mind, he called out loudly, his voice, although muffled, still with detectable levels of whiny.

"Alright Skywarp... Very funny, you figured out how to teleport other 'cons" Shortround yelled. "How's about you teleport me back?... Skywarp?... Joke's over?"

Shortround was still oblivious to the other two Transformers, but his back was turned to their direction...

[Wheelie]

So much for trying to slink and creep! With him on my tail, I'm in quite deep!

He's tried to put some distance between himself and the other mechanoid, but he is small and travel any distance takes time. If there were solid ground below, he could transform and roll; for a small guy, he's got speed like no other. Just about nothing the Quintessons had could keep up with him.

He leaps from tree to tree, more panicked this time in his effort to put space between himself and the machine tracking him. His leaps aren't as careful, and several times he almost slips and falls.

Almost becomes actual on his next leap. The branch, possibly strong at some point in its past, is now weak and rotten and caves easily under even his weight. He crashes into the swampy waters below, momentarily stunned by the impact.

[Spinister]

The thing about FLIR is that it’s forward-looking infrared. Shortround is behind Spinister, so he can’t see the hovercraft Decepticon.

Spinister listens along to the banter on the Decepticon channel. Lord Starscream’s voice is unmistakable. Spinister would put 88% certainty on it actually being Starscream. Now, when Starscream isn’t a dangerous rogue, he is high command, and which of the two he happens to be seems to alternate almost weekly.

So there’s more here at work than meets the eye. ‘Starscream’ has not clarified exactly what, however. Another voice, one he heard earlier, chimes in that there are Autobots here.

There is also his prey. Radioing in can wait. His brightly-coloured target has slipped up, and this chance is too good to pass over.

Spinister transforms and drops down through the trees, landing on his feet with more of a splash than he would have liked. Shortround might notice the whoosh of something large and fairly heavy breaking the canopy a short distance from where he is.

Standing over the small orange robot, he judges it to be a Transformer of some sort who retained his Cybertronian lines and never took a Terran mode. It’s no one he knows. Spinister moves to grab him and heft him up, if the little robot can’t squirm away first. If the robot is an ally, so much the better. If the robot is a foe, he’ll have a prisoner.

Voice a bare whisper, Spinister assures, “Ssh, ssh, little one. It’s dangerous out here.”

And who is he kidding? Spinister’s one of the dangers.

[Shortround]

Shortround was suddenly more worried. Why was that bright purple Decepticon not responding? Had Shortround's horribly intuitive guess been horribly innaccurate? Well, the screechy Decepticon on the radio seemed to indicate so.

He looked around, attempting to describe the area he was in, at least in better words than "Miserably wet" and "Not Cybertron", however he then heard something loud, from behind him. Instinctively he leapt in the air and turned around, his gun aimed at the trees. He could go about this calmly, or he could...

"PANIC!" Shortround yelled, firing several bolts of plasma in the rough direction of where the sound came from. Even at the best of times Shortround was a medicore shot, but if someone came close to scaring him, then he became awful at accuracy. At random firing however? Shortround was top notch.

His shots fired, Shortround then ran in the opposite direction to the sound. Whatever lay out there couldn't be worse than whatever he just fired at, and he did want to find somewhere safe before contacting these new Decepticons. Shortround had a habit of accidently making enemies...

[Wheelie]

Wheelie squirms, but finds that he can't quite get enough leverage to escape from Spinster's grasp. He cannot recall the last time he has seen another Transformer. Oh, certainly, he's seen other transforming robots, like the Quintesson soldiers or the occasional stray mechanoid that had ended up in their hands, but it has been thousands, perhaps millions, of years since it was truly another Transformer.

Spinster's purple badge stirs something in his memory banks, but it's nothing he can connect to anything else. It's just a decoration, as far as he can tell.

The sound of Shortround--though he doesn't know that's the source of the noise--firing puts the truth to Spinster's words. After a moment, he ceases his squirming.

"You're telling the truth and not a lie! Someone out there wants us to fry!"

[Spinister]

Spinister didn’t hear Shortround’s earlier shouts, due to a combination of distance, the swamp muffling the noise, and Spinister being a helicopter.

He notes the Autobot symbol on the Tranformer that he’s grabbed and immediately tenses. A prisoner, then. He ought to have a pair of cuffs or so on him. The Micromaster size setting would probably work.

His pondering about how to keep Wheelie captive is broken by the faint sound of shouting, followed up by several incendiary blasts. Tucking Wheelie in front of him in a gesture that could be construed as protective, Spinister takes cover behind a sturdy old banyan-type tree. He likes dead Autobots, but in an unfamiliar situation, the potential for having a hostage is very appealing.

Once the shooting seems over, Spinister peeks out behind the tree. Despite how wet everything is, the plasma has managed to catch some of the dryer areas on fire.

Wheelie’s words amuse him, but he stifles any chuckling. That plasma fire was awfully convenient, wasn’t it? Looks like this little Autobot doesn’t know enough to be afraid. Spinister considers his options. It’s not enough for him to know that there’s a threat out there. He wants it gone. He decides, Hairsplitter, watch the kid.

Hairsplitter feels gobsmacked and squeaks, Why me?

I’m not doing it! Singe gets in quickly.

That’s why, Spinister answers.

Sighing, Hairsplitter transforms and climbs up Spinister’s side, leaning against his shoulder. He waves a hand tentatively and greets, “Ah, hello there. I’m Hairsplitter.” His voice probably sounds a bit odd – not processed and mechanical, and he has a bit of an accent. Still perfectly understandable, however.

Spinister sets down both Wheelie and Hairsplitter gently. He directs, “I’m going to check out whatever that was. Hairsplitter’s going to watch over you. Try to find some shelter.” Silently, he adds to Hairsplitter, And keep me in on your video footage. You let that Autobot out of your sights, and-

He doesn’t need to finish. Hairsplitter already knows. Spinister turns, Singe held in front of him warningly, and stalks off towards the blaze.

[Wheelie]

Wheelie gasps at the sight of one of Spinster's guns transforming into... something. At least that he can remember, Wheelie's never actually seen an organic before. All the life on the Quintesson's world was mechanical-based, after all. Even the Quintessons themselves were not exactly what anyone would call a traditional lifeform.

"They call me Wheelie, the one robot clan! You need to find shelter, then I'm your man! Since way in the past, since it's all begun, I've been keeping away from all Quintesson! Seen plenty a robot, seen a wee bit of fun, but never before seen a 'bot from a gun!"

If he knew anything about Autobots and Decepticons, he'd know enough that he should not trust Spinsters or the strange little gun-person. But that's one thing Wheelie does not know. Well, one thing among quite a few. But he does know that Spinster acted to protect him when the shooting started.

No one has ever done anything for him before. He's had to do it all for himself, again and again, virtually all his life. It's enough to promote instant trust in the small Autobot.

[Shortround]

Panic is not something Shortround handles well. Neither is running, as the ungainly robot has already slipped and fallen in the muck. However, he manages to pull himself up and look behind him at... Well, a blaze starting to catch.

"That'll do for a landmark!" Shortround says, to no one, before leaping and transforming into his hovercraft mode, and floating on the water's surface. He sends off a radio message, in the hopes that whoever Screechy is, he's nicer than whatever's near the blaze.

//This is Shortround, I'm... In some swamp near some fire with something bigger than me nearby, send help! Preferably with lots of firepower!//

Shortround is so focusing on hoping for a message to come back, that anything could sneak up on him. Thankfully he does have his Decepticon symbol in full view on the front of his hovercraft, if a Decepticon just so happens to sneak up on him.