Decepticon Interim: Books

[Skystrike/Skylar Stringers]

“And find books, computers, posters or something; whatever the people who built this place may have had in form of literature. Preferably with pictures.” Skystrike added as an afterthought as she answered Starfighter’s query. “We’ll need to learn this alien language somehow. Since the cities we’ve visited don’t seem to have power I’d imagine that there isn’t really much in way of publicly accessible networks and that…” Thoughts slightly derailed, she looked down distractedly at Shortround for a moment when he asked his question before shaking her head in a negative answer. She would have suggested looking for buildings with big and brightly colored fancy signs, but this was an alien world, not human. Who knows what they would have used for advertising? It could be by pungent smells for all they knew.

The blue jet cast a brief and slightly annoyed look at Eye-fire when he stands up, not all too happy at the fact that the gun was any where near her once again. The trip from the beach with him and the new Predacon had been enough, thank you very much. Luckily, Wreckage’s positive answer detracts her attention away from Eye-fire.

“That would be quite helpful.” Skystrike answered before hesitatingly turning to walk after him, drawing her wings back subconsciously to make glancing over her shoulders easier. Though Skystrike maybe have been a pretty hefty seeker, her back wasn’t as heavily protected as Wreckage’s. Only her vigilance would help her if anyone chose to shoot.

[Starfighter]

Starfighter scampers along behind Skystrike, once again tagging along at the back and mostly ignored. On the bright side, he'll probably block any potential shots to Skystrike's body before he collapses.

"If the books are made of organic material, they might have rotted by now," he offers, drawing on what little he knows of organics and their nature. He's got the paper part down right, but he's a little rusty on the half life of paper pulp. "Or they might not be on a reasonable medium."

[Shortround]

"I found what I think means 'Cheap bootleg for not much money'" Shortround said, opening one of the boxes and revealing a large ammount of toys in all sorts of bad colours and looking vaguely like robots. Vaguely.

"Corse, knowing my luck its something like SuperSpecialAwesome Robo 27" Shortround added with a shrug. "Been looking for any sort of shopping centre so I can't find whatever these things were bootlegged off in the first place"

With that, Shortround closes the box and manages to get it back onto his back, before following the group. Not like he has anything else to do. "I'd like to find a computer as well, see if they don't have any global news networks or anything that could tell us what happened" Shortround said. Of corse, he REALLY wanted the Internet so he could try and hawk off his stuff on Ubay.

[Eye-fire]

OOC: I'm not entirely sure whats going on with the post order here, I keep waiting for Starfighter to post after Shortround... then suddenly his post just appears before Shortrounds....

Eye-fire catches onto the word "cheap" as Shortround says it, thats more or less the ideal thing to look for in a target. Size isn't very important for him, just as long as someone can hurl it into the sky high enough to give him a challenge.

"Those cheap commercial products are more or less exactly what I've been looking for. Mind if I inspect one more closely?"

[Wreckage]

Wreckage tracks along the streets, silent save for the whirs, clicks, and muffled thuds of his motions. He seems to find himself at the fore of groups here rather frequently. At least this time, it is on his own terms.

"I did not concern myself with the interior," he rumbles candidly, and perhaps a bit cryptically. If there are books there or not did not interest him at the time and does not particularly interest him now. He merely recalled that it had an identifying feature flagged by Starfighter's talk of signs and offered his knowledge of it. Which brought him back to now. "It may very well be empty," adds the APC with bland disinterest.

The brief jaunt from where they were to the little building on the edge of the blast zone is as uneventful as a stroll could be. And there it is: a flat, blocky, single-floored affair with large windows across the façade and down both sides. Most of the windows are broken and the wall facing the blast zone is, of course, badly damaged. Checking the rear of the building will reveal more of the broken windows. Peering through these gives the viewer a look at the uniformly partitioned, unlit interior. Things probably look a mess. And out front, as Wreckage said there would be, is a slightly warped sign crafted of wrought metal.

"…Here." He stops to let Skystrike and Starfighter pass; they were the ones who wanted to see this building, after all.

[Skystrike/Skylar Stringers]

“If the environment to store them in is relatively controlled, the organic material shouldn’t be too rotted just yet. If they are not on a reasonable medium then the more work for us.” Skystrike answers Starfighter only slightly more optimistically. She glanced briefly, but warily over her shoulder at him as they continued walking. She after making sure that the other flier wasn’t pointing a gun at her back, she turned her attention to look flatly ahead at Wreckage’s back, listening to him the few times he spoke up as they strolled through the abandoned city.

It was certainly an intriguing back. The altmode pieces seemed to shift over one another in a rather scale-like manner and the seeker idly wondered how his creators found the time to build what seemed like such a complicated shell design.

It wasn’t until the blast zone came into sight that she turned her attention away from Wreckage, perking up mildly at the familiar sight of destruction. It was a comforting reminder that this universe wasn’t as alien as it sometimes looked. Destruction was still imminent amongst the untouched empty cities and the endless greens and blues. A universe without destruction would be a rather scary place.

It was then that Wreckage chose to announce their arrival and Skystrike swiveled her head around to peer at the rundown and damaged building before them. She nodded gratefully at the gray APC and strode past him to carefully inspect the structure, crouching down and peering through the dark windows. The dim light from her optics dully outlined something box-shaped in the gloom and the flier reached up and shattered the glass with a gentle tap before reaching inside and pulling the thing out.

There were a few soft ‘thumps’ as several colorful objects slipped through her fingers and onto the dusty ground. Some of them were rectangular in appearance with white sheets crumpled against the ground and alien scripture scribbled on their colorful covers. Most of the others looked somewhat like earthen disks, diskettes and memory sticks.

“Well.” Skystrike heard herself say sounding pleasantly surprised.

[Starfighter]

Starfighter peers over her shoulder, raising up on the front of his feet to get a better look.

"They look like data storage devices," he comments thoughtfully, ducking down and gently picking up a few of the ones that had slipped between Skystrike's fingers. "But we'll need something to read them, they're too primitive for anything I've got."

Starfighter turns the largest disc over, looking for inscriptions or other identifying marks. There were none on the item itself, and the ones on the cover looked like someone had tried to teach astrophysics while drunk. "At least, I think so..."

For all he knew, it was superadvanced technology that could only be read by someone with sensors that hadn't been invented yet.

[Shortround]

"Huh? Oh, sure" Shortround says. So there ARE other Transformers who collect toys around... Interesting. He indicates towards the boxes, allowing Eye-Fire to grab which ever bootleg he wants.

Little did he know that Eye-Fire probably didn't want them to collect. But Shortround will learn that the hard way.

[Eye-fire]

Eye-fire nods, and opens a box, rummaging through it a bit.

Eventually, he finds a largish, brightly colored and evidently badly made "robot", and weighs it in his hand.

Taking a step back, he hurls the toy high into the air, and as soon as it leaves his hand he transforms into his sniper rifle form.

He sights the toy as it reaches the height of its arc, and fires an iridescent purple eneergy bolt at it, entirely obliterting it.

Transforming back into his normal form, he stands with his hands on his hips.
"Yes, those are exactly what I was looking for. If you have enough, we may just be able to train everybody using them." He says, still looking up at the smoke left from the blast.

[Wreckage]

Wreckage watches the two Seekers with only vague interest. Whatever it is they have found, they seem to find it incredibly engaging. Are they scouts, then? Scouts are usually the ones who bother with such things.

Let them, he decides. He has no taste for it. He will stay nearby, however, if only for a lack of anything more engaging immediately at hand. He steps back several paces to observe them in silence, periodically glancing skyward. The clouds are slow-moving and scattered, some high and thin, others lower and heavier, ragged-looking. He rather hopes the formations bode ill for the weather.

His thoughts on meteorology are interrupted by the flash and shrill crack of weapons fire some distance into the less-ruined areas of the city. It might even be where they left behind the other two Decepticons. Wreckage tenses and shifts, weight settling evenly on both legs, as he looks warily toward the source of the sound. He is ready to draw weapons but does not. Yet.

[Skystrike/Skylar Stringers]

“So now we have to find some kind of computer that they use here. Or we can try to chance it out with some of these... book things.” Skystrike rumbled as she set down the shelf she’d taken from the building on the road, scowling as a few more objects clattered and thumped onto the ground. When Starfighter peered over her shoulder, she gave him a rather baleful glare but decided against whacking him with her wing just yet, simply shifting slightly when he bent down to pick up a disc. The next time he did that though, there would definitely be slightly more painful consequences.

Turning her attention back to the scattered material on the road, she gingerly picking through the tiny colorful bits of alien technology on the palm of her hand. Skystrike’s optics wouldn’t let her zoom in very well on most the lettering though. The black scrawls shifted in and out of focus and the pictures on the covers of what she guessed were books were even harder to make out. Such was the downside of doing self maintenance for the past few centuries.

"Wreckage?" The gray mech was probably going to be unhappy about being dragged into this. "We could use a third opinion over here." Because there was no way in the pit the dark blue jet was going to admit she had bad optics in front of complete strangers.

Then, the sound of laser fire shrieked off in the distance making Skystrike abruptly jerk in surprise and stand up. If Starfighter didn’t move away fast enough, he is probably going to end up with a face full of a wing.

[Starfighter]

Starfighter jerks back a moment before Skystrike does, and her wing passes over his head.. He tucks his disk away and drops to his knees, scrambling at the other strange objects and tucking them away as fast as he can. In the face of potential attack, his first instinct is to save the data. Bodies can be repaired, but lives can be saved or destroyed (and by lives he means his own) when information is lost.

"What's going on?" he asks in a nervous, high-pitched voice as he scrambles up the last of the items. He stays down, just in case someone tosses a missile at them.

[Sky-byte]

There's nothing terribly exciting in the vicinity of this rocky place, well at least nothing that catches his wandering water-seeking attention. Sky-byte finds himself in a skulking cruise back into the little mining town. The crack and flare of gunfire catches his attention, immediately causing him to transform and duck behind the wall of one building. Immediately, his mind runs to one thing: Autobots! It's a habit, and with this habit comes images of tiny, menacing Car Brothers and Optimus Prime parading through his mind.

Wait...wrong world and wrong people.

But that doesn't mean there aren't any Autobots. If there aren't any Autobots, well, Sky-byte isn't beyond hoping that perhaps the Decepticons were shooting at each other. He creeps forward towards where the gunfire originated. Creeping consisting mostly of over-dramatized duck and dashing between different buildings. Rounding one corner, Sky-byte frowns as he ponders the strange scene laid out before him. No, they don't seem to be shooting at each other...

Eyes widen when he spots the objects that Starfighter seems to be hoarding. "Books!?" All caution forgotten, Sky-byte dashes forward and makes to snatch on up one of the tomes. If it's in any way as fascinating as the literature back on Earth, he's in, or perhaps some alien poetry? He forgets momentarily that this planet perhaps doesn't use Earth languages or Cybertronian...

[Shortround]

Shortround remains silent. However, he finally starts twitching a bit.

"You... Didn't want that for collecting, did you?" Shortround asked, a clear note of hostility in his voice. His plasma rifle had also found its way from his subspace and into his hands.

"Let's get one thing straight... Eye Fire?" Shortround asked, turning around. "I collect toys. Toys that people would kill for. I'll let you blast a few bootlegs, but if you so much as touch anything that isn't a bootleg here that I don't already have and I may just do something that will result in my death, a lot of fire, and possibly some pain to you depending on how accurate I am"

Shortround is not impressed.

[Eye-fire]

"You.... collect small pieces of plastic, with no use other than to maybe melt don and be made into other, useless pieces plastic?" Eye-fire asks. This is the first time he has encountered something like this.

But it should be noted that he is truly interested in this, its a completly new phenomenon to him.