Seek Without Finding

[Fleetwind-3]

"Maybe just a high-speed flyby to gather information," Fleetwind muses, part to himself, part out loud. "Maybe at both locations? But we don't know where they have Synapse stationed."

"The problem is being seen. We get spotted, we lose the element of surprise; they'll know we're here."

Then he changes direction, now heading towards Decepticon base. "But still, a quick high-speed fly-by to gather information should be fine. I am a trained scout."

Well, okay. Technically, Fleetwind should be radioing back to get permission to do this. But this is Fleetwind. Why should he bother with such technicalities?

[Duskwing-3]

"Yeah, and what happens to Thundercracker in the meantime?" Duskwing asked Skystrike, nearly growling in return.

"Yeah, what you said, Fleet. That's smart. I'm with you," Duskwing said, banking sharply to follow.

[Fleetwind-3]

Fleetwind dives down and starts hugging as low to the terrain as he dares - and he dares to fly quite low, sometimes brushing the tree-tops, sometimes narrowly avoiding a sudden outcropping.

As they get nearer, he says, "Don't slow down. Keep your sensors running, and stay low. We're just doing one fly-by to see what we can see, and that's it."

---

OOC: Our group seems to have lost its common sense component. After the fly-by, shall we wrap things up?

[Duskwing-3]

Duskwing followed after a noticeable hesitation. High-speed, he got, but Fleetwind hadn't warned him he was going low! It took him a few minutes to sort that out, then he was thundering along behind Fleetwind.

"Gotcha. But what if we spot TC?" Duskwing just had to ask.

[Fleetwind-3]

"That depends on whether or not we can tell he's ours," Fleetwind answers. "For that matter, we need to be thinking about what we do if we spot ourselves."

Fleetwind now climbs, moving just above the tips of the mountains, ducking and weaving above them. "I think for Thundercracker, we'd better alert Starscream."

[Duskwing-3]

Duskwing followed the nap of the earth, just skimming ridges and diving into valleys. "Yeah, thinking 'bout dat is good. I don't do so good thinking up stuff fast on the spot; I gotta take some time to con--con-- consider it, see?"

"Okay. Hey, what's our ren--rende... uh, meeting spot if we get split? Procedure says we gotta have one." It wasn't that Duskwing was a stickler for rules; it was more that he depended on 'The Book' to tell him what to do when he had no idea himself.

[Fleetwind-3]

Meanwhile, Fleetwind himself is having second thoughts. After all, he's always relied heavily on improvisation - enough so that he didn't stop and realize that his current partner isn't as good at on-the-spot thinking.

(He might have remembered if Skystrike hadn't suddenly faded into the background.)

"Rendezvous, and sure. Sounds good. We should probably run silent for the next few minutes. Base should come within view... now!"

---

OOC: I am, for obvious reasons, not up for a full-out encounter, and recommend a relatively uneventful fly-by due to the fact that most of the Decepticons are on the other side of the continent? We'd come away knowing that most of them are not home, a few are, and there's what looks to be the left over of the Autobot camp but no sign of the prisoners. Sound fair?

[Duskwing-3]

"See it!" Duskwing acknowledged, swooping low--the town's buildings were too low and scattered to count as the kind of Cybertronian skyscraper canyons that 'The Book' said you should approach high and fast to recon--it was more like scattered open, where you flew low to avoid being spotted.

Duskwing picked a course over the partially ruined buildings and plotted it in his mind, then flew that course, looking around as he flew.

---
OOC: good enough. Our boys bring back some intell without blowing cover or getting shot to pieces.

[Fleetwind-3]

Fleetwind makes similar choices, although he picks a different path. He does spot the wrecked buildings, however - the many wrecked buildings.

//Looks like these Decepticons treat the area around their base about as kindly as our Autobots treat their little abandoned city,// he radios at low power. //I suppose that shouldn't be shocking.//

It isn't long before they've made their fly-through, and Fleetwind begins darting for the mountains, to put as many of them between himself and the other base as possible.

//Anything interesting?//

---

OOC: I guess we can start wrapping things up soon?

[Duskwing-3]

// I didn't see nobody outside, if dat's what you mean. Mine's all built over and forted up. Some a dem wrecked places looked funny--one's a crater, like maybe Omega Supreme took a shot at da place. // Having voiced the idea, Duskwing was now convinced that that's what happened.

He shadowed Fleetwind on the escape run, flying the valleys between the ridges as much as possible. Something nagged at him, but he couldn't figure out what.

----
Yep.