My Body Has A Number; Does My Face Have a Name?

[Kup]

OOC: Month 5, Week 2, Day 1. Event Horizon, Kup's office. Semi-private.

Kup sits in his office, slumped over his desk. In front of him is his battered old sheet of metal, and in front of him the terminal is on with an assortment of reports on it. He can't make out all the technical medical gooble-de-gook on it, but he's clear enough on the general idea - Elita-1 is actually Sentinel Prime. Also, she? He? doesn't have an operational spark, brain module, or laser core, but he? She? is still up and about.

Kup's not really a very creative thinker. He gets by on his vast store of experience. And in his vast experience, when a Prime comes back from the dead while still being dead, that's bad news.

Unfortunately, Botanica doesn't want him to just toss Sentinel in the brig and delete the key-code, and for some leaking reason, Rodimus and Xaaron are listening to her.

Kup grunts, shakes his head, and glances towards the office door, waiting for the two he called in for this.

[Sentinel Prime]

Sentinel Prime is still wearing Elita-1's body and colours when she arrives, precisely on time. She is somewhat out of denial, though she is still having trouble dealing with the fact that she is a soulless zombie girl, stuck in the body of Optimus's dead girlfriend, who is also her dead ex-girlfriend, who has an evil spider alternate future version of herself running around still alive.

Slag, her life is messed up.

But Sentinel Prime hasn't had any modifications made to the body yet, because this is Elita-1's body! Elita-1 might want it back someday! Getting the body turned into a snowplow would be awfully rude.

Sentinel Prime is thinking about a repaint job, though. If Elita-1 did not want blue on her, she would not have dated blue bots like Sentinel and Optimus! Also, a repaint job is a lot easier to undo than a rebuild.

There is also the issue that the medics aren't sure she would handle a rebuild well. Sentinel Prime has no spark that could be easily popped out and swapped into a new body. The medics are unsure how much of her hardware is necessary to keep her 'her'. If they left out a tertiary timing processor in the transfer, could that... destroy what she is? Autobots of her reality aren't designed to be downloaded onto disc.

Sentinel Prime salutes rigidly and stands that way, because they are parked in orbit, not under way. She does not move like Elita-1 did. She walks straight-legged and poses like her maternal batch initiator was a ramrod, stiff and formal, and she stands a certain distance away from walls and other obstacles as if she is used to being bigger than this.

"Sir." Her voice is Elita-1's, but her intonation is subtly different, how she stresses certain syllables, the timing and spacing... all of that belongs to Sentinel Prime.

[Optimus Prime]

Optimus Prime follows Elit- Sentinel Prime in. This is so confusing and awkward and horrible on many levels. He's glad Sentinel isn't dead, but can't help feeling the universe is only doing this to him so it can yank his chain some more. It's not a nice feeling, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

"Kup, sir," he says simply, saluting and coming to attention.

[Kup]

Kup impatiently returns the salute with the minimum amount of effort that it takes to get Sentinel to stop saluting. He looks up, optics narrowed, and studies Sentinel quietly for a time. Are her colors a bit grayed? Finally, he grunts and leans back in his seat, pointed stylus tapping absently on the metal 'note sheet'.

"All right," he says finally. "I guess first I wanna hear your explanation. What the blazes is going on... 'Sentinel.'"

[Sentinel Prime]

Sentinel Prime stops saluting, but she does not lose her air of obsessive over-formality.

Her colours are pretty crisp. There might be a slight amount of desaturation, but she was already a bit pastel, so it is hard to tell. Sentinel Prime feels cold, though, and there's a bit of numbness and an ache that won't go away, but she is doing her best to ignore that.

"Sentinel Prime, sir," Sentinel Prime mutters, her own optics narrowing. "There I was, on that disgusting infected alien ship, trying to follow the esteemed Rodimus Prime's instructions to initiate the self-destruct, so that we could cleanly and efficiently destroy that foul vessel without needing to worry about the radiation adversely affecting our fair vessel, the Event Horizon, or any of the infected aliens surviving to attack the Event Horizon, which could have happened if the Event Horizon had fired on the infected alien vessel and incompletely destroyed it. I mean, can you imagine, a fragment of the infected alien ship impacting ours and infected aliens getting in the air ducts? It would have been pandemonium. Utterly unacceptable. Science-bot second class Elita-1 was guarding my back. Then... someone... ah, well, appears to have punched through my back and into my spark casing."

"Then I think I died."

Sentinel Prime shuffles her feet and looks down.

"Could happen to anyone, you know. A punch through the spark casing will do that. Kill you, that is."

[Optimus Prime]

Optimus also drops his salute. He has a bit of trouble not letting his jaw go slack hearing Sentinel's version of events. He was there for most of it, but the way Sentinel tells it is just so . . . detached? He's describing his own death in an almost off-hand fashion, like he doesn't care.

OOC: Skippable unless needed to talk.

[Kup]

Kup snorts and glances faintly ceilingward at Sentinel's correction. That hadn't been an intentional slight due to the Prime's zombie status - after all, he's more likely to call Rodimus Prime "Rodimus" than "Prime" or even "Rodimus Prime" (and more likely to call him "lad" or "punk" than any of those), but now that Sentinel has pointed it out, Kup will... continue on as he would have, anyway.

"I'm not critisizing you for dying, Sentinel," Kup sighs. "Yeah, that does happen." Then he adds in a mutter, "Way too often." Louder, he finishes, "I just want to know how it is you're standing here and... and... like that," he gestures at Elita's body, "despite it."

[Sentinel Prime]

OOC: I am operating under the assumption that Sentinel has not been otherwise informed about what happened. There are pretty good reasons for this. One, they aren't sure that she is not an evil trick. Two, telling someone how events happened can actually change that person's memories of the event. So, to get the best recollection, one wants to not bias the witness in any fashion. However, if anyone thinks that Sentinel would have been told, let me know, and I will edit this post!

- - -

"I'm, uhm, not entirely clear on the specifics, myself," Sentinel Prime mumbles, still staring at her feet. She looks back up, rubs the side of her face, and admits, "I had been running with my emotions damped, sir. I tend to... overreact, some might say, and damped emotions helped with that. Think of it like a music player with the volume turned down. You can still hear the song, yeah, but the music doesn't distract you from what you need to get done."

If Optimus Prime has read Sentinel Prime's will, he might have some insight on that situation that makes the whole deal a lot more sinister than the innocuous way Sentinel Prime is describing it.

"But if you pop out the datastick and put it into a different music player, one with the volume cranked all the way up... it's still the same song, but it's louder, and it's harder to ignore. Elita-1 didn't have her emotions damped. So when I woke up stuck in her body, I was, erm... hysterical, I suppose. Trying to deal with un-damped emotions after having them tuned down for so long was... difficult."

"And there were so many bad implications!" Sentinel Prime throws her hand in the air. "Elita-1 was guarding my back. If something happened to me, something might have happened to her, too! And that's just.... not acceptable. And Optimus Prime was moving toward our position - what if something happened to him? And Impactor and Springer were coming to help out Optimus - what if something happened to them?"

Her optics are wide, and her hands shake a bit.

"And Jetfire and Jetstorm and Skyfire were outside - what about them? And what about Drift and Mirage and Override? ...and slag, but I could go on. I'm sorry, sir, for the digression." She covers her face.

"And then there's the fact that I, ah, woke up in Elita-1's body, so obviously something happened with her. Which, I... can't... slaggit."

Cutting off that growl, Sentinel Prime takes a moment to compose herself. "I awoke on a table in a Decepticon laboratory. The spider-glitch, the other spider, the male one, and their Optimus clone were present."

In other words, high octane nightmare fuel tailored to Sentinel Prime was present. She twitches and spreads her hands out. "...yes, a bit hysterical. I mean, I think, maybe an infected alien got past Elita-1 and punched me in the back, and I was dying anyway, so maybe she downloaded me to get my mods while she could and accidentally copied everything? And then maybe Elita-1... er... lost the fight with that alien and passed on to the AllSpark?" Frag it, but Sentinel Prime has real trouble accepting that part." And then the Decepticons got their grubby hands on the body somehow and accidentally activated that download of me in Elita-1's buffer, so I booted up there, since Elita-1... wasn't home? I mean, dead bodies from my reality can operate pretty well without a spark, it's sort of gross..."

The things Sentinel Prime's security clearance has let her see. She cannot unsee them.

[Kup]

Kup silently listens to Sentinel's story, though his attention is, in fact, on both Primes as she tells it. He watches Optimus for reaction particularly closely as Sentinel puts forth her guesses as to why she's in Elita's body.

Finally, however, he just nods faintly, glancing down and making a few symbols onto his metal sheet. He looks up again, and his expression softens a bit. "Just so you know... everyone else did make it out." He glances down at the metal sheet again. "From what I understand, there wasn't time to grab... your bodies in the middle of the fight, not with the ship about to go, and after it went, we couldn't stick around too long because of the radiation levels." These things probably provide cold comfort, but Kup feels the urge to defend their choice to leave the bodies behind, anyway.

He looks up again. "So you woke up in the 'Con lab. What next?"

[Sentinel Prime]

"I was confused," Sentinel Prime says petulantly, lip jutted out. The second worst part of all this, she thinks, is how embarrassing it is. The first worst part, of course, is that Elita-1 is probably dead, and it is her fault. Sentinel Prime being dead really only ranks down at number three.

Yes, being dead blows oil-burning exhaust, but as deaths go, taking out an evil alien ship is okay. Yes, saving a planet full of hostages would have been better, but this is... okay. It's not like Sentinel Prime died of fuel pump failure at the age of one billion like some loser.

But slag it, Elita-1 should have lived, for all of Sentinel Prime's troubles. That is how it should have gone.

"The spiders webbed me down with stasis webbing, which didn't do a thing for my panic, sir. The Decepticons honestly seemed as confused as I was about everything. I don't think they knew I was Sentinel Prime and not Elita-1. I'm pretty sure that they were going to try to transplant Blackarachnia out of that grotesque spider body into the dead Elita-1 body, so the body being up and flailing was a real wrench in their plan."

"Anyway, so they called in an interrogator - some sort of weedy little two-wheeler, and Blackarachnia, Tarantulas, and Scourge filed out. Now, look, sir. I know that fraternising with the enemy is all kinds of illegal. I try to avoid things that are completely illegal like that, except for robbing casinos, that was kind of an exception - you know what, nevermind."

Sentinel Prime is babbling, and she knows it. She takes a moment to collect herself again. Everything is pretty jumbled up in her head, and she's so emotionally messed up that she feels physically sick.

"Elita-1 is - was a great bot, don't get me wrong, but I am pretty sure that, faced with interrogation, she would have flirted with the interrogator in an attempt to mislead, misdirect, and obtain her freedom. Given that I thought that the Decepticons thought I was Elita-1, I... flirted with the interrogator."

There is another long moment of staring at her feet, as if she is considering her last fuelling and if it is going to stay down.

"Badly, sir. I'm good at many things, but fraternising with the enemy is just not something I practise, for obvious reasons. I also threw the circuit breakers for my lower arms and legs, so that the stasis webbing couldn't sap too much of my energy."

[Kup]

Kup is silent for a long time in response. His shoulders slump, his optics dim, and he lifts his hand to squeeze his nose and sighs. He can only imagine that Sentinel made the worst femme fatale ever, and really, he's less than pleased to be in a position where he has to imagine something like that.

He turns the sheet of metal over and makes another mark on it, then nods. "All right. Flirted badly. How'd you manage to get out, then?"

Please, please, let's move the subject onto something else here. So far, the story is so... convoluted that it seems unlikely to be a fabrication, but... not impossible. Not given his home reality. Some sort of indication that she wasn't intentionally released might help matters. Some way to verify that this really is Sentinel Prime and not some sort of really... insane... attempt to plant a double-agent among the Autobots.

Making her race Optimus to prove who she is would probably be a bad idea, wouldn't it?

[Sentinel Prime]

Sentinel Prime learned how to drive from Swerve. A race might be a bad idea.

She admits reluctantly, "Luck, sir. The interrogator left, and I was alone in the room. I was able to wrestle myself out of the webbing, because with those breakers thrown, the webbing couldn't drain my core systems. Once I had the webbing off, I flipped the breakers back - there's kind of a nasty numb sensation when you do that, but Scourge had held me down back when the spiders were webbing me, and I copied his powers, though I didn't understand it at the time. So I loaded up his strength then and made my own exit out a wall, because I figured the door might be trapped. Elita-1's voice is a lot like Blackarachnia's, so that helped with getting the space bridge going via vocal commands, which dumped me in... French?"

One sort of questions why Sentinel Prime knows so much about getting out of bondage, but frankly, she doesn't want to talk about it. It was handy the time that other Optimus Prime cuffed her in the Steelhaven.

[Kup]

Kup is quiet for a few moments. It should be just long enough to make Sentinel uncomfortable. Finally, he corrects, "France," then shakes his head and makes another mark on the metal sheet before twisting it so that it's 'upside down' relative to how he'd been holding it.

"So really, that could easily add up to, 'The 'Cons let you go on purpose.'" He looks over at Optimus.

"What he-" he pauses and looks at Sentinel, expression questioning. "She? He? saying fit with what you know?"

[Sentinel Prime]

Sentinel Prime feels amazingly uncomfortable. She's being a lot more truthful and frank than she usually is, though she doesn't think it is doing her much good. She hisses out, "Yes, sir. If I were you, I wouldn't believe me."

Sentinel Prime would send herself to the stockade forever if she tried to run this story by herself. The old her would have just lied and made up a more plausible story. Was she so wrong, then?

She glances sidelong at Optimus.

"She, though. I'm currently self-identifying as female, sir. It doesn't really feel right, but this body looks female to me, and I wouldn't want to confuse people." Sentinel Prime holds up her hands and adds hastily, "Not that there is anything wrong with having confusing looks. It's just not something I would choose for myself."

[Optimus Prime]

Optimus's face contorts with horror and sympathy as Sentinel relates his sordid tale of spider-bondage. "I know that Sentinel showed up in Arles where the Combaticons had laid a trap for me. Onslaught didn't seem to be expecting h-er, him?" Stupid pronouns. The Prime pauses a moment, looking reflective.

"That could just mean that Blackarachnia let him go without telling Onslaught, but that doesn't seem like something she'd do."