The Angel at the Gate

[Emirate Xaaron]

Month 6, Week 2, Day 3, at night, a Biotech Unbound construction site, open

---

A woman with golden skin, bright yellow eyes, and silver hair is creeping around the patch of verdant green that has sprung up on Biotech Unbound land. She watches the news, she speaks Cybertronian, and she's not an idiot. That is really all there is to it.

Metatron has no common sense, though, because if she did, she would have back up right now.

[Shanodin]

The trees have eyes and they are watching the metallic woman as she creeps through the foliage. Vines slither and stems quake independent of an breeze, and flowers turn to follow the quiet intruder as she moves.

So far, the intruder has done nothing to harm, nothing to threaten, but it is her skulking movement which has the Green on alert, and the Green's goddess dropping silently down to the ground some distance away. The dryad watches intently, staring silent accusations and questions at the invasive gilded lily in her garden.

[Emirate Xaaron]

Metatron calls out in the dark in Cybertronian, "Botanica! Are you in there?"

Her voice is... almost a command, even when she does not mean it to be so. It compels.

[Shanodin]

The dryad flinches at the voice, taking steps toward the gilded figure without realizing she is doing so. She disappears into the earth and reappears within the intruder's line of sight. The thorny vines that make up her hair have extended and wrapped around her body, a warning not to get too close.

"You know the Green's language, but you are not of the Green. How?" she asks.

[Emirate Xaaron]

The thorns are a shame, because Metatron would quite like to give Botanica a hug. It is a relief to know where one of her officers has gone! Botanica seems to have gone native, though, as some of Autobots have, albeit in a rather peculiar manner.

Metatron holds out one of her hands and replies, amused, "My dear, this was a language of metal long, long before it was ever a language of Green. You've forgotten that, haven't you? Try to remember for me."

[Shanodin]

The dryad starts to reach her hand out to the woman, then quickly snatches it back. She shakes her head, causing the thorns to make a sound not unlike a rain stick.

"I don't remember metal. I remember seeds crying, pale and shriveled. I remember flowers coughing in poison air," she hugs herself, shivering, "I remember death."

She takes a step forward. "I remember light."

[Emirate Xaaron]

Metatron keeps her hand out and her gaze locked on the dryad. She agrees, "Yes, it is from the light that we draw our lives. Now, you were always more easily swayed than most by outside influences, weren't you? You give people pieces of yourself as your first defense. When they come to hurt you, you try to take their hurt away instead."

[Shanodin]

The dryad listens and watches, unblinking. Bit by deadly bit, the thorns are retracting, albeit slowly.

"Mothers are supposed to die for their children," she says softly. Her chin tilts up slightly and her look turns slightly challenging.

"Fathers expect their children to die for them."

[Emirate Xaaron]

"Guilty as charged," Metatron admits, a bit of pain showing in her face. She never discussed that with Botanica, did she? But it is true, all the same. "I have gone about some things the wrong way. I expect that I will make mistakes in the future, too. I try to learn and to atone. You are in danger now. I expect you've noticed some of it, but I would be remiss if I did not warn you."

[Shanodin]

"You are not Father," the dryad says very seriously, "But you are close to Him." She seems rather certain of this fact.

She scowls when the woman mentions danger, and her thorny hair (now just hair and not a wall of thorns) bristles. "None can touch me here unless I allow it. They would make me leave. Would murder all my children."

She touches one particularly brilliant bloom and her expression saddens, "I have other children, too, but I can't leave here to check on them. I hope they can live without me for a time."

[Emirate Xaaron]

"I am certainly a father after a fashion and a poor one at that," Metatron admits. Poor Triple-Changers. Poor Ultra Magnus. Poor Micromasters. Poor, poor all of them, "but I cannot excuse it on taking after Him," which she does.

Her hand is still held out.

"I would not become overconfident. Can your garden withstand napalm? Biotech Unbound has claimed this land, and they have extensive resources. I must confess, I am uneasy leaving one of mine in one place where anyone could get at her."

[Shanodin]

The dryad shakes her head again. "They won't."

"Destroying the garden destroys me, and he wants me."

She doesn't know why, specifically the man in the white coat with the odd words wanted her to come with her, but that's what the flowers said he wanted.

She continues to gaze intently at the metallic woman. Slowly, hesitantly she reaches for that outstretched hand, fingertips barely touching it if allowed.

"I think I remember you. You were my anchor, once."

[Emirate Xaaron]

"Unpleasant people will sometimes be of the opinion that if they cannot have someone, they will destroy the person instead," Metatron observes.

She tries to gently close her hand over the dryad's. Metatron's skin isn't fragile and easily torn like a normal human's, and there's a strength in her muscles. She might not be able to lift a car, but she could hurt someone.

"Yes. On another world. You say that destroying your garden would destroy you. I can see that you would not want to leave it behind and unguarded." Metatron has not heard the dryad mythology of how they are bound to her trees; her childhood memories, which are no such thing, are populated by different stories of clockwork horses and ten little apples. "What if we... moved your garden? All of it, in one piece."

Spacebridging into dirt is generally not recommended, which is all the more reason for Metatron to want to try it.

[Shanodin]

The dryad blinks as Metatron asks about moving the garden, and almost pulls away from the woman. "You don't understand."

Shanodin shifts back and forth on her feet for a moment, and then begins to tug Metatron toward one of the lot's boundaries. The gilded woman may notice that the farther the pair gets from the grove's center, the less strength the dryad seems to be able put into the pulling.

Once they reach the back edge of the lot, Shanodin looks furtively up and down the street. She drops Metatron's hand and moves just up to the line where dirt meets sidewalk and hesitantly sticks her arm out past that line.

There should be enough light from street lamps for Metatron to see how swiftly the dryad's skin goes from brilliant green to gold almost to brown before Shanodin shrieks and yanks her arm back. She cradles her arm to her and looks up at the gilded woman, her expression sad and resigned.

---

Tugging w/ permission

[Emirate Xaaron]

Metatron obligingly follows the dryad. When she withers, Metatron's eyes go wide with obvious concern, and she attempts to grab the dryad and drag her back towards the green.

She clarifies, "No, I mean, picking the whole thing up, down to the bedrock, and moving it somewhere safer." Metatron is not entirely sure where. She hasn't gotten that far in her planning. "Black will have to wonder where the great big hole in the ground came from, but that would be his problem."