“Uhm… You lead the way, I barely know them.” Gronius said stepping backwards, raising his hands to show that he is not the one to lead in this position.
@ProfSrlojohn Meanwhile, Redstocker was still trying to talk with Juliana.
Zepar begins heading out to look for the Splitter brothers.
That was all this section of the console had to offer.
■■■■■■■■■■■■ scans the bridge, his brow narrowing.
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Gronius followed him.
OOC: I don’t really have much to say here. I don’t really want to repeat “followed them” over and over and over again.
OOC: Then don’t have song just follow the rescue team over and over and over again. Have her be more proactive.
IC:
The other half of the rescue team journeys elsewhere into the wreck of the Dark Sky. The hulk groans and creaks as waves lap against it, sweeping loose debris out into the sea. Dark shapes move beneath the water, slithering through the wreckage.
“Guys, I’ll be back. I’ll search from above for survivors.” she said, turning to her robot mode.
Only after a few moments of stagnation she took off, and even then she was shaking frenetically, still not used to the lack of a beast mode.
@Toa_Vladin @ToaNoah_Wafflemeister @meepinater @MichaelBT-7474 @BlackBeltGamer98 @ProfSrlojohn
Topside had remained in Engineering, taking a cargo lift up from the maintenance bay up to the gantries around Salvation’s main reactor. It had just occurred to him that he had never, in the past month that this voyage had dragged on, set so much as a foot down here before. It was an oversight that he now needed to correct.
And Topside needed something to take his mind off the many who had fallen in the last battle.
Was it darkly ironic that a mission to save life had so far yielded only an ever-rising death toll? That new factions were rising just as the current regimes had set down their weapons to rebuild the civilization they’d nearly destroyed? These questions and others like them gnawed at Topside’s mind like a sharkticon at scrap metal on the shores of Junkion’s acid sea. Managing a veritable flying city sometimes served as a good distraction, but the weight of the mounting dead was increasingly adding to the burden of his mission, and in spite of himself he was beginning to wonder how much more he could take.
“Ah, captain Topside,” Greasemonkey remarks, bringing the Autobot captain out of his thoughts and back into the rumbling heart of Salvation. “A pleasure having you here, sir.”
“Pleasure’s mine,” Topside insists. “Never been down here before, and I like to know my ships from bow to stern, so I came to have a look around.”
“An inspection, sir?” Greasemonkey replies, not looking away from his consoles as he delicately adjusted the output of he transwarp drive. Keeping innumerable tons of cybertronian steel from losing herself in the void outside reality was tricky business, on top of the attention that Salvation typically demanded of the old cyborg.
“I do hope all of the Omega Key’s modifications are up to standards, then,” he comments. Topside shakes his head.
“I’m not here for an inspection, Greasemonkey; I’m sure you’ve got the place squared away,” he says. “Just taking the tour, so to speak.”
The single rarest combination of words in any language in all the galaxy might be this:
Shockwave was perplexed.
No conundrum seemed beyond the capacity of Shockwave’s mind. The cyclops had devised cures to terrible diseases (some of which he’d even concocted himself), engineered fearsome instruments of destruction, and refined the science of CNA editing and replication to where it was today. He had earned his reputation as Cybertron’s most brilliant mind since the fall of the Golden Age.
And yet these pieces of ancient technology before him now confounded him- vexed him, almost. The Omega Key had largely restored the components necessary to build the Cortical Psychic Patch, but how to assemble the device, Shockwave had yet to discern. Integrating it into the ship was another matter altogether- it would be like trying to install a transwarp drive in a 21st-century terran car- the two technologies were so far apart as to be virtually incompatible.
In the lab on the other side of the hall, Grommet studies the abilities of a particularly fascinating insecticon: a swarm of tiny, ant-like bots that chewed up energon to build the intricate structures of their colony. On the other side of the room, Sprocket rolls a datacard between his fingers. It contained data from the knight facility Arachnados had explored on the forest planet Salvation had visited a few weeks prior. The data was a fascinating read, but Sprocket couldn’t find any way to make some real use of it…
Facelift and his crew settle in with Salvation’s resident insecticon hive. The mad doctor looks up into the narrowed optics of the hive’s queen: a menacing, six-armed giant of a bot armed with a plethora of sharp blades and stingers.
“So, uh… looks like we’re roomies now…” Facelift opens. The queen stares back silently at Facelift.
“…Look, I’m not particularly thrilled about this new arrangement either,” he continues, “but the sooner we learn to tolerate each others’ presence, the sooner our new situation could start to mutually benefit us both.”
Rarely did Salvo truly wish to be alone, but for the worst of Decepticons she made an exception.
…She made just for the junkion going by Thrift of the Rings, as well. For the past half-hour now she’d had to endure his rambling. Junkions could be good conversationalists, sure, but some of them could really talk your ears off twice over.
Forcep extracts a vial of Blue Cybermatter from a CR chamber- the one Halfrunner happened to currently occupy, in fact- and takes it into a lab branching off the med-bay to study. He was no expert in Golden Age-era technology like Sprocket was, but cybermatter was not unfamiliar to him. But the mysterious substance had been used to terraform planets, not mend wounds. The properties of the liquid pouring from the Omega Key was some new, never-before-seen variant of Cybermatter, one that he wanted to ensure would have no adverse affects on the bots it worked its miracles on.
In the Peace and Tyranny, Lurch grumbles on about the foolishness of Lady Corona and her followers (“What utter scatterbrained lunatics, to think that Nova Prime, of all bots, could be redeemed into some Primus-chosen savior of our people! I say she payed a fair price for her fraudulent prophecies and delusions!”), along with the decision to allow the surviving pilgrims aboard Salvation (“And what if they try to summon some other villain from millennia past, hm? The pirate lord Thundertron? Why not Nemesis Prime, or Unicron himself?!”). The patrons of the gloomy establishment listen to his words, some of them rather attentively.
Around the shipwreck, other New Decepticon ships swing around and shine spotlights into the water, allowing Song to catch brief glimpses of metal tendrils and organic scales slithering beneath the debris.
Wildsong would also be able to spy four battered and bloody Decepticons holding onto each other atop a train car hanging precariously from one of the Dark Sky’s larger pieces.
“Hm…”
Song pointed her machine gun at them. They would never see it coming, not from this distance. They were Decepticons, and most importantly they were still her enemies. She would do a favour to her true cause by just simply killing them, and then blame it on the fact that she tough they were Autobots of some of Corona’s goons.
She sighed. “What am I doing? This undercover role takes the best of me…” she said before flying towards the four.
The New Decepticons lift their heads as they hear Wildsong approach.
“Can you four transform?” she asked them.
One of the New Decepticons could not; a piece of debris had struck his midsection and torn up many of the interior mechanisms connected to his T-cog. The other three, however, were fully capable of assuming vehicle mode, but they all transformed into cars.
“Sigh… OK, two of you get on my wings. I’ll get the other two afterwards!”
“I really miss my claws…”
Two of the New Decepticons- including the one that couldn’t transform- climb onto Wildsong, but their combined weight would prove to be beyond the carrying capacity of her new alt-mode.
Spectrum turns to leave the room. [quote=“Chromeharpoon, post:5564, topic:49995”]
■■■■■■■■■■■■ scans the bridge, his brow narrowing.
[/quote]
“What?” The three Splitter brothers said in unison.
The room’s machines continue to spin and glow.
“…Anything else?” ■■■■■■■■■■■■ sighs.
She swore.
“OK! Then just one of you.”
Spectrum left the room.
Thrust shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
The bot who could still transform climbs off.
■■■■■■■■■■■■ nods.
“It seems our ship now has more than a few tricks up her sleeve,” he muses.
In a darkened, secret room within Salvation, a stasis pod hisses as its lid swings open, disgorging a lanky Decepticon with sharp features. The bot falls onto the deck, wretching as he claws at his chest. The sudden jolt back into consciousness was not a pleasant experience.
“Are you done?” a voice boredly asks after a moment of listening to the Decepticon suffer. Breathing heavily, the newly-awakened robot lifts himself to his feet, leaning against the stasis pod to support his shaking legs.
“What… what’s the situation, boss-bot?” the assassin wheezes.
“There’s been a… complication,” Bludgeon’s spy says, choosing their words delicately. "Several, in fact. I need you to lighten my burden some, if you catch my meaning.
Of course the assassin understood. “You got names for me?” he asks.
The spy hands their subordinate a datapad.
“Naturally,” he says. “But be discreet. You know, ‘make it look like an accident’ and all.”
The assassin opens a locker built into the side of his stasis pod and pulls out a submachine gun.
“Discreet” he scoffs. “Shame.”
“You good there?” she asks the bot on her wing.
“Yeah, I’m good!” replies the Decepticon, gripping tightly onto Wildsong’s wings.